McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (16 page)

I stop to buy a bar of chocolate at a shop that appears to be open, but whose door is locked. It’s opened begrudgingly, then locked again behind me to deter other customers, by a hatchet-faced lady who glares at me while I select the best Kit Kat in the shop. In a corner a couple of intimidated Americans lurk in the shadows, examining tea towels covered in pictures of leprechauns, or possibly the shopkeeper’s relatives.

Glengarriff is a busy tourist town, with menus in Dutch, and woolly sweaters and ornamental shillelaghs on permanent offer at knock-down prices. As I drive through, a small huddle of men with assorted nautical headwear and cigarettes on the go lurk near one of the boating concessions, touting for business from a family of recently arrived smart-but-casual Continental income opportunities pushing a polka-dot pram. The town has a sense of heightened Irishness that gives it an air of unreality, but there’s no denying it’s in a gorgeous spot.

Turn left at Glengarriff and you enter Beara. ‘Within five miles there is a country of the magnificence of which no pen can give an idea,’ wrote Thackeray, who clearly couldn’t be bothered trying to describe it, as he was behind schedule on a Vanity Fair script for the BBC at the time. Suddenly the lush rolling farmland of West Cork and the verdant Celtic jungle of Glengarriff are just memories, and you’re in an altogether wilder place.

The road west has the massive expanse of Bantry Bay to the left, and stark mountains of biblical ruggedness on the right. Sheep are attached to unlikely precipices as if by Velcro. Radiant shafts of sunlight pierce the dark bruise of cloud cover and hit the water with a metallic flash, as if to prove there is a Creator, and his taste is for random and terrifying beauty. By heading for Beara instead of following my intended route I suppose I’m hoping to leave the world of plans and arrangements behind, lay claim to my share of Ireland’s spontaneous and disorganised ebullience, and see if I really fit in. I’ll simply turn up at McCarthy’s Bar, and see what happens. If nothing does, I can go away again.

Entering Castletownbere I notice that the Tank has developed a niggling exhaust rattle. I consider pulling in at O’Sullivan’s garage, but the new-found spirit of the journey persuades me to ignore it until it gets really bad, then tie it up with a bit of old washing-line I’ll find in a ditch somewhere. O’Sullivan’s garage is just along from O’Sullivan’s estate agent, next door to McCarthy’s solicitors on the one side, and MacCarthy’s—with an ‘a’ like my grandfather—Bar and Grocery on the other.

Deferring the first pint of the day to enhance its flavour, I park on the waterfront and go for a stroll through town.

Castletownbere—or Castletownberehaven to give its full name—is a proper working fishing port. Thirty or forty small boats moored on the waterfront just yards from the main street are swarming with fishermen doing things I don’t understand with cables and hawsers. A lad in a woolly hat with a mad gleam in his eye is moving crates of monkfish with a forklift, tearing around the quayside with all the caution of Keith Moon driving a Rolls-Royce towards a swimming pool.

Blowing in the breeze along the water’s edge is an exotic-looking row of what visitors believe to be date palms, thriving in the Gulf Stream, but which are in fact cunning impostors imported from New Zealand. Framed by the stark mountain-sides behind, the houses and shops leap out in vivid shades of yellow, blue and dayglo. O’Donoghue’s Bar is two shades of purple. The bank is green and pink. ‘Jack Patrick’s Restaurant and Butcher’ proclaims a sign. ‘In memory of the men of the Berehaven battalion who fought for the Irish Republic’ says the large grey Celtic cross in the market square opposite MacCarthy’s. A fresh tricolour wreath of lilies lies next to it on the pavement.

There’s a B&B sign on a big old house so on impulse—I’m getting the hang of this—I go and knock on the door. After the sort of pause that usually suggests someone inside is destroying evidence, the door is opened by a bespectacled, guilty-looking man who hasn’t recently showered. He squints malevolently round the door and says, ‘Yes?’ meaning, ‘I don’t want you to stay here.’

‘Do you have a room for the night?’

He peers out over my shoulder to the street. ‘On your own are you?’

‘I am.’

‘I only have a double.’

‘That’s okay. I’ll pay the double rate.’

He shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t usually do that.’

He goes to shut the door, to stop me seeing whatever is hanging from a meat hook or decomposing in the acid bath behind him; but suddenly we’re interrupted by two returning guests, a good-looking, fresh-faced couple in their twenties—Dutch cyclists, I’d say at a guess—who go in past him, smiling. As the door slowly closes, my last glimpse is of him watching them go up the stairs, with the brooding gaze of a serial killer of Dutch cyclists.

Half an hour later I’m unpacking in a hygienic bungalow on the edge of town. As I close the gilt-embossed door of the white melamine wardrobe and sit down on the polyester and fibreglass duvet cover, I can gaze out through the double-glazed UPVC windows at the untamed mountainside beyond. Smack in front of it a technicolour plastic leprechaun stands by a tiny Renaissance-style fountain on a crazy-paved patio. The casual brush of bare foot against the maroon, yellow, black, green and orange swirls of the brushed nylon shagpile generates a bracing burst of static, and sparks leap from my forehead.

I am not the first to observe that the landscape of rural Ireland has been badly defaced these last thirty years by the slapdash construction of suburban housing in places where there are no suburbs. On mountainsides, cliff-tops and riversides, by secluded loughs, ancient bogs and neolithic monuments, the Invasion of the Killer Bungalows has swept all before it. Strict planning regulations are now rumoured to be in force, but the faux-Spanish haciendas, neo-Kelloggs dream homes, and mini-Southforks are already here. At times it can seem that the booming Celtic Tiger economy must be driven entirely by the manufacture of net curtains and plastic Doric columns.

But before sneering at Irish bad taste, smug outsiders who live in twee English villages, like me, should bear in mind that the bungalow blight is simply the logical outcome of Ireland’s history of poverty; a poverty for which English landlords living across the sea in their carefully preserved villages must shoulder their fair share of the blame. Ireland simply does not possess the picturesque old housing stock that’s to be found in England and France, because for many centuries, and until very recently, this was a desperately poor country. Those houses were never built. The census of 1842, for example, records that eighty-four per cent of the population of the Beara Peninsula at that time were living in one-room mud huts. Visitors like Thackeray, though used to the deprivation of Victorian London, were staggered by the poverty and squalor they witnessed.

The self-confident synthetic consumerism of the new houses is a response to this history of deprivation. ‘Look,’ the bungalows are saying, ‘we’re not peasants any more. We buy things now, rather than digging them up. We’ve been sitting on bare wooden benches for centuries, but we’ve got Dralon sofas now, just like you.’ So people whose parents made do with bare concrete floors are now mad for fitted carpets, preferably in epilepsy-inducing designs. Grandchildren of turf cutters who never saw an indoor toilet can’t wait to install turf-effect gas fires and en-suite avocado bidets. Often you’ll see an inappropriate-looking new house built right next to the ruin it’s replaced. ‘We were that,’ it’s saying, ‘but now we’re this.’ It’s a very Irish paradox that modem houses and bungalows can speak so eloquently of the nation’s past.

When I arrived here Mrs O’Sullivan greeted me in textbook style.

‘Where are ye from? Are ye working or on holiday? Are ye married? Do ye have children? Why aren’t they with ye? What work is it ye do, clearing off and leaving them behind? Will ye be wanting mass times? Half eight all right for breakfast?’

Then she let me in.

She showed me round, making sure to point out the carefully concealed switch and red light without which, bitter experience has taught me, showers in B&Bs just get colder and colder, even with the dial all the way up to red. Then she, her husband and two kids set off in a people carrier with a fish symbol on the back for half six mass, Saturday night mass now fulfilling the once inflexible Sunday obligation.

‘Crazy, really, isn’t it?’ said Mrs O’Sullivan. ‘But I suppose it’s good for the supermarkets and golf clubs. Sure, I expect soon we’ll be able to go to Sunday mass Monday to Friday as well. Will you be late?’

‘I shouldn’t think so, no.’

After all, I don’t know a soul. I’m taking Wibberley out in my pocket for company.

‘I’ll make some sandwiches, so. They’ll be there whenever you come in.’

On the wall in the hallway, where the previous generation would have venerated the Pope and JFK, is a photo of Manchester United, who seem to be more popular in County Cork than they are in Manchester. Pausing for a moment by the front door to admire the traditional Celtic craftsmanship on the glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary holy water font with integral night light and thermometer, I step outside into dazzling sunshine and heavy drizzle, and set out to walk to MacCarthy’s.

On the main street, lots of swarthy, tough-looking men, heavily stubbled and tattooed, and that’s just their heads, are prowling round in groups. As I’m wondering what gay package tourists from Brighton and San Francisco are doing in Castletownbere, I notice they’re speaking Spanish and Portuguese, and are probably fishermen ashore for the night. Round here, they’ve been arguing about monkfish quotas with the Spanish for at least 500 years.

Outside the church half a dozen shifty-looking men are lurking by the porch, observing their obligation to attend mass, but without actually entering the building and being spotted by the priest. Two of them are smoking, cigarettes clutched between thumb and first finger, lit end in palm, in the tough-guy style favoured by mean hombres, and boys behind bike sheds, the world over. Hunched and restless, their furtive, well-practised body language doesn’t say ‘Church’ so much as ‘Unemployment Office’ or ‘Magistrate’s Court’. Ireland may be becoming a more secular society, but some deeply ingrained vestige of belief has convinced these guys they’re more likely to avoid eternal damnation if they spend an hour every Saturday night having a few smokes outside the church before going out for a skinful. It’s a complex business, modern theology.

The Second Rule of Travel in Ireland says:
The More Bright Primary Colours and Ancient Celtic Symbols Outside the Pub, the More Phoney the Interior.
Reassuringly, the sign outside MacCarthy’s is plain white lettering on black. I wasn’t expecting the ‘a’ before the ‘cC’ but detail isn’t going to hold me back now. In any case, the ornate period tiling on the floor as you go in proclaims ‘McCarthy’s’ which creates a comforting air of confusion, and gives you something to talk about. Even at seven o’clock in the evening, damp, friendless and without a plan, I can sense that this place might be a contender in the Best Pub in the World competition I have been privately conducting since 1975. For the Ovalau Club in Levuka, Fiji, the pressure is suddenly on.

MacCarthy’s is an effortless compromise. The front half is a grocer’s shop with seats for drinkers; the back half, a bar with groceries. On the right as you enter is a tiny snug, once a matchmaker’s booth where big-handed farmers arranged marriages between cousins who hadn’t met. Aluminium kettles and saucepans hang from the ceiling, not for show, but for sale. Drinkers sit under shelves of long-life orange juice and sliced bread. There is a fridge full of dairy products. The well-stocked shelves behind the bar display eggs, tinned peaches and peas, Paxo stuffing, custard creams, baking powder, bananas, Uncle Ben’s rice, nutmeg, onions, olive oil, spaghetti, Brillo pads and soap: good news for hungry drinkers who need a wash.

The dense, luxuriantly-sculpted pint of stout is five minutes in the pouring, the precise amount of time needed to confess your entire life history to the skilled Irish bar person.