Myles Away From Dublin (19 page)

Let me set out one word which is new, mysterious, fully understood by nobody, very important, possibly
disreputable
, by many thought fraudulent and detestable and sometimes defined as the name of this country’s second most important industry – TOURISM.

It is, as I have said, new, and the multiple façades of its meaning may be gleaned from the French word
tour
, which my dictionary says has the following meanings in English:

Now it is not good enough to say that tourism is just a fancy new name for ‘taking holidays’. Obviously it is much more than that because it entails a populational upheaval, a considerable social mix-up and also financial transactions which in sum are formidable.

In this country most of us doubt the volume of the tourist trade as given annually by Bord Fáilte because many of the figures are estimates and anyway it is impossible to segregate in the total of visitors which are properly called tourists (or foreigners visiting this country) and which are Irish people, mostly from Britain, coming home for a few weeks to visit relatives. But given that the figures are roughly right, is it a desirable business?

One objection to it is that it is sharply seasonal. The off/on nature of the employment it affords in hotel and catering establishments must cause hardship and
disruption
to those who work in the business, and proprietors are pressed to carry out capital investment which will yield a very uncertain return when one considers the many imponderable and unpredictable factors which
govern tourist traffic, from Irish weather to the varying industrial and financial conditions abroad.

One does not have to exaggerate the close and considerable ties which exist between this country and the USA (where there is usually no shortage of money) but it is a fact that, Shannon notwithstanding, the numbers of holiday-makers here from the US is disappointingly small; the majority of such people regard Paris as the ideal jumping-off point for an exploration of the Old World, and direct jet flights to that city are nearly as short and convenient as is the stop at Shannon.

Furthermore, the spread of tourist traffic here is very uneven, some places getting an absurdly large and undeserved share of the spoils.

No visitor to Ireland would dare be going away without having seen the lakes of Killarney, Galway Bay and maybe the Glens of Antrim, and also loafing around historic Dublin, but I would personally say that Wicklow, for its astonishing variety of mountain, strand, woodland and river, is the most attractive and beautiful country in Ireland, but little visited by foreigners.

I suppose in tourist traffic terms the word ‘unspoilt’ is one of praise but I doubt if publicans or hoteliers would agree: they would probably substitute ‘neglected’.

These thoughts were provoked by a curious personal experience. When the present writer had the honour to be a very young fellow, his parents used to take a house for the months of July and August in Skerries. This is a pleasant little seaside town about 18 miles north of Dublin and has long been that city’s resort for holidays of the ‘family’ kind as distinct from Bray, which is a shrill gaudy place full of noise, honky-tonks and neon.

I revisited Skerries on the 31st of last month to check on something and noted many changes, mostly for the worse, though strange to say several of the old thatched houses in the town survive.

It was my first sight of Red Island, which calls itself a holiday camp but which looked to me at least from the outside as the nearest thing imaginable to a Nazi
extermination camp (but I don’t mean that it is necessarily not a nice place to stay). It may be that the date of my visit was unfortunate but I must report that so far as visitors were concerned, the place was almost deserted and the few I did encounter all seemed to be English.

Here was apparently another aspect of tourism. In recent years it seems that all Irish people who can afford to take a real holiday away from home make sure to spend it anywhere except in Ireland, and for many years now a favourable exchange rate of currency has induced thousands of Irish people to go to Spain. And France, Germany and Italy have long had their own attractions for our people.

I personally know the Rhineland better than I know the valley of the Liffey or sweet vale of Avoca, but somehow I don’t feel an unpatriotic renegade.

I’ll finish with a true story about the late R.M. Smyllie, famed Editor of the
Irish
Times.
He was on holiday in Germany at the outbreak of the 1914 war and was immediately arrested. He protested that he was an Irishman, not British, and demanded that he be sent back to Ireland.

‘
Irland?
’
the fat, puzzled sergeant said incredulously. He took down an enormous atlas in the police station, laboriously turned over the pages and finally slammed it shut.

‘
Existiert
nicht!
’
he roared, and Smyllie was locked up for the duration.

Readers will remember that I recently wrote some notes here on TOURISM, questioning certain aspects of this industry, particularly the results of its essentially seasonal nature and the distortion and disequilibrium arising from the marked unevenness of its impact on Ireland, both territorially and as to people.

Certain highly publicised spots get the bulk of the trade and the money while other places, just as admirable, get next to nothing. Well, there seems no easy answer to such problems – except, perhaps, to tell foreign visitors on arrival that they will damn well go wherever the big buses bring them! What an
opportunity
for lone Mountmellick!

Today I would like to attempt some remarks on a subject cognate to tourism, namely, an ordinary Irishman’s attitude to taking his annual summer holidays. I will set the matter out in the form of a dialogue between two old pals who casually meet.

‘Ah, Tom, the bould man. Right well you’re looking.’

‘And why shouldn’t I? You’re not looking too bad yersalf aither.’

‘Any holidays yet?’

‘The what was that?’

‘Holidays. Did you take any yet?’

‘Course I did. Three weeks, and I never enjoyed meself so much. Made a new man of me.’

‘Where did you go? I mean, was it Madrid or just Lahinch?’

‘Are you sarious?’

‘I’m always sarious. If it was Vienna, can’t you just say so? Or is it a top secret?’

‘Listen here. If you want to suggest I’m some sort of a mad willy-the-wisp at my time of life, I suppose I’ll have to pretend to laugh at your poor idea of a joke. For
yer information, I didn’t traipse across to Moscow aither. No sir!’

‘Well where did you spend yer holidays?’

‘I spent them at home like a dacent man, where I’m properly fed, don’t have to sleep in a damp bed and put up with the bad indescribable language of Frenchies or Japanees. Nor Cockney bowsies naither.’

‘Well holy mackerel! You didn’t go away at all?’

‘Indeed and I did – and every day. A day-trip to Portmarnock wan day, maybe to Maynooth the next. And I took care to have a good lie-up in the mornings, too.’

‘Me dear man, did you never hear of the great benefits of a change of scene, a change of air and meeting complete strangers? You must be the only character alive today who never heard of the great benefits of a complete break. That has been
acknowledged
for centuries, man. The important thing is change.’

‘Is that so?
Change?
I prefer to keep me change in me own pocket.’

‘Living away is nearly as cheap as living at home.’

‘You talk of the benefits of a complete break, acknowledged for centuries. Is that so? What centuries? The idea of holidays at all, of any kind, is quite recent. In the day of Charles Dickens the way to clean a filthy chimney was to send a young boy up it. Slavery! Come across to this pub and I’ll stand you a pint. I’ve still a few bob of my holidays money left.

‘Tell you another thing – and stop slopping that pint about! As you probably know, I’m on a diet. Even in a decent hotel (if I could afford it) I would be regarded as a nuisance.’

‘Or a pest.’

‘And furthermore, if I could persuade them to attend to me special diet, I’ll go bail there would be an extra charge. Once you don’t fit into their plan for the
mass-production
of their dirty grub, you’re a special case. If yer stomach isn’t right, you’ll pay through the nose for
it. And if you complain, out you go!’

‘Of course a good boarding house might look after you OK?’

‘And be ett alive be fleas in the middle of the night?’

‘Ah now I don’t know.’

‘Tell me this. What about yerself? Have you taken any holliers yet?’

‘No. I start in about eight days from now.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘Aw, Skerries for a fortnight. Go there every year with the wife and kids.’

‘
Skerries?
’

‘Yiss. You see, there’s bags of sand down there. The very man for the kids.’

‘I’ll say no more. Next year I might change me own ideas and take a trip to Constanty Nopel.’

An Irish firm recently offered a prize of £300 ‘to be spent in 24 hours’. I did not examine this strange offer very closely as, to be eligible, one had to buy a refrigerator.

Frankly, I don’t need a refrigerator and cannot help regarding things that are kept in them with suspicion. I may mention in passing that there is something far more terrible than the commonplace fridge: it is called the Deep Freeze.

I came into collision with the Deep Freeze last Christmas when an old friend whom I accidentally met in Dublin town invited me into an expensive restaurant ‘for a bite’. I was bitten all right. He suggested some salmon, and I thoughtlessly agreed to this.

Only after several weeks’ appalling illness did I realise that it had come from the Deep Freeze and had possibly been caught in 1946. Archaeological treasures are fine, but not on the plate between your knife and fork.

But this £300 to be spent in 24 hours? Let us suppose that the condition is exactly that, that the sum of £300, no more and no less, must be got rid of in that short space of time. I think it would be a most difficult thing to do – it might even be impossible. You could not, for instance, buy something worth considerably more than £300, adding your own money to make up the difference. Anything worth less than £300 would also be a rupture of the bargain.

Can you think of any surefire way of getting rid of this sum by buying something?

Let’s see (and discard) some of the obvious ideas.

Walk into a bookie’s shop and put it all on a horse? No. That sounds simple but would fail, for any bookie in his senses would refuse the bet. Just try putting on a fiver and you’ll know what I mean. Irish bookmakers
regard bets as money into the kitty. They don’t see anything funny about bets on horses which romp home. They suspect a ‘job’ has been pulled and pay only with enormous reluctance. The punter feels slightly ashamed of himself while he pockets the greasy reward of his courage.

The words ‘buy’ or ‘spend’ must be given their full, simple value. When you buy something, you must get it right away and have the use of it. This rules out a great variety of purchases. It is unlikely but still possible that a highly undesirable tumbledown cottage would be on the market: but you couldn’t buy it.

No matter how courteous and gallant the owner, the lawyers would have to set about putting the deeds in order, meanwhile holding your cash or cheque strictly in suspense. This foostering would take at least a fortnight, and your 24-hour transaction would simply not exist.

Well, how about buying a car? Out of the question. No doubt a good second-hand car could be got for £300 but the day has not dawned when you could buy such a machine and drive in it. Very likely it would have to be taxed but even if it is taxed, it would be illegal for you to put it on the road without insurance. And that would take a week.

The same can be said of almost anything that is designated Property. Lawyers, busybodies and
interferers
are involved, with inevitable delay. If you went into a highclass outfitter’s, sent for the manager and told him you wanted to spend £300 – no more, no less – on clothing for yourself, he would probably smile affably, discuss the whole mystique of dress since earliest times and keep you engaged in conversation until the police had arrived.

The same would be true of attempts to buy wallpaper, raspberries for making 7,000 lb of jam, ornamental Chinese lacquerwork, 6,000 sq. yards of trelliswork to secure privacy in your garden, or even 800 blankets to keep you warm. It’s not sufficient to want
something and readily produce the money to pay for it.

It must be a REASONABLE something. Try buying £300 worth of invisible ink and you will almost certainly find yourself in some dungeon where spies are stored. Even outsize expenditure on photographic materials would be dangerous for the same reason.

Is there then anything left? Well, a fur coat is a possibility but you would have to be a woman and be sure you knew rabbit from mink. Even then some hugger-mugger entailing delay might be involved, for the better stores probably keep their top class coats in a secret store in some remote village such as Mulhuddart. In any case I’ve never heard of a fur coat worth exactly £300.

Could you perhaps buy a whole collection of things in total worth £300? Without hesitation I would say NO. It is all very well to lay out tenpence on a quarter pound of Marie biscuits, 3d on a bar of chocolate and one and eightpence on postage stamps.

Perfecting such transactions takes time, and that 24 hours can be a viciously narrow term. Even if it wasn’t you would lose count.

In a last desperate plunge, when in a state of collapse from fatigue and worry, you would probably buy a radiogram, bringing your grand total to £315, with the taxi to pay on top of that.

My own choice in a situation of this kind is automatic. Give me, I say, what I am well used to by now and am no longer terribly afraid of. I mean poverty.