McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (14 page)

I go to the toilet to make a token stab at freshening up but recoil in horror, driven out by the throat-tearing retching sounds of a six-foot-five man wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Irish Pub Berlin’. I head for the nearest coffee bar, where I join a queue so morose it brings to mind a meal scene from
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
. Spotting an espresso machine, I ask for an espresso.

‘No! Espresso! Feeltah coffee!’ barks the former KGB agent behind the counter. He is partnered by a brown-haired woman of such severity that I am powerless to resist when, against my will, she dumps a croissant-shaped object, that I now know not to have been a croissant, on to a paper plate, where it lands with the appetising thud of a cheap Polish brick. It’s accompanied by a heavily perspiring pat of foil-wrapped butter bearing the incomplete legend ‘Best Before’, and I’m sure it was.

Up on deck, we’re gliding along the river estuary past the same fields I saw as a child; but television and condoms have arrived in Ireland since then, so today there’s no one out there waving. Cobh Cathedral dominates the hillside in front of us, surrounded by brightly painted houses.

‘Fucking hell. Last time I was here they were all grey,’ says the man next to me, a priest in his mid-fifties.

Down on the car deck, all the other vehicles seem to be occupied by sober, well-rested, mentally stable people who must have been airlifted aboard in the last half-hour, because there was certainly no sign of them last night. I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t dream the entire freak show when, lying in a patch of oil by the rear wheels of a Dutch lorry, I spy a soiled ginger wig in a tartan hat. Of its tiny psychotic owner, though, there is no sign. The bow doors open, we rev our engines, and traffic pours from the bowels of the enormous ship, campers, minibuses, caravans, trailers, several coaches and dozens of private cars, many of them with the D nationality sticker that indicates ‘GERMANS IN RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF RELAXED CELTIC FUN’. We’re all funnelled into one tiny road that leads away from the port like a single-lane M25.

Unfortunately, the radio is still tuned to the BBC, which sounds all wrong in Ireland. The writer Lord Bragg is trailing his programme later that morning, in which he will argue that the latest developments in science and theology show that he is very clever indeed. I retune frantically, hoping to get an update on the Croagh Patrick trench. But instead, it’s a tragic news story about a ninety-year-old lady being mugged on her way to early morning mass. The thieves got away with her prayer book and rosary beads. Sounds like Christian Brothers, if you ask me.

Suddenly, I look up, which I try and do as often as possible when driving, and realise that the lorries and camper vans that moments ago had packed the road ahead have miraculously disappeared. A glance in the rear-view mirror reveals an empty lane winding away down a hill. I appear to have Cork completely to myself. Hundreds of drunks, a lesser number of clean-cut families, a rugby team and some Germans have disappeared into the countryside without trace.

Ireland’s ability to absorb incomers should never be underestimated.

The Convent sits on a hillside on the edge of the village, looking down on a ruined abbey and a spectacular tidal inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. It has twelve acres of grounds, a walled nineteenth-century vegetable garden, and a restaurant with stained-glass windows—once the nuns’ chapel—where the cooking is the equal of any in the country. You can stay there for less than the cost of a dodgy B&B in Lowestoft; but it isn’t actually called the Convent, and I’m not going to tell you where it is.

I withhold this information, not out of malice, but enlightened self-interest. The Third Rule of Travel says:
Never Bang on About How Wonderful Some Unspoiled Place is, Because Next Time You Go There, You Won’t be Able to Get In
. When you’re travelling, it helps to know a place where you can recover from the last place, and I’ve known about the Convent for a few years. Fortunately, it’s less than an hour’s drive from the Cork ferry, so I’m there in time for breakfast. Dizzy with sleep deprivation, stinking of ashtrays and other people’s feet, I take my seat next to the only other guests, an American couple in their fifties. They smile politely, and recoil.

I’m tempted to ask them why so many of their fellow countrymen continue to mispronounce
Monty Pie-thonn
, when we don’t have a problem with
Cheers
, but realize this would be unnecessarily confrontational; so instead I set about a life-affirming spread of free-range eggs, home-baked soda bread, sausages from the Convent pigs, and kippers cured by the woman up the road. Service is refreshingly un-Soviet. After flirting briefly with a walk down to the abbey, I decide to do what you’re allowed to do with a clear conscience in Ireland, Spain and other countries not founded on the Protestant work ethic, and go to bed for the day.

Unfortunately, though, as I’m half-English by birth, and wholly so by environment, it’s impossible to sleep. Mind you, the electric saw in the room below doesn’t help, shrieking and grinding away in what later turns out to have been an ecologically disastrous and ultimately doomed attempt to create a cold-storage room by sawing a fridge in half. One of the seductive things about West Cork is that stuff is done in an altogether less by-the-book way than it is in, say, Oxford; as I’m sure Jeremy Irons—whose castle near Baltimore has been undergoing renovation for several years now by all manner of odd people you bump into in bars and, well, bars mostly—has realised.

Con and Karen, one Irish, one English, have been at the Convent since the late seventies, when they bowled up from Antwerp with a multinational crew of maverick chefs, psychedelically-enhanced waiters, and their lovers, and set up a commune. I bet that pleased the parish priest. The building and grounds, once the home of the Sisters of Mercy—the nuns, not the prostitutes in the Leonard Cohen song—were bought at a knock-down price from a disillusioned Californian mind-control cult who just couldn’t seem to control minds out here the way they did back home. Over the years commune evolved into backpacker hostel, into B&B, into guest-house with great restaurant. TVs, trouser presses and mini-bars haven’t arrived yet, but if you’re the kind of person who enjoys gourmet cuisine in a deconsecrated chapel, while a fridge is sawn up in the room next door, then you’ll struggle to find better at the price.

Downstairs in the chapel I have a coffee, and eavesdrop on the mid-morning debate about what should be on tonight’s non-laminated menu. Fishermen are phoned to check what they caught last night; ducks are ordered from some dishevelled duck bloke up a back lane somewhere; and the garden is checked for leaves that look ready for plucking. I don’t think you make much money with this sort of carry-on, but it appears to be very good for the soul.

‘Organic Dan’s on the phone.’

‘Great fella, Organic Dan,’ enthuses Con, while Karen orders the mushrooms. ‘Blew in from Germany about ten years ago. Couldn’t leave, of course, so started up in the organic vegetable business. Completely assimilated now. More Irish than the Irish. Supplied vegetables to us the whole of last year and forgot to send a bill. Marvellous. Wouldn’t last a week in Munich now.’

It seems Ireland has always had the ability to render incomers harmless by making them Irish. When the English, or Normans as they were at the time, first invaded in 1171, they were clean-shaven and close-cropped, as they liked to fight, and didn’t want nasty tweaks from hair getting caught in chain mail and helmets. But within a couple of generations those Normans left behind to be in charge had adopted the long hair and wild beards of the native Irish. It wasn’t long before they were speaking the language, singing the songs, and presumably showing a reckless disregard for the licensing laws. If there’d been fridges, they’d have been as keen as the next fella to saw them in two. Anyway, by Edward Ill’s time the situation had got so out of hand that the English introduced the Statutes of Kilkenny, observing that ‘many English of the land of Ireland forsaking the English language, fashion, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion and language of the Irish enemies.’

So this new law forbade the English from marrying the Irish or listening to their storytellers and musicians who, long before James Joyce or the Chieftains, already had quite a reputation. They weren’t allowed to sell horses to them, or ride bareback like the locals, or speak Irish; and they were told to get a bloody good haircut and generally smarten their ideas up. These statutes remained law for 200 years, and had no effect whatsoever. ‘They were in essence an admission of the failure of the English conquest of Ireland and an acknowledgement of the Irish conquest of the English by absorption,’ as Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberley has written.

I know he has, because by lunchtime I’m sitting in a pub in the village, just down the road from the Convent, reading his excellent and amusing history, rather wonderfully titled
The Trouble with the Irish (or the English Depending on Your Point of View)
. I reckon if I can’t spend the day sleeping, the next best thing is to spend it reading and drinking. I found the fading green hardback in a second-hand shop in a fishing port in Nova Scotia last year. I know nothing about Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberley except that he also wrote
The Mouse that Roared
, which went on to become an Ealing film classic; and I only know he wrote that because it says so in the front of
The Trouble with the Irish
.

It was published in 1956, and for all I know I’ve got the only copy still in existence. Because of its age it seemed an appropriate choice to accompany me on this journey; it delivers a history of the country that ends at exactly the time my boyhood visits began, which has a pleasing symmetry. It also carries a distinct flavour of the fifties, that long-lost era before Guinness was chilled, when cows were milked by hand, when a priest could still fumble beneath an altar boy’s cassock without fear of being pictured in the local paper getting out of a meat wagon with a blanket over his head.

And he was no mug, old Wibberley. This is the final paragraph of his book, written, remember, in 1955: ‘So it would seem that North and South will finally be united. But the Irish must surely have learned that union brought about at the point of a gun is not union but suppression and thus any attempts of the IRA to force the North to unite with the South will but stiffen resistance and prolong the eight-hundred-year-old problem, now approaching solution, of the trouble with the Irish.’

But it’s his theme of absorption of the outsider due to what he calls ‘that particular property of Ireland, that intangible but forcible magic of the land’ that intrigues me. What if all the family time I’ve spent here over the years means that I’m partially absorbed, and the country is calling out to me to complete the process? This seems more credible than genetic memory, and less shallow than my having simply fallen for Ireland’s well-marketed image of the Celt and the craic; or at least it does after three pints of stout. But if Ireland absorbs everyone—or at least everyone who’s open to it—then does that mean that ancestry doesn’t matter? Is there no difference between me and, say, a German tourist on a cycling holiday with a Corrs album playing on his Walkman? This is an ugly possibility that’s difficult to contemplate, so I decide to order some food instead.

I cast an eye on the blackboard. Salad of marinated feta cheese with roasted red peppers. Stuffed chicken fillet with tomato tequila sauce. Hake with chicory and orange in filo parcels with prawn sauce. If any absorption is going on on the food front, it seems to be in the other direction. I decide to go as native as the menu allows, and order a plate of smoked wild salmon from the wonderful smokehouse up the road whose name I can’t tell you, but the old boy who owned it dropped dead last year at the primary school Christmas play, and his son runs it now.

The village is tiny, so there are just the six pubs. I’ve picked the one best suited to Wibberley’s theory of absorption. There’s a French landlady and a Belgian barmaid, both with spectacularly confused accents. A young builder with a scar on his face is sitting at the bar eating a very rare steak with garlic butter. As I make my order he deftly initiates a conversation, and in less than a minute has confided that, although he’s never actually worked on Jeremy Irons’s castle, he once sold him some timbers, over the odds like, in the boatyard at Baltimore.

A lull in the conversation means that it’s my turn now. Unfortunately, a lifetime spent in England has rubbed off on me, and I can’t think of anything to talk about except the weather.

‘See it’s started raining again.’

‘You know what, best feckin’ thing about this country, the rain, you know why? Cause if the sun was always feckin’ shiny every bastard would be coming here. That beautiful waterfront over there at Glandore—d’you know that? Well, feckin’ high rises all up the feckin’ hillside, that’s what it’d be like there now if the weather was like Greece. And then the place would really be shagged now, wouldn’t it? This way, it keeps most of them away except for the ones who really want to come, like, and anyway I think it’s more interesting, isn’t it, when every day isn’t the feckin’ same?’