McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (23 page)

I walk along the main street, past a franchise for the surreally named fast food chain, Abrakebabra, and stop for a coffee in a meat and two veg café. Someone’s left a newspaper behind on the next table, and I find myself powerless to resist the pull of the headline.

PRIEST SUES CORPORATION OVER KNEE: ‘A priest who sued Cork Corporation for compensation because a fall in the street made it hard for him to kneel and genuflect, settled out of court yesterday.’

It sounds dodgy to me. I mean, the wear and tear on your average priest’s knees must be tremendous. They’re bound to be the first bits to go. If you bear that in mind, then there must be a fair chance the crafty old bugger took a dive hoping to get a big payday in court. Surprisingly, however, Cork Corporation’s barrister ignored this sure-fire line of argument and adopted a different and ultimately flawed strategy.

‘Defence complained that many members of the clergy continued with hip replacements, knee replacements and even the loss of a limb.’

Top work, MacRumpole. ‘If it please Your Honour, I refer the court to the previous case of Father O’Malley, who, Your Honour will recall, had both legs flattened like Sta-Prest slacks, after falling under a corporation steam roller. These days he says mass on a converted skateboard pulled along on a rope by two nuns, but he’s never asked for a penny from the corporation, so I don’t see why this whingeing eejit should get anything either.’

The paper says that the priest’s thinking of taking a holiday now he’s got his money from the council. As I sit reading about him, he may already be in Mykonos, having his nipples pierced.

Flicking through the paper, I’m astonished at the number of references to, or articles about, British media figures, like David Beckham, Posh Spice and the cast of
Coronation Street
. Perhaps most tellingly of all, there are references to ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair’, and ‘the House of Commons’; the prefix ‘British’ is not employed. An article also points out that twenty-one per cent of the Irish population now read the
News of the World
. Irish circulation of the
Sun
is also up twenty-three per cent in two years; and if you watch TV in pubs, hotels and guest-houses, you’ll quickly be aware how many people are ignoring local coverage in favour of British news, sports and soap operas on satellite. Ireland may be a self-confident, independent and booming country, but the accessibility and influence of British media and culture has never been greater. People should watch out. We’ve been in this game a long time. We don’t always need to send in the Paras.

Happily, there’s no cricket on the sports pages, but one headline does catch my eye. KILLARNEY RACES, it says, FIRST RACE TWO THIRTY. Suddenly, I have a plan. I pay my bill, then find a deli, where I make my contribution to Ireland’s ₤10 billion budget surplus by investing in half a cooked chicken and a quarter of a bottle of champagne. All I need now is a ruined abbey.

I head for the Tank, which has been sitting unmolested on double yellow lines for the last day and a half. Out of force of habit I kneel down, like a priest with top-notch knees, and extrude a particularly mucky fistful of feathers. What are you meant to do with this stuff? I can’t just dump it in the gutter. It might give off fumes that will inhibit the growth of local children. Or maybe it’s carcinogenic. Perhaps I should pop it in a Jiffy bag and send it to Greenpeace. I get in the car and pull out into the path of a pony-and-trap-load of Koreans, who are shooting the shit out of everything that moves with four camcorders at once, and head south into the National Park.

On race day Thackeray visited Muckross, a few miles south of town, so I reckon I may as well do the same. When he was there the English landowner, Mr Herbert, was building ‘a fine house in the Elizabethan style from which you command the most wonderful rich views of the lake’. Today, the house is a major tourist attraction, drawing large crowds and performing the useful social function of preventing Killarney itself from exploding through sheer volume of people. As I arrive, a very tall woman in pink, and a very short bloke in a cabaret costume, are having their wedding photographs taken. Standing on the steps of the house, surrounded by friends, family and a couple of ill-considered bridesmaids, they are being heckled by the official photographer, a Dublin wideboy somebody must have picked out of the
Yellow Pages
with a hatpin. Dressed in a blue Max Miller suit with a vivid green check, early Pink Floyd tie with matching pocket hankie, and two-tone Doc Martens, he is marshalling his subjects with a non-stop stream of good-natured banter.

‘Jesus Christ, will you move in at the edges? Can you get hold of that bloody kid? Could you not smile? It’s meant to be the happiest feckin’ day of yer lives. Where’s that bloody priest gone now? Ah, hello, Father, just get on the end of the line there, would you?’

It costs to go in the house, so I don’t, but you can wander in the grounds for free, so I do. Thackeray loved the place, his only regrets being that, like me, he had no one to enjoy it with, and, unlike me, he hadn’t brought lunch.

Depend on it, for show places and the due enjoyment of scenery, that distance of cold chickens and champagne is the most pleasing perspective one could have. I would have sacrificed a mountain or two for the above…

So in homage to Thackeray, I sit myself down on a mossy bank under a tree with a spectacular view of the lake, and get out the cold chicken and rapidly warming champagne. It’s beautiful, expansive, landscaped parkland, with an outrageously picturesque lake as its centrepiece, and it does nothing for me. The heart isn’t pumping, the hairs aren’t rising, and the tears aren’t going to well up without at least half a bottle of supermarket gin. Somehow the view feels all wrong: Anglo order imposed on Irish chaos. One of the distinctive qualities of the English landscape is that over the centuries virtually every acre has been designed. The hand of man is everywhere, and you either like that or you don’t. But here, in the elemental west of Ireland, a manicured and cultivated oil painting is the last thing I want to be walking around in. I finish most of the chicken, and all the champagne, but I’d have been happier with an apple and a bottle of water on an old rock up a wild mountainside. A couple walk past arm in arm, but break off when his cellphone rings. I get up and head back to the car park.

Going through the woods along the side of the lake, I stop and chat with a large, tweedy Austrian lady who is carrying a walking-stick and a bag into which she is putting litter. I ask her how long she’s worked at the house. She says she’s on her holidays. International Litter Vigilante, it says on her passport.

The wedding party have moved on, to be replaced by a milling throng of Americans who can’t find their tour bus, and so are panicking in case they die. On a wall nearby, a dozen or so Irish building workers are eating packed lunches and enjoying the show. It could have been much the same when Thackeray was here. The house was still under construction, so there must have been plenty of grimy labourers stripped to the waist like these lads and having a good old laugh at the antics of the Victorian tourists, naively taking holiday pictures with their easels and paint-brushes.

A little way back up the road to Killarney I stop at Muckross Abbey, because Thackeray gave it such a good review.

The prettiest little bijou of a ruined abbey ever seen—a little chapel with a little chancel, a little cloister, a little dormitory [he’s coming across as a little camp, don’t you think?] and in the midst of the cloister a wonderful huge yew tree which darkens the whole place.

I walk a few hundred yards from the car park up a tarmacked track. Ponies and traps driven by men deemed too sinister-looking to operate on the streets of Killarney, and God knows that’s saying something, are on hand for the hard of walking. Massive rooks are dining on an abundance of horse shit.

The fifteenth-century abbey is still there, just as he described it, except that…at first I’m not sure. The yew tree’s there, sure enough, a few hundred years old now; it’s just that…there’s no roof or anything, and it’s clearly a ruin, so why does it look so…new? I love my ruined abbeys and bits of old stone, several times a day if possible. I love their mosses, their patina, their lichen and sense of timeless decay, but these rocks look as pristine as the stone-built B&Bs on the edge of town. It’s like those old banks and insurance offices and municipal buildings that have been cleaned up in Glasgow and Manchester and Leeds.

They haven’t, have they?

Yes, they have. A charming young man conducting a visitor survey from a nearby shed confirms it. ‘There’s a restoration programme going on. It’s just been sandblasted.’

Sandblasted? I can see that, for an urban building covered in Victorian soot, sandblasting can take things back to how they used to be. But for a rugged walled church by a lake in County Kerry, that’s suffered from nothing but fresh air and Cromwell’s soldiers for 500 years, it’s an act of vandalism. Victorian soot had a limited sphere of influence. It never made it this far.

As I drive back towards town and the first race of the day, the radio phone-ins are in full swing. A woman calls in on her cellphone.

‘So where is it you’re calling from Marie?’

‘I’m in the car, on me way to Pamplona.’

‘Pamplona? In Spain? ‘So, how’s it going?’

‘A bit hot, like. But it’s going great. The kids have been strapped in the back since a week last Tuesday. Me husband has to get out every hundred miles or so and turn’em so they don’t get bed sores.’

‘Good for him. So will he be running with the bulls when you get there?’

‘He will indeed, yeah, God bless him, we’ll all be watching and praying for him. He’ll be running with them first thing tomorrow. Mind you, I haven’t told him that yet.’

Thackeray reckoned that Killarney racetrack ‘is really one of the most beautiful spots that ever was seen, the lake and mountains lying along two sides of it and of course visible from all’. It’s the same today. The only suggestion that there’s a town nearby is a church steeple rising behind the trees. It’s turned into a warm, sunny day with occasional showers, or a showery, overcast day with occasional sunshine, depending on your point of view. The runners for the first race, the two thirty, are already coming out on to the track as I go through the turnstile behind an elderly lady in a big hat and trouser suit, who asks the guy taking the money, ‘Will I do? Do you think I have a chance?’ She’s either looking for a man, or running in the three thirty.

At the end of an astonishingly long line of bookies is a chap called McCarthy. I go straight over and put ₤5 at five to one on a horse whose name closely resembles a TV executive I’d like to see run two and a half miles jumping fences while a fierce little Irish bloke whipped him. My horse leads for the whole of the first circuit, then appears to be pulled backwards on invisible wires, and comes in last with something to spare. I resolve to spend the rest of the afternoon ignoring the races and watching the people, as Thackeray seems to have done.

The sight of so much happy laziness did one good to look on nor did the honest fellows seem to weary of this amusement. Hours passed on…but the finest peasantry in Europe never budged from their posts and continued to indulge in talk, indolence and conversation.

He was also lucky enough to witness a fight; though to the modern reader it sounds like something that might go on in Madam Sin’s Dungeon of Pain just off the Tottenham Court Road. ‘The great flagellator rode up to the groom, lifted him gracefully off his horse into the air, and on to the ground, and when there administered to him a severe and merited fustigation.’

Things have calmed down a bit since then; although between the first and second races I spot a priest in a dog-collar and flat tweed cap putting on a bet; a transvestite falling off her four-inch lilac stilettos; a jazz band playing the theme from the
Benny Hill Show
; a woman in an Armani suit eating two scoops of mashed potato and a fried egg with a plastic fork off a paper plate; and a stall selling off-the-peg prescription reading glasses for a fiver a time. The crowd is split fifty-fifty between local families and couples out for a jolly, and the serious racing fraternity. I don’t see any Americans, but there’s a sprinkling of young foreign-language students with those logo-covered backpacks they never take off. There’s also a handful of ‘posh English wankers’ as a barman describes a group of champagne-guzzling punters who, I have to say, look like posh English wankers to me.