McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (49 page)

Outside the market I decline a
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from a woman in heavily embroidered clothes whose head and hair are covered with a scarf. A hundred guilt-stricken yards along the street I stop and buy one from a woman in similar clothes, who’s also pregnant. I ask where she’s from, but she doesn’t speak English. I can only presume they’re refugees from the Balkans or one of the ex-Soviet republics. The news has been full of reports of the scenes in Dublin, with scores of European and African refugees living and sleeping on the street in the glitzy financial district, after the closure of a hostel. I heard a TD, a member of the Irish parliament, on the radio yesterday. ‘Surely this country which has exported countless millions of its people all around the world can welcome these poor people in their hour of need, especially now we’re prosperous for the first time in our history. It seems that as we’re becoming more racially diverse we’re also becoming a more racist society.’

As if to prove his point, a woman with a Dublin accent immediately phoned in. ‘It’s just an excuse for claiming benefits and for criminal elements to come in here. The other thing is they’re all having so many children. What happens when they’re all planted here? Are we going to have the same carry-on they have in New York and London? Keep Ireland for the Irish is what I say.’

I was struck by her use of the archaic word ‘planted’; that she should choose to discuss contemporary issues in language associated with a perceived wrong carried out hundreds of years ago.

This sort of intolerance isn’t something I’ve ever encountered over here, and I’m hoping it can’t be widespread. After all, the British state has done little over the years to commend itself to the Irish people; yet in a lifetime of coming here, I’ve never had a single ugly moment, nor even an adverse comment, for speaking with an English accent. In fact, a man once approached my father and me in a West Cork pub and apologised for the rebel songs that were being sung ‘That’s all right,’ said my dad. ‘They’re very popular where we come from too.’

The family tree is spread out in front of us on the coffee table at my uncle’s house, just outside the city. So far he’s traced it back to 1700. He seems surprised when I ask where he went to access the records.

‘This is just from talking to people, and from what I already knew.’

I remember driving through the countryside with him when I was a child. He would point to someone working in a field or walking by the road and say, ‘Now you see that fella, you and he are cousins, second cousins, on your grandmother’s side. His father and my…’

I remember thinking that he made it sound as if everyone was related to everyone else, which I suppose in a way we were. One of the first things to strike me about the family tree is that, as far back as it goes, the name on both sides is McCarthy. My grandfather and grandmother were third cousins. Of course they were. That’s how it was in a time when there was a small population base and no one ventured far from where they were born. People were effectively marrying within a tribe. Apart from one ancestor who died with his family on a famine boat—coffin ships, they were called—on the way to America, there seems to have been no emigration. From what I see here, my mother and two of her brothers were the first to leave the country. So we’re the first generation to be born abroad.

The close-knit patterns of what I’m looking at draw me in. I feel part of something coherent and tangible. He is able to give me chapter and verse on any name I point to. The depth and breadth of his knowledge is remarkable. Since his generation, as we’ve all become more mobile and more scattered, the information has become dissipated and lost. Lots of people these days are consulting genealogists to help them understand where they come from, but not many of us can turn to someone who has acquired the information orally and is able to see the bigger pattern of which it’s a part.

Happily, there are no ugly surprises in store like there were for that retired trade unionist in England a few years ago, who fulfilled a life-long passion to trace his ancestry, and within half an hour had discovered that he was related to Margaret Thatcher.

It’s surprising how gripping it is to see history written as the names of individuals. Some things leap out at you. Irish Christian names—Tadhg, Peig, Cormac, Aindriu—are succeeded by English ones, as the Irish language is suppressed by law. A note by the name of my grandmother’s sister—Auntie Annie from Dunmanway, who force-fed us the chicken and ham—shows that for many years she was the teacher at the village school where Dominic’s son and the rest of the English travellers’ children are now pupils, which has a pleasing synchronicity. There’s a macabre Skibbereen connection in the form of a distant relative who walked round the town with a limp, the result, so the story goes, of broken legs sustained through being left for dead in the famine pit I’d stood by at Abbeystrowny. It’s a humbling business. The detail of one’s own life can begin to seem an inconsequential and colourless thing.

One event in particular catches my eye. At the top of both branches of the tree are two men with the Christian name Tadhg, pronounced in English ‘Tague’. It translates as Tim. The name Patrick didn’t become widespread in Ireland until the 1800s; so before the Irish were called Paddies, they were known as Tadhgs, or Tims, a pejorative term that survives to this day in parts of Ulster and Scotland. Anyway, some time in the early 1700s one of these Tadhg MacCartais had five sons; according to the document in front of me, they ‘all fled to France from pursuit by Redcoats. All trace lost.’ As they didn’t have Butlins in those days, I take this to be a reference to the English army. My uncle had grown up knowing this story.

‘They were chased by soldiers—I don’t know why—and took refuge in a thatched house that stood just behind the house in Drimoleague where your mother and I grew up. The soldiers burned it down, but somehow they escaped and took a boat from Glandore harbour to France. Nothing was heard of them after that.’

Well, I’m sorry, but I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff. I find it impossibly romantic. So France must be full of my relatives. There’s a famous Château McCarthy, producer of fine clarets, that I’ve always known was of Irish origins. Perhaps we’re related. I’ll turn up on the estate and claim my inheritance.

‘The people with the vineyards were earls, Peter. We were small farmers. These five fellas probably ended up cannon fodder for Napoleon, dead in the snows of Moscow.’

He’s probably right. Still pretty romantic though, isn’t it?

Traffic’s bad in the city, so I park and go looking for a cash point, because I’ve spent all my money on olives and tamarind. I find myself walking along the street where the Whiff were playing in the pub on St Patrick’s Day all those months ago—An Siol Broin. It was a dingy, atmospheric little place, perfect for taking half an hour out just now to contemplate the implications of my ancestry. I walk past a huddle of Indian men in cheap jackets and grey shoes, who look as if they’ve just got off the boat. Hang on. I’ve walked too far. It must be somewhere back up the street. No, it’s not here either. Shouldn’t it be just past that mini-cab office?

The dingy pub is no more. The Shelbourn, says the upmarket font on the black-tiled facade with, in tiny letters below it, An Siol Broin. The smoky atmospheric boozer has been devoured by a brand-new ‘traditional’ bar. Two estate agents and a woman from a management consultancy are sitting in the big new clear-glass window, sipping Malibu with Aqua Libra and cranberry juice, or at least that’s how it looks from the street. I pop my head through the door. They’re still putting the finishing touches to the decor. The new boards that have replaced the old boards are being stained down to look old. The place smells of sawdust and aftershave, instead of old stout and Crusties.

Some people would say this is progress.

On my way to Drimoleague next morning I stop in Dunmanway for a newspaper and a cup of tea. On the front page there’s compelling evidence to support my theory about the abundance of foreign cash, and the proliferation of driveways with electric gates and entryphones, in parts of West Cork. The story’s underneath a photo of gardai swarming all over a yacht. ‘Three Englishmen were arrested yesterday on board a converted trawler off the Cork coast. When the boat was brought ashore at Schull Harbour, it was found to contain 1.2 tonnes of “Moroccan Gold” cannabis with a street value of fifteen million pounds. A further two thousand kilograms have been discovered in the area in the last six years.’

I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not, but there’s a neat companion piece on page two. ‘Teenagers questioned in a survey published today say that they spend £25 a week on alcohol, £19 on cigarettes, and £23 on drugs.’ Sixty-seven pounds a week? Now that’s what I call a tiger economy. At that rate, the stuff in the Englishmen’s boat might just last the local kids till half-term.

On the outskirts of town there’s a big placard saying that there’s a Queen tribute band playing this weekend at the Grade B Hotel. I wonder if they’ll be staying the night for some old-fashioned rock-and-roll mayhem? The tellies are so far up the wall they’d never get them out the windows without a cherry-picker. I met Freddie Mercury once, when Queen had just started and hadn’t made a record. They played at a youth club in St Helens. He walked into a public bar full of miners and glassworkers wearing black nail varnish and a fur coat. Freddie, not the miners and glassworkers. You could tell he’d do well.

The leaflet advertising the Lough Derg Pilgrimage—the one that effectively decided the shape of my year—is no longer on display in the porch of Drimoleague church. I’d suspected as much. Was it pure chance that it just happened to be here when I turned up that day back in March; sheer accident that I should glimpse it, and so be tempted to undertake my journey? Or had a priest with binoculars spotted me turning up, and sent his most trusted nun down to pin the leaflet on the wall? They’d have needed walkie-talkies.

‘Down a bit, down a bit. Up a bit. That’s it. Right there, where the bastard can’t miss it. He’ll be powerless to resist. Quick! He’s coming! Lie down behind one of the pews. And as soon as he’s gone, take it down, iron it, and put it back in the drawer.’