McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (51 page)

An hour later I’m sitting in a meeting-room with Paul from Marketing, wondering where are the most unlikely places they’ve opened up recently.

‘Uzbekistan. Kazakstan. Siberia. Las Vegas. At the moment it seems unstoppable. We’re riding the crest of a wave.’

So what is this Irishness they’re selling? Are people buying into James Joyce and Oscar Wilde? Van Morrison and U2? Identifying with the underdog, and the romance of rebellion? Or have they just heard the Irish are good drinkers, and want some glory by association?

‘None of these things really, though some of them help. You have to remember that in many of these places they have no idea where Ireland is, and may never have heard of it. Italy was different. Our football fans went there in’92, had a hooley, and the place went mental. We put in seventy pubs in less than a year. And the Italians are like us. They value family and religion, and having a good time because you’re a long time dead. But Italy’s an exception.’

So what are they selling to the rest of the world then?

‘Sociability and warmth. People are buying into the concept of sitting down and talking to someone you haven’t met before. We’re creating an atmosphere that persuades people to go and frequent a pub in countries where they don’t frequent pubs. We’re changing habits.’

Irish staff—at the very least, an Irish manager—is crucial to success.

‘The Irish are very good at breaking down the programming that different societies have built into them. So instead of asking for something, and getting served, you get human contact from across the counter. The Americans always have problems with this, that there’s no corporate formula. We try and deprogramme the staff and encourage them to be themselves. If anyone says, “Hi, I’m Dale and I’ll be your server tonight,” he’s fired. We can’t tolerate that sort of shite.’

We go out for a pint and something to eat in a mock-traditional pub they’ve built in a 1960s hotel in suburban Dublin. After all the time I’ve spent in the real thing recently, it’s a rather unsettling experience.

After lunch, as we drive to their showroom, Dublin resident Elvis Costello is on the radio. I wonder if music is important to their operation.

‘It’s crucial in controlling people’s moods through the day. So you’d get, say, Planxty at lunchtime, then Enya in the afternoon so they’ll chill out and stay longer. Crank it up a bit in the evening. The Cranberries maybe, or “Brown Eyed Girl”.’

But they aren’t listening to the same music in Las Vegas and Uzbekistan, are they, in the same order?

‘Er, yeah, they are. It’s programmed in advance.’

We go to a warehouse full of old bicycles and staircases, agricultural machinery, jars and bottles and fading tobacco ads.

‘You have to remember that Irish pubs were originally community centres, and the best ones still are. So in our pubs eighteen-year-olds are happy to sit alongside sixty-five-year-olds. It adds authenticity. Drink was always an element, but it was never the key element. D’you know we’re barely midway in the European alcohol consumption league? They may find this amusing in England, but the Irish have never been big drinkers.’

One side of the showroom that fronts the warehouse contains newly made Victorian hardwood bars and cupboards, and repro Guinness ads; the other, though, is unashamedly modernist. There are smoked-glass tables, chrome bar stools, designer chairs, and all manner of avant-garde knick-knackery.

‘The old stuff’s for overseas. The new stuff’s for Ireland. Dublin mostly. Things are changing. Traditional design is synonymous with the past. They want to sit at glass tables now, with weird chairs, and good-looking women.’

I like Paul for his honesty, for not trying to put a phoney gloss on what they’re doing. And one of the things they’re doing is making a lot of money. Before I get my taxi to Dun Laoghaire he has a final word.

‘We’re not saying that hospitality is unique to Ireland. Look at Spain or Italy. Even the States. But we’re unique in packaging and marketing it.’

In the back of the cab I’m thinking that what Paul’s company is doing is, in essence, also the policy of the whole massively successful Irish tourist industry. Literature and history and landscape and fishing are all add-ons; but what the country has been selling itself on is warmth and conviviality. The fear must be that the process will change the reality; that warmth and conviviality, like other resources, may turn out to be finite. Marketing, of course, is eternal.

We’re back in Dun Laoghaire in no time. I’ve been so preoccupied with my thoughts I haven’t even had a chance to ask the driver what he thinks. Miserable, unsociable English bastard, I expect.

I’d like to eat at the sexy-looking bistro that’s been incorporated into the old Dun Laoghaire railway station; but there’s a Chinese restaurant just up the road, and duty, research and a sense of what is appropriate require I go there for my farewell dinner. In this most sociable of countries, where I have spent the afternoon discussing the virtues of talking to strangers, I’m once again dining alone.

The food is excellent, especially the Singapore noodles, and once again grotesquely expensive. I read today that Ireland is now the second most prosperous country in Europe, after Luxembourg. It had always been one of my ambitions to eat Chinese food in Luxembourg, but now I’ll be crossing it off the list.

As I collect my key at hotel reception a boob-tubed English woman and her crop-topped daughter, drunk as skunks the pair of them, are asking after the taxi that’s meant to be taking them to the nightclub.

‘Oh, and here,’ says Mum, passing the duty manager a half-empty bottle of vodka, ‘can you put that in the little boxy thing with me key.’

‘You can tell you’re not Irish,’ says the manager as a parting shot as they leave.

You know, I haven’t a clue what he meant by that.

Up in my room all the English TV channels are on tap, but it would feel a kind of betrayal to watch the BBC on my last night. The programmes on Irish TV are all crap, though, so I don’t watch them either. There’s a radio implanted in my headboard, so I lie down and listen to that.

As chance would have it, there’s a feature about the lax planning regulations of the last twenty years, which are now turning out to be not entirely unconnected with corruption. A posh architectural expert from England is asked for his opinion of the aesthetic damage that’s been done by inappropriate styles of building, and the discussion inevitably moves on to the use of UPVC.

‘It is a hideous material,’ he simpers, ‘amoral, and promiscuous in its ubiquity.’

‘But these days,’ says the interviewer, ‘designs have got better. They’re making UPVC windows now that look just like wooden sash windows.’

‘Even worse. The one indisputable principle of modernism is that a material should be true to itself and never pretend to be something it is not. What will happen in Ireland is what is happening in England now, where the supposedly everlasting windows and doors are looking so shabby they’re being replaced with the wooden ones that were ripped out twenty years ago. It really is a del-isshus irony.’

The phone is ringing, but it sounds a long way away, almost as if it’s coming from outside. I walk across to the window to look out, only to see a large old-fashioned boat steaming away. The people on board are waving to me. Then something catches my eye. The white plastic window frame is split, and a chunk has fallen to the floor. Behind the facade the insides are revealed. I stoop to examine them.

Noodles.

The UPVC windows all across the country are manufactured from compressed noodles! No wonder they cost an arm and a leg in restaurants. Building contractors and corrupt politicians have cornered the market and forced up the price. I’ll ring one of the phone-ins tomorrow. Better answer that phone now though. Where is it?

‘Hello?’

‘Mr McCarthy? This is your alarm call. It’s half seven.’

I’m still dressed. I get up from the bed, pull back the curtains, and glorious sunshine streams in through wooden sash windows.

After breakfast I take a stroll along the waterfront to the martello tower at Sandycove. There’s the first chill of autumn in the air, but the sea is eerily still, and the brilliance and clarity of the light make me feel like I’ve landed in a fictional small-town port that has broken loose from Dylan Thomas’s imagination and drifted across the Irish Sea. Elegant fanlights sit above imposing Georgian front doors painted rich hues of red, green, blue, and yellow. Low grassy dunes run down from garden gates, before giving way to the rockpools of the foreshore. A few bright-eyed early risers are out walking or cycling, as if they’ve been placed in the shot by a director. It feels so perfect, so overtly fictional that at one point I feel slightly dizzy, and stop to sit on a stone bench.

As I round the headland at the foot of the martello tower, people are swimming in the sea, climbing down the rocks on a metal ladder, and diving from higher up. ‘Forty Foot Gentlemen’s Bathing Place’ says a sign. This is where the men of Dublin—and latterly, I’m told, the women, though there are none in evidence today—have traditionally exercised their right to bathe nude. On one of the rocks a naked elderly gentleman is flaunting himself, hands on hips, like a catalogue underwear model without any underwear.

I walk as far as the tower, which is now a James Joyce museum, but I’ve no mood for museums today. I’m thinking of what Dara Malloy said that day on Inishmore, when we walked down from the fort together. He’d been talking about the magic that some places hold, that special feeling that embraces landscape and history and our personal associations, but somehow goes beyond the sum of them.

‘Energy. Spirit. Even faeries—call it what you like. It’s just words to describe a real experience we can’t explain when we get that shiver or the hairs stand up. The word doesn’t matter. The feeling is real, and you cannot deny it.’

So what, I asked him, about my feeling? Was a true sense of belonging here possible for me; or was I just another victim of the ruthless marketing of sentimental Irishness?

‘No, I don’t think it’s that. But nor do I think it’s genetic memory. And I wouldn’t think it’s so simple as happy childhood summers, though that’s obviously played a part.’

We stopped at a stone structure, a waist-high flat slab supported by two uprights. In recent times the islanders had used it to butcher sheep, though no one seemed sure how long it had been there.

‘I think everyone has an inner voice, and we can all learn to listen to it. You don’t need to analyse where it comes from, but you can attune yourself to it. If you can learn to follow it, it will lead to fulfilment. That’s why I came here.’

We walked on down the hill to the road above his house, looking across to Connemara.

‘The Celtic monks would wander round Europe until they found the place that was calling to them. Then they’d settle and make their community there. They had an expression for it: seeking their place of resurrection. They believed they were beneath that spot in the firmament that would one day lead them to heaven.’