Round Ireland in Low Gear (16 page)

Ten days later, on 25 August, during which attendances at the Grotto averaged five thousand a day despite cold and wet weather, three thousand people recited the rosary and sang hymns. Three quarters of these said that they saw some movement, though one, a steward in charge of mustering the crowds, said he was ‘damn slow to admit it’. With the onset of winter the number of visitors dramatically declined, but the phenomena showed no signs of diminishing.

What was remarkable was the variety of ways in which the statue was seen to move: ‘sometimes in a series of inelegant jerks, rocking and quivering, as one might expect during an earth tremor’ (by Dennis Barnett, a reporter for the
Sunday Tribune
); sometimes swaying; sometimes constantly moving. Others saw the face transformed into that of Christ or St Joseph, Padre Pio or a Jewish rabbi. The statue was also seen to have a glint in its eyes, to gesture with the arms, to twist its body, to smile and look around, to open and close its eyes, to move from side to side, to attempt a genuflection, or to be about to fall.

And what of the demeanour of those present, so many of whom had witnessed something or other? No observer noticed any signs
of ecstasy or delirium, in fact the reverse. When one of the girls who first saw the statue move on 22 July was asked what she was thinking of when the incident occurred, she replied, ‘If I was thinking of anything it was about the good time we’d had in Cleo’s Disco in Bandon the night before.’

However, there was a good deal of disorganized opposition to the idea of a moving statue at Ballinspittle, the silliest of which came from the government press secretary Peter Prendegast, who was quoted as saying, ‘three quarters of the country is laughing heartily at Ballinspittle’, which was one thing it certainly wasn’t doing. Anything more likely to rally support for the statue would be difficult to imagine. More solid criticism came from the local builder who had laid the foundation stone thirty-one years previously, Mick O’Reilly. ‘It’s as solid as a rock. The actual statue isn’t moving. It’s an illusion, but it looks like a calling to prayer to counter the ills of the world.’ And on the evening of 3 October 1985 the statue was attacked by two men armed with hammers and hatchets, while a third took photographs and exhorted the visitors to the shrine not to ‘adore false statues’. They were members of a Californian Christian sect. The statue was severely damaged, but was repaired by Maurice O’Donnell, and on 11 November it was lifted back into position in the Grotto to cries of ‘Three Cheers for Our Lady in Heaven!’

It was still not yet dark, and having failed to elicit any movement from the statue we dawdled up the road in the direction of Kinsale for about half a mile before turning back. What with the rain hissing down it was a thoroughly lowering evening, and not one on which one would have expected anything of the statue, unless one knew of its previous outstanding form in bad weather. When we got back to the Grotto the three people who had been there had left and there was no one else present.

It was by now quite dark and the only illumination was that shed by the eleven electric lights which made up the halo. They strongly lit the upturned face, less strongly the upper part of the body, and left the lower parts of the statue in almost complete darkness. As we knelt there before it I prayed that I wouldn’t see it move. I didn’t want it to move, not because I didn’t believe it really could move – whoever or whatever made the world and the universe would not have much trouble activating a statue – but because I didn’t think it ought to move for me. Nevertheless, just as during the war I had gazed out fixedly into the darkness of the night so many times while acting as a sentry, eventually imagining I saw movement, so I gazed at the statue of the Mother of God in Ballinspittle, waiting for a sign. And suddenly, when my eyes had begun to ache with the effort of concentration, it began to move, not just backwards and forwards, but from side to side. It was extraordinary, but no more extraordinary in its way than seeing movement taking place in the darkness as a sentry, and sometimes actually shouting, ‘Who goes there!’ I looked away, looked again, and it wasn’t moving any more.

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said to Wanda, and told her what I’d seen.

‘Some people have all the luck,’ she said. The trouble was I didn’t feel lucky, nor did I feel excited, or spiritually uplifted, or anything.

After this we stayed on for a while but I didn’t see it move again, nor did Wanda. I felt rather awful having seen it, not even being a Catholic, but I was not by any means the first non-Catholic to see it. So far as one can make out the Ballinspittle statue favoured no particular creed: it was equally likely to oblige for a Mussulman.

Back in Ballinspittle things didn’t look so good from the point of view of food, so we drank hot whiskey and water in our bedroom and then sallied out into the rain, bought sardines, cooked pork and soda bread and ate them in Hurley’s pub in the company of
four friendly men who made room for us by the fire, which the landlord kept stoked with a mixture of what is known as slack (small coal) and cement – a strange mixture, but it burned well, and was apparently very economical. There was also a very drunk, carefully dressed old man left over from a funeral that had taken place that afternoon, who was still on his pins, rocking backwards and forwards, preparatory to leaving the premises. ‘Moike, are you practithing to take on the stathue, now?’ one of the others called out after him as he moved out into the night. No one present was anything but reserved about the various abilities the statue displayed, and all of them were extremely modest about what they themselves had seen. No one talked about the phenomena in a religious context, but rather as if they had been on parade, as it were, in its presence.

The next morning was much warmer, in fact it was muggy, but it still continued to rain. We had breakfast in the front room which was very bright and full of religious pictures and pictures of the family and lots of shiny athletic trophies which they had won and were still continuing to win at school. Breakfast was extensive, with lots of porridge, and while we ate Noreen O’Donovan told us how, until the previous year, she had been crippled with arthritis and had been in agony, hardly able to walk – a terrible affliction, especially for a woman with a large family, but not altogether surprising in a place as damp as Ballinspittle appeared to be. ‘Then one day,’ she said, ‘there was an excursion to Knock and all the way there in the coach I was in terrible pain, but whatever it was, the bumping in the coach or Knock itself, I was cured. I’d love to go to Lourdes in August but there isn’t much chance of that.’

Just as we were going to load the bikes up she suddenly said, ‘Would you like to see Our Lady of Fatima? She’s away down at Mrs Pat Bowen’s place. It wouldn’t take long. She’s only there for a week.’ So we set off in the ancient O’Donovan family motor.

Mrs Pat Bowen was Secretary of what everyone round here called the ‘
Com
-it-tee’. She was young, dark-haired, attractive and very devout and she herself had seen the face of Our Lord shining through that of the statue; and I wouldn’t have liked to have been the one who suggested to her that what she had seen was anything less than supernatural. In her front parlour, surrounded by burning candles, was a facsimile statue of Our Lady of Fatima, who on 13 May 1917 appeared to three peasant children, only one of whom survived beyond the age of twelve, at what was to become the Lourdes of Portugal. Fatima attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year, both in May and on 13 August, when peasants from all over Portugal take advantage of the end of the wheat and barley harvests to visit the shrine, as do parties from the towns, some arriving by coach, others with donkeys, their panniers loaded with provisions, to camp out in the stony surroundings of the shrine.

This particular statue, which was of painted plaster, had been provided by an organization known as the Blue Army of Fatima, based in Cork, which supplies what are known as ‘pilgrims’ statues’ (statues that have been blessed by the Pope) on a weekly basis, from Wednesday to the following Wednesday. The only proviso is that the statue must never be left alone, and indeed there was a lady kneeling before it when we arrived. It was an impressive thing to see in someone’s front parlour, surrounded by candles, and we, too, knelt while Mrs Bowen recited part of the rosary.

Afterwards Noreen took us on a tour which included a visit to the lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, from which nothing at all could be seen in the fog and rain, and for a drive along the shores of Courtmacsherry Bay, where her husband, who had retired from managing a creamery at the age of forty-six due to ill health, had his daily bathe. Looking at the icy seas thundering onto it, I decided that wild seahorses would not have dragged me
into them. After this we said goodbye with genuine regret to this good, kindly, humorous woman who, with her eight splendid children, her faith and her courageous endurance of what in Britain would have been regarded as poverty, had all the virtues that the Catholic Church in Ireland, run by men who often have only the haziest idea what they are demanding, demands of its women.

What did the sudden reoccurrence of such phenomena as moving and speaking statues and visions, all in the space of a single year, signify? Were they of supernatural origin or were they, as suggested by a team of psychologists from University College, Cork, an optical illusion? When the savants came up with this explanation there was widespread belief that the Bishop of Cork had persuaded them to do so in order to stop the whole thing getting out of hand, presumably pursuing the same train of thought as that of the vicar in Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline and Fall
, who observes that a lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.

Was it something to do with the really enormous changes that had taken place in the everyday lives of the Irish, especially in the rural parts of Ireland, since the early 1960s, when we had last been there? During those twenty-odd years there had been an economic boom which had fizzled out completely, but which had changed the face of Ireland: whereas previously it was commonplace to see people walking many miles along the roads on their way to work, to school or to market, now most people had cars, or knew people who would give them a lift; tractors had come into widespread use on the farms and many people had stopped planting potatoes, as it was easier, though much more expensive, to buy them in a shop, imported from Holland. In the same way attractive but insalubrious cottages were abandoned for those ugly but comfortable bungalows. During this time TV became
widespread and gradually destroyed the habit of conversation. The price of Guinness had soared, to £1.50 Irish a pint by the time we left Ireland, putting it out of the reach of the old and unemployed. Many of the bars were now called ‘lounges’ and were as flash as their counterparts in the United States. Taxation was crippling, except for the farmers who made up 25 per cent of a population the younger and more talented of whom were draining away overseas, like water from a leaky barrel. Since our last visit, we felt the Irish had certainly lost a good deal of their sense of humour, a priceless attribute that many Western peoples have never really possessed, and one that depended on their ability to turn a unique phrase, something that the ever-increasing use of what might be described as English Irish of the sort now taught in schools and heard widely on television was, presumably, largely responsible for.

Looking back on our travels in Ireland in January 1986, it would be almost impossible to credit the weather we encountered, if I did not have before me as I write the Irish Meteorological Services
summary of the weather for that period. There was only one place, Rosslare, where less than twenty rain days were recorded and even that managed to come up with a very creditable 97mm of total rainfall for nineteen of them; its best or worst day, according to whether you are a subscriber to the
Guinness Book of Records
or simply want to go cycling, registered an awe-inspiring 17.8mm. Snow, hail and sleet were frequent, as were gales, particularly on the coast where we were. According to the weathermen the depth of snow never exceeded 2cm, which is simply not true. We saw a 6-foot snowman on the Dingle Peninsula. On 29 January the temperature in south-east Mayo fell to –7.1 centigrade.

In the second of two periods of gale force winds – of up to 70 knots in some places – we got as far as the west side of the Beara Peninsula, part of which is in County Kerry, part in County Cork. On the first day out of Ballinspittle we skirted the estuaries of rivers, some of them too small to be named on our maps, passing sandbanks and villages of identical cottages painted in brilliant turquoise, imperial yellow and
sangue de boeuf.
At the head of the Arigadeen estuary, at Timoleague, what at a distance looked like a battleship cast up on the shore turned out to be the gaunt, grey, extensive ruins of a Franciscan friary, smashed up not during the Reformation, which spared it, but by English soldiers on a visit in 1642, who found thousands of barrels of wine in its vaults.

Then into a region of marshy land further south and west, with a few poor farms and cottages. Lost in this wilderness, I tried to ask the way at a cottage surrounded by electronic debris and savage dogs. With torn curtains and a long wire trailing out of the letter box like an unlit fuse it was difficult to believe that it was actually inhabited, but it must have been because a naked electric bulb was burning in its unimaginably horrible front parlour. No one answered the front door, though. It was a wet
Saturday afternoon and there was not a living soul on the roads; everyone was inside guarded by savage dogs rendered even more savage by not being allowed to watch TV. Finally I found a dogless farmyard with a man in it carrying a dung fork but when I approached him he, like all other Irish apparitions, simply faded away.

At dusk we came into Clonakilty, a town founded by Richard Boyle, the great effing Earl of Cork, passing a couple of tinkers’ caravans down on the foreshore and what was left of a bungalow given to them by the local council, after they had stripped off all the useful bits, so that it looked as if a shell had burst in it. From one of the caravans two tinker girls emerged, bound for a night out in Clonakilty, as smart as bandboxes. The rain was truly awful and we took refuge in a hotel with hat racks made from deer antlers and had tea while drying out among farm ladies and their daughters in for the shopping.

We stayed in a B and B kept by a truly formidable lady who had massed bands of relatives on the premises, and a maid to put coal on the fire, as if it was the 1930s, and woke up on Sunday to a dark scene: violent squalls were hurling themselves on Clonakilty from a sky the colour and consistency of ebony. Then suddenly it was clear, the orange street lights went out and everything was brilliant and rainwashed. As we went into the town we saw men standing on the corners reading the lubricious bits in the Sunday papers and houseproud women polishing their door knockers. While Wanda went to Mass in a church with a tall, slender spire, I hung about outside, studying the graves of eleven priests, all buried cosily together in a single vault, in company with other male black sheep who interpreted attending Mass as standing outside in the churchyard. Perhaps it was our imagination, but we didn’t feel that people were as friendly here in Clonakilty as we were accustomed to.

We then embarked on what seemed a long, long ride (in reality only seven miles) up endless hills and down to Castle Freke, the wondrous and extensive ruins of a house built in 1780 by Sir John Evans-Freke and finally abandoned in 1952, with castellations, square and polygonal towers and a portcullis that still functioned. Gutted by fire in 1910, it was rebuilt in time for the coming-of-age ball given there in 1913 for the tenth Lord Carbery.

Although now almost completely hidden from view by encroaching vegetation on the gatehouse side, where the portcullis still hung, there were still long, magnificent views across the wooded demesne to the lighthouse on Galley Head, and westwards over Rosscarbery Bay. We followed the wall of the demesne, beautifully made with slates laid vertically, past entrance gates topped with what looked like whipped cream walnuts, down to the Bay itself, where the surf boomed on the sands, the air was filled with flying spume and there was a gimcrack motel with forty rooms with broken windows for sale, already an Irish ruin. Then to Rosscarbery, a small place above a spacious estuary with sandbanks covered with green veg, and reached by a causeway.

There were six pubs in and around its main square, which was only 100 yards long. We chose Nolan’s Lounge, the only one offering sustenance on a Sunday afternoon, which was jam-packed with people. Suddenly, as we were downing powdered mushroom soup and damp ham sandwiches (this was no
route des gastronomes
), the landlady got the message that the Garda was on the way (it now being long after closing time), the lights went out, and we found ourselves in the street still clasping uneaten sandwiches. Soon the pub was empty except for some stubborn old hardliners, quivering and quavering and dribbling, hoping they would be invisible in the gloaming. In the end the Garda never came. They had been right to hang on: there was rain and huge rainbows and on a long straight stretch of road an apocalyptic
wind – it had to be at least Force 10 – a blast of which literally blew Wanda off her bike and into a ditch, from which I rescued her crying with vexation.

Hereabouts in a deep valley, out of the terrible wind, was what was left of Coppinger’s Court, an ivy-clad seventeenth-century fortified house occupied by an amber-coloured donkey with eyes to match which was groaning away wanting sympathy, and a he-goat that didn’t want any. Then up a horrible hill past the Drombeg Stone Circle, Hut and Cooking Place that neither of us felt inclined to visit; then a lovely swoop down to Glandore Harbour, where we wanted to stay the night but found all the hotels were shut.

So out of Glandore, with the sun gone in, past a pretty Protestant church hidden among the trees with a tunnel leading up to it through solid rock, and along the shore of the inner estuary and past a bridge leading to Union Hall across the water, where Swift stayed in 1723 and liked so much that he wrote a Latin poem in praise of it: ‘Carberiae Rupes’, or ‘The Cliffs of Carbery’.

Leap, at the end of the estuary, also had six pubs within 100 yards, of which the biggest, the Leap Hotel, was bulging at the seams with members of the local hunt who had been having a Sunday meet and were all dressed up for it, and another party, equally dressed up, recovering from the effects of a funeral they had attended, sipping away like anything at Irish whiskey and hot water. By this stage both parties had become somewhat intermingled. In this hospitable place we each had two set teas with scones, two hot whiskeys with water, two high teas and more hot whiskeys and water, while an Irish group played and sang Irish airs. All this was served like lightning by Mrs Ann Sheahan, wife of the proprietor, and together with two bed and breakfasts came to just £25.

It poured all night and was still pitch dark when we woke, but
it cleared a bit later, when we took the road to Skibbereen, six miles to the west, at first uphill past gorsey tussocks, rocky outcrops and, to the right, little loughs. While we were exercising ourselves in this fashion a van passed us, the driver of which dropped a bundle of newspapers outside a small shop. A dog emerged, and having sniffed it and looked it over thoroughly in case it contained any pornography or contraceptive apparatus, none of which is well thought of in this part of the world, bore it back into the shop to be given a further going-over by the proprietor. The buildings on the outskirts of Skibbereen were rendered in bright turquoise, acid green, vivid yellow and orange. It was sale time: one shop had a close-out lot of Makita angle grinders on offer, but we did not allow them to detain us and pedalled on along the bank of the River Ilen en route for Schull, passing Abbeystrowry, an ivy-clad monastic cell built by the Cistercians, even in such weather beautiful and mysterious. The road was now beginning to traverse what were some of the poorest parts of Ireland, whose inhabitants had suffered the most terrible privations in the years of the Great Famine – more poor tussocky land with slatey-looking stone pushing up through it. Ahead of us now was Mount Gabriel, a bleak mountain, bare apart from the pale dome of some warning system on top of it; to the left fleeting views of a castle on Mannin Island, one of the 127 assorted rocks, islets and islands in Roaringwater Bay.

Schull (it means School) had a rocky foreshore, a small jetty which was in the process of being dug up, a fish factory and a pair of dank but commodious public lavatories which we both patronized, a positive treat after performing in the rain, as we usually found ourselves doing. Half mad with thirst we pedalled up its hilly main street past a pub which also sold coal and went in for undertaking, to the Bunratty Inn, Irish Pub of the Year 1983, at which we finally came to rest. The only other customer
was an ex-Fleet Air Arm navigator who had come to Schull to make arrangements for his wife’s ashes to be scattered here, the place where she had been born.

Mrs Mulvaney, the innkeeper’s wife, was, unfortunately, seriously ill and it was her husband from whom we ordered drink and sandwiches. He had worked for the American Tobacco Company in a previous incarnation, both in Shanghai before the revolution, and in Singapore; and he had an extraordinary collection of cigarette packet labels (which he had extracted from the firm’s copyright department), one of them for a Chinese brand that had been the world’s biggest seller. Here we ate delicious crab and smoked salmon sandwiches – the best pub food we had so far found – and that night we slept above O’Donovan’s Grocers on Main Street, now the premises of Mrs Mary McSweeney.

Our room had been papered with large-scale maps of the area by some archaeologists who once stayed there, and these provided a lot of fascinating information about this part of the Mizen Head Peninsula, including the whereabouts of a number of children’s cemeteries which dated back to 1846, the worst year of the Great Famine.
²⁸