McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (4 page)

The display is simple and dignified. Go through a gate off the lane and you find the wall bases and floor of the house the Collins family built and moved into at Christmas 1900. It was burned down by the British Black and Tans under Captain A. E. Percival on 7 April 1921. There’s a photo of Collins beside the burned-out remains, looking as if he means business.

I found an interview recently with Jack Ryan, a ninety-eight-year-old IRA contemporary of Collins. Percival, it seems, was hated in West Cork. He had a particular fondness for taking early morning drives through the countryside in his open-topped touring car, taking pot shots at farm workers in the fields who, he said, ‘had no stake in the country’.

While fleeing from British troops after an abortive arms run, Ryan was confronted in a field, man to man, by the hated Percival.

He describes the scene: ‘I always carried two guns, hidden with my arms folded, so I could have my fingers on the triggers, ready. So I pulled out both of them, but one of them didn’t go off. The firing pin had broken, so I let him have it with my left-hand gun, and down he went.’

Ryan escaped, but Percival, thanks to a chain-mail vest under his tunic, was simply knocked out.

The ninety-eight-year-old ruefully concludes: ‘I wanted to get that bastard so badly, and it’s to my eternal regret that I didn’t.’

A short way from the ruin is Collins’s actual birthplace, a very basic structure which became a farm building after the family moved into the new house, when Michael was ten. Born in 1890, he was the eighth of eleven children. He went to school in Clonakilty, which must have been a bit of a hike. From the age of fifteen he spent nine years in London, working in the British Savings Bank, in stockbroking, and the civil service, before coming home and taking part in the 1916 Easter Rising, for which he was interned in Wales. He went on to lead the volunteers of the IRA, and to negotiate personally the flawed and contentious Home Rule settlement with the British in 1921. He was killed in an ambush in the Civil War in 1922, on a roadside in West Cork. A small information display tells you the bare facts, in English and Irish, before concluding: ‘Let the rest remain to the historians.’

It’s a tranquil spot, and long may the tour buses remain in Killarney instead of here. There’s no traffic, no admission charge, no refreshments available, no headphones or guidebooks or photos of Liam Neeson in the movie; just three or four bare stone benches on which to sit and contemplate, if you wish.

I lean over the wall to chat with the simple Irish countryman next door, who turns out to be English—a Geordie, from Newcastle in the north-east. He says that, apart from a brief flurry of interest in the weeks after the film was released, few people come, He and his wife have been living here for two years. His dad came from nearby, and though he himself had grown up and spent all his life on Tyneside, he’s always felt more at home here. He turns and looks at me.

‘Do you know what I love about the Irish?’

I shake my head.

‘The way they don’t seem to be after your money. Everyone else in the world is. But the Irish just don’t care. They just want to know everything about you instead. I love it.’

So there we are. Two Englishmen who want to be Irish, standing in the spring sunshine at a shrine to a republican hero. He’s bought a house next to it, for God’s sake. I ask him did he realise that Collins went to school in the same town where the bass player from the Jimi Hendrix Experience plays in a pub band, and he concedes that he didn’t, but agrees that it certainly is a small world. I make a mental note to pop a memo through to the tourist board pointing this out. They could do a pamphlet: Michael Collins—the Hendrix Connection. (‘Scuse me while I kiss the Blarney Stone.’)

I bid Collins’s Geordie neighbour farewell, and set off to look for a stone circle called Bohonagh, described in a scholarly tome I’m reading as ‘perhaps the finest circle now standing in West Cork’. Cork is extremely rich in these ancient monuments, with more than 300 of them in the west of the county alone. However, I’ve been warned that relatively few of them have official public access or are marked on maps; the majority are away out of sight on some farmer’s land, and may only be viewed at the landowner’s discretion. I have a rough map showing Bohonagh to be somewhere just north of the Rosscarbery road, within a few miles of the Collins house; but if it is, my Geordie friend hasn’t heard of it.

I head north up some lanes with grass growing up the middle of them, always a sure sign that you’re going the wrong way, whatever it is you’re trying to find. I soon reach a crossroads. A woman of about sixty is standing next to her near-mint-condition Austin 1100, which she has parked inconspicuously in the middle of the road. She smiles and walks across as I pull up and get out of the car.

Now, if you’re going to go travelling in Ireland, it’s important you know the correct way to ask somebody for directions. What you
don’t
do is abruptly say, ‘Excuse me! Could you tell me the way to…?’ This is an English technique, the subtext of which is: ‘I’m interrupting you here in a fairly clumsy way in order to elicit a necessary fact, but otherwise this transaction is of no value and will give no pleasure. Go on, tell me then.’

The preferred approach in Ireland is to turn the encounter into a social occasion, on a par with what goes on when two strangers meet and get chatting at a party or wedding reception. A tangential preamble is essential; something along the lines of, ‘Ah, that’s a great hedge you’re trimming’, or ‘Sure, it’s a glorious day’, especially if it isn’t. Large quantities of personal information will then be exchanged, in the course of which the directions you are seeking may or may not emerge. Some of the best conversations you will have in Ireland may happen in this way.

I was once travelling in County Clare with a wonderful man called John Moriarty, a Christian mystic who is, by the way, convinced that I do carry the genetic memories of my Irish ancestors, and am therefore genuinely at home here. We were on the edge of the wilderness known as the Burren, looking for one of the ancient holy wells of Ireland, St Colman’s Well. We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up to be a top travel experience.

On the road ahead of us, a man was walking. No buildings were visible for miles in any direction, so it was difficult to understand where he might be walking from or to. He must have been seventy, and was dressed in a farm labourer’s tweed jacket, shiny with ordure and held around his waist with a length of string. He wore an old flat cap that may once have been shot at by Captain A. E. Percival, and the look of a man who had never been pampered. ‘Ah, look,’ said John. ‘A bachelor.’

We pulled over and John walked across to him—none of this wind-your-window-down-and-bark-an-enquiry nonsense. They then embarked on a wide-ranging discussion that took in meteorology, natural history, anatomy, theology and chiropody, before John deftly slipped in the crucial question, for all the world as if it were an afterthought.

‘We’re looking for St Colman’s Well.’

‘Ah, yes. Ah, yes.’

‘Do you know it then?’

‘Sure, I do. I do.’

‘Could you tell us how to find it so?’

Pause. ‘What country’s it in?’

So as the woman approaches the repmobile, I’m aware of the social etiquette. But will I be able to pull it off? She opens brilliantly.

‘I’m just waiting for my daughter.’

Of course. So that’s why she’s parked in the middle of a crossroads. She has a look that is at once both blank and intense, as if perhaps she’s spent too many years as a priest’s housekeeper. But I don’t let it get to me, and come back with details of my own family. We then banter about crops and such like for a while, until I sense that the moment is right. And then—ping! I’m in.

‘I was wondering if you might be able to give me some directions.’

‘Ah. Well, I’m afraid, you see, that I don’t live around here.’

‘Oh, I see. Where do you live, then?’

‘Over there.’

She points to a white farmhouse across some fields, on a hillside about a mile away.

‘Oh. Right. Well, anyway…’

I produce the scholarly tome and show her a sketch of the Bohonagh circle, but it’s clear she doesn’t recognise it, even though she must have lived her whole life within eight or ten miles of it, according to the complex family history she eagerly provides. But the name itself rings a bell, though she says there’s also another place that sounds similar, and it might be that. Or not. Eventually she suggests a route.

‘Go back a way below there, now. Go right, and right, and I think left. Do you know the Dunmanway road?’

I nod, and smile, and only I know that I mean ‘No’.

‘Well, you take that. And there’s an old tumbledown wreck of a pub there, and you turn away up the hill. It’s painted yellow. Or at least it was twenty years ago.’

Clueless, I head off politely, happy simply to put a few country miles between me and the Michael Collins birthplace. After driving for ten minutes, I round a bend, and suddenly find myself at the Michael Collins birthplace. The Geordie waves and smiles.

I immediately implement Plan B, which in this instance is to drive at random until something happens. It’s important to have a Plan B, especially when there’s no Plan A. After a few minutes, I find myself at a T-junction I don’t think I’ve passed before, though of course I can’t be certain. And there’s a pub—no name displayed, but almost certainly called McCarthy’s. Unfortunately, it’s shut. This is a difficult concept to grasp. I’ve never found a pub closed in Ireland before, and I’m not sure how to cope. Intellectually, I realise that the whole point of travel is to introduce you to the unknown, but emotionally I’m finding it difficult to deal with. I take a swig from my bottle of Virgin Mary mineral water, and consider my situation.

I’m lost, and the pub’s shut. It’s hard to see how things could much worse. But I’m determined not to be thwarted by these elusive stones. They have come to represent the moral high ground, and I am determined to attain it. I drive a few more miles round winding lanes, until I find a sign to Rosscarbery (‘Michael Collins birthplace—1 mile’). Then, within sight of the main road I’d left earlier in the day, my eye is caught by a bright yellow sign on a noticeboard at the entrance to a field.

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT THE OCCUPIER OF THIS PROPERTY EXCLUDES THE DUTY OF CARE TO ALL VISITORS.

NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY IS ALLOWED.

Inside the field, only about fifty yards away, but protected from me by a gate, barbed-wire and an electric fence, sits a huge cromlech—a boulder marking an ancient burial site. Above it, on the west of a hill, is the outline of an old ring fort. If I’ve got my bearings right, the place is called Templefaughnan, and Bohonagh can’t be far away. The tome tells me that St Fachtna, who is credited with bringing Christianity to this area in the sixth century, is reputed to have preached the gospel in this very field.

He wouldn’t have much joy if he came back today, mind you. Five modern bungalows guard the field in a protective semi-circle, in case the barbed-wire and the electricity aren’t enough to put you off. I think of scaling the gate for a closer look, but the thought of some beefy farmer lurking behind the net curtains, with ginger hair growing out of his ears and nostrils, just itching to exclude the duty of care to some trespassing English bastard, persuades me to drive on.

Round the first bend in the lane, opposite a bungalow with crazy-paved gateposts, is a roadside holy grotto. In marked contrast to the rugged, ancient boulder in the field, it looks as pristine as a gilt-framed picture of Daniel O’Donnell on a suburban convent mantelpiece. Either side of an altar-shaped slab stand the Virgin Mary and a chap I take to be St Fachtna himself, but who is a dead ringer for Willie Nelson. Country and western is popular out here, though, so you never know.

Searching for pagan stones in the midst of this Catholic iconography is making me feel like a devil worshipper who’s sneaked into St Peter’s and can’t find his way out. Suddenly, the lane sweeps sharply downhill towards a junction a couple of hundred yards away. As I change down and negotiate the slope, I look up, and there ahead of me, silhouetted against the horizon on the crest of the next hill, dominating the surrounding landscape, is Bohonagh.

But by the time I’ve descended to the junction, it’s gone. I drive along the road in both directions, but the stones can’t be seen from anywhere. To find them, you’ve got to know they’re up there, and know where to go. There’s no sign or marker, so people must drive within a hundred yards of them all the time and not have a clue that they’re there.

But now I know they’re uphill, and just two fields away.

My way is barred by a wide ditch full of blackthorn, which is of course a sacred bush, though that isn’t much consolation just now. But thirty yards away is a barred gate, and not a yellow placard in sight, so I stride up to it with a spring in my step. Then, more threatening than any official sign, I spot the fragment of ragged brown cardboard tied to the gate with baling twine. A message is printed on it in Biro, in a crabby hand that lacks generosity of spirit:

DANGER!

BULLS!!

DO NOT ENTER

Hmm.

I’ve never been one to mess with bulls, particularly in a Catholic country. Spain, for example, is a delightful place, but I’ve always been mystified by the nationwide passion for taking the piss out of bulls. Sometimes it’s a prelude to killing them, of course, but often it’s just for the crack.

I have a much-prized piece of home video shot a few years ago at the fiesta in Jávea, on the Costa Blanca, where they let the bulls run through the narrow back streets of the town before emerging into the main square. As the first bulls enter the square, a local sex god in tight black trousers and a puffy-sleeved white shirt unbuttoned to the scrotum leaps out in front of the lead bull, grimacing and pouting, waggling his arse, and making what I take to be the Spanish equivalent of the wanker sign.

‘Wanker, eh?’ enquires the bull, lunging at him and penetrating his ribs with its horns in a fairly matter-of-fact manner. Sexgod is thrown abruptly to the ground as various spectators rush to his aid and shoo the baffled bull away. Two stewards run in. One picks him up, dusts him down, staunches the wound, and asks if he’s all right. He nods; at which point the other steward punches him in the face, presumably for taking the piss out of a bull in an unacceptably flamboyant manner. After all, without rules, society will collapse. As, indeed, does Sexgod, before being carried unconscious from the arena.