McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (36 page)

And I suppose he may have moved by now, but last time I was here, the Edge, the guitarist from U2, was living here, in the house where Oscar Wilde grew up. It was meant to be a big secret. But as soon as you arrived in town and went to the pub, the barman would say, ‘What’ll it be? By the way, do you know the Edge lives here?’ It was the same in the shop. ‘That’ll be ₤4.90. And the Edge lives here. Straight out that road. You can’t miss it.’

So, yesterday evening, on the ferry ride back from Inishmore, I decided I’d stop off in Cong. From there I could meander through Connemara up to Westport, then on to Sligo, and Donegal at last, for the penitential barefoot fasting and application of the red-hot holy leeches.

But it was an overcast evening as I came ashore, and I didn’t feel inclined to make the spectacular journey up to Cong in the gloom. As I was manoeuvring the Tank out of the car park, a fella I’d seen on the boat came across.

‘You’re not heading for Galway, are ya?’

‘I don’t know where I’m heading, but it won’t be Galway. I think I need to find somewhere to stay.’

‘Sure, your best bet would be Spiddal, there’s loads of places there.’

‘Where’s Spiddal?’

‘It’s on the road to Galway.’

So I was heading to Galway after all.

He was a young man with dark hair, brown eyes and a tartan holdall. He said he goes out to the islands whenever he can because he works for an estate agent in Galway, and he hates it. So, I wonder, are there still property bargains to be had?

‘You’d still find places up in Connemara, but you might find it hard not speaking Irish. The Germans buy lots of places, but they sell them again soon enough.’

He told me about some clients of his, two gay German guys, who spent two years doing up a little cottage outside Galway, until it was just perfect. Then they decided Ireland wasn’t really for them after all, and put it on the market. One of them was a photographer, and he presented the agent with a handsome portfolio of pictures of the property, and a video.

‘We’ve a lady on our books who’s been working as a housekeeper for a priest, but the priest’s died. She’s looking for somewhere small, and she’s very house-proud, you know, very fastidious. So I figure maybe this place could be right for her. So, I give her the details, and the video, and tell her to get in touch if she wants to go and take a look. Drop me anywhere here now. This is Spiddal.’

I pulled over to the side of the road and turned the engine off while he finished his story.

‘Next day, she’s back, and she’s angry. Won’t even talk to me. She’ll only talk to the auld woman who does the photocopying. Turns out that the video’—he was laughing now—‘the video had been used before.’

Oh no.

‘So there’s the video of the house like, all nice, and when that ends it’s, you know, fuzzy white snow, so she gets up to turn it off…’

Dear God, no. And her a priest’s housekeeper too.

‘…and this porno film comes on. Gay stuff. The real thing, like. And it’s halfway through so it’s really into the action. She went mental.’

He opened the door and climbed out.

‘Thanks for the ride. There are places to stay all along here and some more B&Bs up that road on the left by the pub. She’s decided she’d prefer a flat now. Good luck.’

I’d been through Spiddal before on the way out to the ferry from Galway. It’s a pretty little village on the shore of Galway Bay, with just a couple of ‘Cambio’ and ‘Wechsel’ signs to indicate it’s now an international hot spot. I found a B&B that, disappointingly, had no colourful landlady with multiple eccentricities. There was just a quiet young man who showed me out to a comfortable room in a bland annex and gave me a key without asking my name.

I soon found an old pub that smelled of new wood. It had just been renovated and enlarged and fitted with new plasterboard ceilings with those inset fish-eye lights. On a night like this, in high season, it looked like a licence to print money. In one corner ten, and I counted ’em, ten musicians sat in a circle playing two flutes, two fiddles, a harmonica, a bodhran, a guitar, a mandolin, a squeeze-box and a tin whistle. When a traditional session is good, it swings, like jazz. These people were good.

I stood at the bar and watched the usual round-up of nationalities revelling in the atmosphere. The bar staff, dressed in matching polo shirts bearing the place’s name, were speaking English to customers, but Irish among themselves. I tried to pick out local people in the crowd, and soon realised that they were doing the same. It struck me as the perfect way of reaping the benefits that tourism can bring, while retaining a local culture, a scene, a network of friendships and gossip on which outsiders cannot impinge, even when they’re in the same room. It was like watching two parallel universes, both happy with their lot.

A woman came up to the bar to buy a big round. She was wearing a T-shirt that said: ‘Connor O’Neill’s Traditional Irish Pub. Ann Arbor. Michigan’. Next to her, a big ruddy-cheeked guy with hairy ears, who I took to be the owner, was rabbiting away to an old couple who were wearing too many coats for the time of year. When he paused to take a drink, Ann Arbor touched him on the arm.

‘Excuse me? I really find your accent very interesting, but it’s kinda difficult for me to understand. Which part of Ireland are you from?’

‘I was speaking Irish, love.’

Back in my room I decided to watch a bit of TV, but there wasn’t one, so I listened to the radio instead.

‘Hi, I’m Boy George. If, like me, you’re slightly over thirty…’

You what?

‘So were the eighties a glamorous period, or just a load of people messing around with their mum’s mascara?’

No one cares, George. We’re in Connemara.

‘So remember, Premier Direct, cheaper car insurance for the over thirties.’

It’s true. I heard it. Celebs do these ads if they think they can get away with it and no one they know will hear it. A little while later, Bryan Ferry came on advertising Athlete’s Foot Powder, but I was fast asleep by then, so I missed it.

Next morning I drove west along Galway Bay, then north into Connemara. Outside Casla, I stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker, a New Zealand woman with a sunny disposition and more freckles than I’ve ever seen.

‘Great kaah,’ she said. ‘My dad had one of these. A but noisy though, usn’t ut?’

Statistics show that New Zealanders are the most travelled nation on the planet, as no one else is that keen to go 13,000 miles for a bar job. Vicki was travelling on her own and sleeping in a tent. She’d been away from New Zealand for five years, but this was her first time in Ireland. I asked her where she was going next.

‘I dunno. What I really need is a laundromat, and access to the unternet. You don’t know if there are any cyber cafés out here, do you?’

We drove through some of the most wonderful scenery in Ireland, following silver streams through wild and deserted mountain valleys. Stems of fluffy white bog cotton sprouted from the peat on either side of the road. The sun flitted in and out of high cloud, creating the constant interplay of light and shadow on hillside that is one of the delights of the landscape of the west of Ireland, when it isn’t lashing it down. I dropped her outside the Sheep and Wool Museum in Leenane. Maybe they’d have a cyber café. On the laundromat front though, I was completely stumped.

As you enter Cong from the Leenane road, you encounter one of the many bizarre features that give the area a rather spooky quality. You’d have no way of knowing this, though. You’d think you were just crossing a bridge over a pretty little pool next to the petrol station and the supermarket. In fact, this is the Rising of the Waters, a unique natural phenomenon in which the waters of Lough Mask disappear into underground streams for three miles before bursting out here, where they sometimes overflow and transform the main road into a duck pond. A few yards further on, the flow of water disappears once more into Poll Tuaithfil—the Pool of the Turning Waters—to emerge miles away in the vast expanse of Lough Corrib. These weird underground aqueducts provide poetic, if not scientific, corroboration for the many local legends with subterranean connections.

All of which is a great reason for visiting the village, as I suppose is the fact that
The Quiet Man
was filmed here. In case you didn’t know this, there’s a
Quiet Man
pub as you approach the village, and a
Quiet Man
coffee shop, and a
Quiet Man
hostel in the centre. Murphy’s Store played the part of Pat Cohan’s bar in the film and, though it’s still a shop, the recently painted sign now says; ‘Pat Cohan—Bar’. A card advertises: ‘Boat Trips arranged from Steven who was in the film
The Quiet Man
’. You’d want to wear a lifejacket, as the film was shot in 1951.

I arrived late in the afternoon and set about finding somewhere to stay. And this is what has put me in such a bad mood, as I sit here waiting for my main course to arrive. Hang on, here it is. So that’s what Mexican Potatoes are like. Christ, there are chunks of watermelon in it. And three grapes. You can see why tortillas would be so popular over there.

First, I went to two B&Bs with ‘Vacancy’ signs in the window. ‘A single? Sorry, we’re full.’ I decided to treat myself to the hotel on the main street, and in return got a big smile from the man at reception.

‘Do you have any rooms?’

‘Indeed, we do. How many of you are there?’

‘Just me.’

‘Ah no, sorry. Full.’

The ageing English hippy behind the counter at the hostel interrupted me before I could finish my sentence with, ‘Nothing at all’ and looked pleased about it. He had a supercilious smirk that said, ‘I’ve got a thriving business and you haven’t even got a bed for the night, you loser’; or perhaps I was becoming paranoid by then. If so, it was with some justification. At a two-star hotel, at six in the evening, the proprietor stared at me through narrowed eyes.

‘I have a room but I’d have to charge you a lot of money.’

‘Okay. How much?’

‘It’s a big double room, see.’

‘How much?’

There was a pause, while he weighed me up.

‘Sixty pounds.’

As I went through the door he was shouting after me, ‘It’s big enough for a family, you know.’

I suppose you expect to be Killarnied in Killarney, but not in a little village of 300 people. Mind you,
The Quiet Man
was filmed here. Have I mentioned that?

Just outside town is Ashford Castle, formerly the home of the Guinness family and now a luxury hotel. Believe it or not, bits of
The Quiet Man
were filmed there, so rooms start at ₤140 a night. There’s a uniformed guard, and a Checkpoint Charlie to keep riff-raff out, though they can pay two quid to go in and stare. I headed out of town in the other direction.

‘All rooms en-suite’ said the sign outside a massive, new, lonely house with some freshly constructed standing stones in the garden. A man took me upstairs to a small cupboard, kitted out with a dwarf’s bed and sink.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’

‘Down at the end of the corridor.’

‘But the sign says “All rooms en-suite”.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yeah, well, it’s just a single.’