Jaywalking with the Irish (19 page)

“Well, I guess.”

“I read your last piece in the
Irish Independent.
Wasn’t bad. But c’mere to me.” He pointed to some back wall black-and-white photographs of an earlier generation of lifeboat men, boasting worn overcoats and threadbare ties for the ceremonial portrait.

“Do you see how these lads are all touching each others’ shoulders
as they stand there? Could you ever imagine the modern crews doing the same thing, sharing the same camaraderie?”

“The boys back there seem like good fellows to me.”

“They’re grand and all that, but listen to me now. The lifeboat men today are a softer breed than was seen in my father’s day. Ah sure, they have all their high tech and self-righting compartments, and sonar finders and all the fiddle-faddle they could whistle for, and they love the press notices they collect whenever they haul somebody in and shout for attention. But they don’t know half of the danger or sacrifice that used to come with being a volunteer.”

So, here in a village whose spirit still revolved around an icon of extraordinary constancy, I confronted one of the oldest Irish values – begrudgery. The man had his rights, being among the thirteen natives actually left in Courtmac, and was such a self-possessed individual that he cared not a whit about his outspokenness. Courtmacsherry seemed the more vibrant for his openness, a village that easily welcomed it new gay innkeepers, graciously accepted crusties and foreign “blow-ins” (a name for newcomers of only, say, twenty years), while mustering one out of every eight citizens to volunteer for life-risking duty on the lifeboat any time a stranger became imperiled at sea. I fell in love with the place.

The next morning I drove to the Seven Heads to gaze over the waters traversed in darkness the night before. But nearly every back lane was capped by warning signs about the foot-and-mouth disease menace that had recently worked up a froth of national alarm. What a stupid nonevent, it seemed to me. Farms had become no-go areas, and disinfectant-soaked mats had been stretched across nearly every rural juncture.

The Republic of Ireland responded with laudable rigor, concerned that infiltration of the disease within its borders could make the multibillion-pound tourist industry and crucial agricultural exports disappear with a fairy’s poof. Hundreds of
gardaí
were therefore dispatched to prevent the smuggling of infected animals across the border with the North by rogue livestock traders, and livestock were vigilantly tested after evidencing the slightest symptoms. Yet some of the more extreme measures seemed more
wishful than scientific, especially the disinfectant-soaked mats that made me instinctively feel that I should not roll across them and perhaps spread the spores of disease.

Nearly every turn was blocked by ratty old rugs. The things had lately been placed before schools, churches, chlorine-reeking leisure centers, and inner-city pubs – even the bottom landing of the Hi-B’s eternally contaminated stairs, where few cows grazed, sported its own squishy mat.

Picking my way forward, I finally found a matless path toward an abandoned pier, where I gazed off toward the spectacular Old Head of Kinsale. The ocean gleamed and gulls screamed. I imagined the 1200 bodies from the
Lusitania
floating on the swells; the fleets of seventeenth-century British sailing ships heading off for the West Indies; the prehistoric Celts offering animal sacrifices in the ring forts and magical stone circles that haunt every other hill in Ireland’s southwest. There was no stage of Irish history that could not be envisioned if one stared long enough into the silver fire dancing on the sea. It was the history of my blood, and my children’s.

Deasy.

Kirby.

Butler.

Monaghan.

Donnelly.

McDermott.

McKeon.

How many of these ancestors had been swallowed by the smiling predations of the Atlantic? How many had been wrestled from the pummeling surf by some fellow peasant who risked all, long before there were any rocketing modern lifeboats or any scribes to take a record of the everyday heroism on Irish shores. Foot-and-mouth disease, this meant next to nothing to me before the ballads of mortality now being whispered out of the sea.

Return to beginning of chapter

True spring was approaching and it felt as if our Irish lives were progressing on all cylinders. Jamie kept busy publicizing plays for the Cork Opera House, and raising funds for the looming Picasso do, all the while meeting an ever-expanding cast of Corkonians. When not working on article assignments, I kept laying building blocks for the magazine. Cutting back on the weekend expeditions, we let the kids enjoy their own rhythms of school, study, and play as the days lengthened. The garden rang with cheerful voices, and the mendicant teenagers seemed to have moved off to meaner pastures. Under the watchful eye of an appreciative teacher, Harris, meanwhile, appeared to be prospering. Near the end of March, Jamie departed across the Atlantic to visit her mother. Even that separation had its bright side, as Laura, less fang-toothed than at the dawning of her adolescence, pitched in to help with the household chores, and the boys gathered close for bedtime readings.

The night Jamie was winging back toward Ireland, I awoke around 2 a.m., descended the stairs for a glass of juice, then gazed over several items from my coat pockets that seemed oddly littered about on the kitchen table and floor. Half-asleep, I assumed that one of the children had briefly arisen earlier and trashed the room in their usual style. So what else is new, I thought. Just before dawn, a ringing phone had me lurching out of bed again, immediately alarmed about my wife’s passage.

“This is the Gurranabraher
gardaí
.”

“Yes?” Not having a clue that Cork, or anywhere in this world, held such an unlikely sounding police precinct, which was roughly pronounced “go on and bra her,” this call sounded like a joke to me.

“Do you know that your car – an Opel Astra, is it? – was stolen last night?”

At this point I was more or less naked and fully confused. “What are you saying?”

“Well, we have recovered it in a housing estate nearby. It appears to be drivable and you can come and get it at any time,” the voice said.

Down the stairs I shambled to make both tea and sense of this news in the light of dawn. In every room, cabinet drawers hung open and papers and clothing lay strewn wildly. A sickening realization took hold that someone had climbed in the kitchen window while I slept, while my innocent children were curled in their beds, and perhaps even stood lurking behind a door while I drank my juice. They had rifled pockets, stolen the car keys, and fled.

That I knew where the car had been found – a dismal northside neighborhood called Knocknaheeny – helped not at all. Sure, I’d heard stories about that place, about a pub dubbed “The Flying Bottle,” where visitors who ask whether their parked cars will be safe receive the joking response, “Why would that matter, when you’ll have every stolen car in Cork available to choose from by the time you leave?”

At the police station, I was handed the keys, which had inexplicably been found in the ignition, and a life-like silver toy pistol that Owen had left in the back seat.

“Ye can drive it away now, but we would like to take fingerprints later in the morning, if leaving it here can be managed,” said the desk officer.

“Let me just have a quick look inside,” I replied. A stink of gasoline sent me reeling upon opening the car door. Clearly, the thieves had intended to torch the vehicle after reaching their destination, a place full of dismal “county council,” or welfare, housing where life is generally spent on the dole. The torching of stolen cars has become a nightly ritual in Irish inner cities, ostensibly to prevent the recovery of fingerprints, but possibly in pursuit of satisfying more primal urges. Our kindly neighbor Pat O’Neill had recently had his van broken into one night; and after stealing £2000 worth of tools, the vandals burned his car fifty feet from our own door.
I’d seen plenty of charred metal hulks in my morning walks for the newspaper, but this one was close. In January, the windows of five cars parked in our cul-de-sac had been smashed without a single vehicle being driven away.

After taking a taxi back to our house, I pieced together what had happened. My disgust deepened once it became clear that the creeps had even stolen the boys’ soccer balls, indicating that they were either so kited on drugs, or otherwise so
Clockwork Orange
senseless, that they would risk a potentially violent encounter for the most juvenile of loot.

A pair of
gardaí
soon showed up from some outpost about five miles away, scribbled notes in little pads, then disappeared with a poof. Another officer from a different station made a brief appearance, followed later on by another from a third substation half a mile down the hill at the edge of town – closed inexplicably on weekends and every night between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. when their presence might matter most. It was apparent that each wave of well-meaning coppers had received no crime report from their predecessors, but all blithely jotted away in their notebooks nonetheless, like wacky characters from Flann O’Brien’s
The Third Policeman
. A detective from Cork’s headquarters appeared out of nowhere and tried to lift fingerprints here and there, scribbling furiously. Over tea, he explained that he was the only fingerprint expert working in Cork on this day and had just come from a rape scene, plus three burglaries.

“I might have gotten a nice print off one of your bowls by the window,” he allowed. “We’ll send it off to Dublin for a computer check.”

“How long will that take?”

“About four weeks,” he replied, which was not reassuring.

“But this house is very secluded and couldn’t these robbers, now knowing how easy it is to get inside, come back?”

The detective worked his spoon. “It’s not likely. On the other hand, it’s not impossible. I would investigate a good security system, if I were you.”

Jamie returned from the airport safely, and I revisited the
gardaí
station where our car still sulked. A talk with another desk clerk
resulted in further scribbling and I began to wonder when any of this shorthand was ever read again. Every shop in Cork had some sort of computer system, but apparently not Ireland’s police.

The car wouldn’t start, so I called a tow truck. “You’re lucky you didn’t confront those bastards, that I can tell you. They would have been only too glad to smash in your head,” the driver consoled me in the cab.

We neared a garage that had done our repairs and I suggested that our Opel be dropped off there. This made the driver wheeze with laughter.

“You’re joking?”

The place was at the rear of a big petrol station. “What’s the matter with it?”

“The punks around here will burn any car left here for the sheer joy of it, that’s what.”

Let us say that I was by now thoroughly rattled. The exploding crime rate in Ireland, so often discussed in the newspapers, had become personal. My fundamental ability to protect my wife and children had been violated, and it now felt like the threat of further intrusions by the same culprits was being shrugged off with a “good luck to ye,” system-wide indifference. In the pubs, people constantly complained that the rule of law in Ireland was finished, that the
gardaí
were stretched thin and demoralized, thanks to parsimonious funding, overcrowded prisons, and turnstile courts dispensing absurdly lenient sentences. Murderers and serial rapists who received “life sentences” served at most the statutory minimum of seven years, while perpetrators of vicious street assaults inevitably got off with a £100 fine.

Deep into each night, I began patrolling the house with a baseball bat. I slept like an insomniac, jolting awake at the slightest sound. The rising menace that is the underbelly of Ireland’s great leap forward now gnawed deep and personal. It had long been obvious that the police were fleeting presences after dark, but only now had the consequences struck home. A neighbor appeared with a shattered elbow in a sling, having been savagely assaulted for no reason other than some sadistic hoodlums’ pleasure upon finding him strolling home from his late-night restaurant job. The brother
of another friend had a different drunken pack stomp on his head for sport, detaching a retina. Unlike two university students who received similar late-night greetings in successive weeks some months later, he was fortunate not to end up on a permanent life-support system.

Obviously, urban lawlessness is pervasive in many western countries and comes with the territory wherever old values disintegrate. But Ireland’s problem was especially disturbing because at times the random violent assaults had no apparent motive, not even robbery. A nationwide obsession with intoxication, as depicted in the tale told by the nasty cab driver about the transformations of the peacock into monkey and pig, was the only cause many commentators could attribute to the rising savagery. Almost equally troubling was the general fecklessness – perhaps the word the Irish most despise hearing about themselves – being brought to bear on this crisis. Stupendous piles of capital were being poured into the country’s infrastructure, such as new roundabouts and a showy sports stadium in Dublin. But less glamorous concerns, such as health care, public safety, and the horrendous fatality rates on the roads, were receiving scant attention from Irish politicians, world masters at speaking obliquely and doing as little as possible about anything problematic, a pursuit in which they are not alone. “A Lot Done, More to Do,” ran the pitiful, don’t-rock-the-boat bugle cry of the ruling political party (Fianna Fail) some months later. Meanwhile, a survey of 1250 Irish crime victims by a group called Victim Support showed that more than three-quarters received zero police contact after reporting their burglary or assault.

In Connecticut, we left our doors unlocked, trusting in the vigilance of the police. At times, the reach of American law seemed heavy-handed, but to live in a country where even unruly adolescents could not be controlled felt scarier by far – it was like a reincarnation of the every-man-for-himself Wild West.

What was so different about Ireland? It was obvious that the
gardaí
were understaffed and that Irish prisons were bursting at the seams. In fact, Cork’s jail was a laughing stock, what with all the drug-filled tennis balls flung over the walls into the exercise yard. The wardens responded by stretching protective netting
overhead; so the inmates’ friends started chucking over light bulbs that smashed upon impact and showered intoxicating chemicals upon their beloveds.

The Irish Minister for Justice, Equality, and Law Reform, Michael McDowell, orated one day that wanton violence, thuggery, and destructiveness were obvious symptoms of a society whose sense of civility and public order had run amuck.

“They undermine our collective sense of security; they decrease our sense of freedom from fear; they degrade our amenity of life, especially in urban areas. Indeed, one of the most disturbing developments in recent years is the mindless but vicious behavior of young men who carry out random ‘run-by’ assaults consisting of a blow to the face of completely innocent and inoffensive strangers,” McDowell said, laying the blame on rampant alcohol abuse.

Some profound transformation seemed to be occurring before our eyes. A letter to the
Irish Times
pointed out that in 1958, a year of horrendous poverty and miserable unemployment, Ireland and Spain had the lowest serious crime rates in the world, with four murders committed in the Republic, 10 rapes, 79 sexual assaults, 267 violent assaults, 61 robberies, and 3315 cases of burglary and/or breaking and entering.

Forty years later, the country was booming with record employment levels, high living standards, free university education, and unprecedented economic, personal, and sexual freedom. But in 1998, despite a modest growth in population (to 3.7 from 2.9 million in 1958), there were 38 murders, 292 rapes, 598 sexual assaults, 691 violent assaults (a more liberal definition put the number at 8664 in 1999), 2500 robberies, and 25,730 burglaries (which the
gardaí
liked to celebrate as a major decrease from a couple of years back).

The Irish police also have another omnibus crime category called “public order offences,” which embrace everything from street brawling to vandalism, public drunkenness and abusiveness. From 1995 to 1999, they counted 111,286 of these everyday acts of social mayhem all told, but in the first eight months of 2000 the number shot up to 50,984, a number that would reach more than 400,000 if projected over the next few years. The columnist Louis
Power thoughtfully asked how crime rates could have exploded in the midst of the sweeping new affluence when compared to those of a destitute, but much more law-abiding, Ireland of four decades earlier.

The answer, the writer suggested, was that Ireland had made a Faustian bargain in tossing aside its age-old religious beliefs and deeply rooted, community-based social norms for the gratification of unfettered modern indulgence. Personally, I didn’t want my children to be beaten into adherence to the old Irish ways, as happened in too many schools a generation back. But Louis Power certainly had a point.

Concerned about my ability to protect my family in the face of such lawlessness, I brushed aside past warnings about direct speaking and mentioned in an opinion column in a national newspaper, without naming names, some of the problems we had encountered in this rapidly changing Ireland.

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the menacing local teenagers, with new recruits, soon resurfaced in our lane, with one snickering, “You got your car stolen and too bad it wasn’t burned.” One friend suggested that “we sort them,” which at certain levels of Irish society means assembling a vigilante pack to appear at a “messer’s” doorstep in the night to exact either psychological or physical intimidation. Those weren’t my methods, and I struggled to hold my peace, even if it was intensely unnerving to feel that our family had become another one of xenophobic modern Ireland’s punching bags. One April afternoon, the young pack assembled outside our door shouting “Fuck Americans!” with no provocation whatsoever, unless they heard the curses I’d been hurling their way in my dreams. This ugliness wouldn’t have even qualified as a public order offence, but it was too much.