At the Edge of Ireland Page 14

  “Yes, Heaney writes powerful stuff. I was rereading Opened Ground just last week…”

  “Yeah, fine collection that…Very fine!”

  “Some of his poem titles…they tell you exactly where his heart is—‘Requiem for the Croppies,’ ‘A Loch Neagh Sequence,’ ‘Bogland,’ ‘The Seed Cutters,’ ‘The Toome Road,’ ‘Bog Oak’…”

  “Ah, yes—the self-absorption of the Irish again. Inward looking, agonizing over all the dreck of a failed society…”

  “Who said that?”

  “Tha’s the second time you…Who the hell do y’think said it! There’s only me here thinkin’ an’ talkin’…”

  “Apologies for the third time.”

  Seamus Heaney

  “Accepted for the third time—but it’s the last one y’ get!”

  “Good brew, this one,” I said. The Guinness was finally beginning to take hold.

  “A very effective diversionary tactic—but true, although a glass of full-blast poteen wouldn’t go amiss—it’s all that’s needed to hot-wire the tongue and kick-start the human engine into life again! But to continue, maybe it’s that self-absorption that sells Ireland, ‘specially in the movies. I mean, think of the best ones, starting with John Ford’s The Quiet Man if y’ can put up with John Wayne’s ridiculous brogue. Then there’s David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. John Huston made a beautiful little art film of Joyce’s The Dead, and then, much more recent, we had two from Roddy Doyle’s books—The Commitments and The Snapper. Then there’s Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot from Christy Brown’s brilliant novel, Neil Jordan’s The Miracle and The Crying Game, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s December Bride. Then y’ got that romp of a thing, Ned Devine, and our latest success—Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2006, and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. And of course my all-time favorite—John Keane’s The Field with Richard Harris.”

  “And mine too! I watched it again just last week. Harris does a great job as the mighty ‘Bull’ with his determination to hold on to a small piece of pasture he’s created over a lifetime from the wild moors. And then, of course, in true Irish heart-wrenching melodrama, it leads to the destruction of everything around him and ultimately himself. Reflecting that eternal cry of the freedom-lusting Irish: ‘I might as well die if I can’t fly!’”

  “Jeez, y’re soundin’ like a real film critic!”

  “Feels like that after a fourth viewing…And to be honest, I’m a bit protective of it…It got panned by some critics for being far too over-the-top. I think with anyone less than Harris, it might have been…But he carries that part so powerfully, and despite the fact that he’s a detestable character in many ways, he holds you right ’til the end…right up to his end, flailing away at the waves with his stick, shouting ‘Back, back!’ in that terrible King Canute kind of madness…”

  “Well put…and I agree. Without Harris it wouldna’ve worked.”

  “So Ireland’s certainly made its mark on the arts…”

  “Ah, that it has. Some fine modern playwrights too—Brian Friel, Sean O’Casey, Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh and his Lieutenant of Inishmore. And music, naturally—the Chieftains, the Wolfe Tones, the Dubliners. People sniggered at Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers at first, all dolled up in their fancy white Aran island sweaters and puttin’ on the brogue and whatnot, but—boy!—they could hammer home our great Irish ballads like nobody else. ‘Fields of Athenry,’ of course—our national anthem almost—but also ‘The Bridge of Athlone,’ ‘Danny Boy,’ ‘Four Green Fields’—that last is one of Tommy’s own compositions—all wonderful stuff! Bob Dylan loved the Clancys. Said they got him started and kept him going. And then this crazy Christy Moore. In his early days he’d go through a couple of bottles of Irish a night and still get up onstage for three marvelous hours. And then y’moderns—Bob Geldof, Bono and U2, Sinéad O’Connor, the Saw Doctors, Clannad, the Pogues, Van Morrison, the Cranberries, the Corrs—even Muzak’s maestro-maven—Enya! Oh! And not forgettin’ Cathal Coughlin—his Clock Comes Down the Stairs is one of the best Irish rock albums ever. ’S’all terrific stuff. Ireland’s a major force in the music field. But y’ also get Tad Meyer, the real traditionalist, too…the unaccompanied sean-nós singers, the uilleann pipes, the players of harps, tin whistles, fiddles, the bodhrán goatskin drum, the preservers of the céilí and the seisuin and the fleadhanna music festivals. Thanks to organizations like Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE, the Irish music movement), the ancient music has been preserved. So now we’ve got both—the old and best and the new and best…”

  “You’d never get high marks for modesty!”

  “Credit where credit’s due, lad. You ever watch a Riverdance audience and the smiles that appear like magic on people’s faces when the Clancys used to start one of their toe tappers? There’s no music in the world like our music!”

  “No,” I agree. “And when it’s sung in the original Gaelic, just watch the tears roll.”

  “Tha’s true! Though barely one percent of the country can understand the Gaelic and the Gaeltacht regions like Donegal, Galway, and parts of County Kerry and Cork are fast shrinking…except—and this is really odd—except in the cities. Some state-backed schools teach all in Irish now. Our former president Mary Robinson always was keen to keep it going. The English tried to kill it, of course, in the bad old days, but de Valera, after independence, wanted us to be a fully Irish-speaking nation. Problem was finding teachers! And parents too—they spoke mostly English. Sean O’Faolain called Irish ‘a buried part of ourselves.’ The British had certainly done a number on us. With their nihilistic selfishness and papier-mâché bravado, they almost completely decimated our culture. But we had a good go at kickin’ ’em out—the IRA in Northern Ireland and down here the burning of all those fancy Ascendancy mansions—the homes of the British aristocrats—in the 1920s—places like Dunboy and the Puxley place in Castletownbere. They say there’s only thirty or so o’those huge mega-palaces around today out of over two thousand. But somehow we never really got the power back. And so nowadays, for all the bullshit rhetoric and platitudes, it seems a waste of time teaching kids Irish when they could be learning some useful language, like French, German—or even Chinese Mandarin, f’ God’s sake. Course, these could never have the pride and power of our great Irish language poets and writers. They’d never capture the spirit of mystery and magic that flows through the Irish language—you’re always on multilevels of consciousness when you listen to it…”

  “Yeah…y’know, even though I can barely speak a word of it, you can hear something magic in the sound and rhythms of the stories and songs. It’s quite strange, there really is a sense of multilevels.”

  “Ah well, tha’s jus’ us, isn’t it? Strange…and magic…and multilayered. Schizoid romantics gliding insecurely through the days on pillows of positive affirmations! Pragmatic sentimentalists! And stupid proud of it…”

  “All over the world!”

  “Ah yeah, our mighty world diaspora of emigrant-loyalists! Without them, we’d be a little forgotten island. Those forty-five million or so in the USA alone, like I said. Can y’believe, a third of Australians too—even a sixth of Norwegians—all Irish descendents. I guess that’s the Viking link…from their raids in the mid-800s, and it all started with the famines and the ‘coffin ships’ in the 1800s. Over a quarter of the population either dead at home or emigrating to build a new world despite our terrible reputation for the drink and the punch-up and the ‘no Irish need apply’ prejudices and our huge Catholic families spreading across uncharted lands like algae on still lakes…”

  “And then comes your reverse immigration…”

  “Wha’?! Ah! Right. See what y’mean. The Celtic Tiger an’ all that. And a brain drain in the opposite direction with our well-trained young’uns comin’ on back from Europe and the USA. Isn’t that jus’ peachy…and along with ’em come all the bloody tourists and blow-ins—busloads of Irish and wannabe Irish,
all looking for roots on Grandpa O’Connor’s little farm out there on the boglands and puttin’ on the brogue and actin’ up more Irish in the pubs than the Irish themselves…”

  “And proud of it!”

  “Ah, well, yeah yeah. I think so. Although we got a bit of a reputation in Europe for money-grubbin’—and grabbin’—y’know the expression ‘Rip-off Republic,’ right? We got more handouts from the EU than any of the other needy countries…until a new batch of really poor places like the Baltic States and Poland came in…”

  “Didn’t the Irish government try to veto them being allowed to join the EU?”

  A hesitant pause and then: “Er…right…well, that was indeed not exactly our finest hour. We were scared the tap might be turned off for us a bit too sudden-like, y’see.”

  “And was it?”

  “Well…yes and no…We did okay, really. And by that time the ball was really rolling over here…and it still is. Sometimes—with the crazy property prices in Dublin and just about everywhere you look—you wonder if there’s a great bubble about to burst. But until it does, I guess we’ll go on spendin’ and drinkin’ and singin’ and laughin’. Just so long as we don’t overdose ourselves with too many newfangled dot-com geeks, metrosexuals, femocrats, Eurotrash, brainiacs, starchitects, and dummy-dweebs. After all, this is still Ireland and we still love livin’ the good old Irish life while we can.”

  “Celebratin’ the craic forever!”

  “Indeed!” he shouted (in one last shower of nose drips).

  And so I eventually left this courtly and ponderous character whose lightness of soul and deep frivolity kept him bobbing serenely on great waves of culture, charm…and charismatic check!

  “Farewell Patrick, and thanks for all the insights.”

  “Ach—I’m hardly started, but I suppose you blow-ins have to be indoctrinated slowly.”

  “And indoctrination by you hardly hurts at all…”

  11

  A Very Revealing May Day

  WHAT AN AMAZING DAY THIS WAS supposed to be in Castletownbere and on nearby Bere Island.

  It was May Day, and I’d been promised all kinds of great events for the Festival of Bealtaine. It would be hard to fit all the exciting diversions into a single day, I was told. Although regrettably, there was nothing of a truly pagan nature to look forward to. Still, plenty of other diversions were in store, so everyone insisted.

  And, in fact, it was remarkably easy to accomplish my tight schedule, because in the end I accomplished absolutely nothing of my original itinerary.

  First, I was to meet an elderly gentleman of great learned veracity—“a sumptuous repository of all that is historical and hysterical about Bere Island,” or so I’d been informed by one of my most reliable informants. Unfortunately, he called to say that, because of a “mighty matter in the way of family affairs, d’ y’ understand?” he’d be leaving the island about the same time I’d planned to arrive following the fifteen-minute ferry ride across from Castletownbere. Maybe we could wave at each other, he suggested humorously, but that was about all that was possible for the time being.

  But I still had plans to go to Bere Island anyway to attend a resident production of one of John B. Keane’s “magnificent masterworks”—Slive—(according to another one of my informants). Admittedly I’d never heard of the play and, until a few days previously, was not even familiar with this much-beloved Kerryman-author. Which I hate to admit, because his reputation has the ring of righteousness and ruthless justice and anyone who admits to an ignorance of his fine literary works is likely to diminish rapidly in stature in the eyes of the locals. But as I am an honest fellow and always welcome a bit of stature-diminishment due to my overindulgent gastronomic and other tendencies—I indicated a willingness to be informed. And informed I was. Endlessly and enthusiastically.

  And so, primed and pumped on the splendidly outspoken Mr. Keane and his career as both pub owner and prolific writer, I was there early to catch the ferry to Bere Island at the dock across from the church and the Supervalue supermarket. I settled down by the harbor wall and waited. And waited. And waited. After an hour had passed, there was still no sign of the ferry. Admittedly it was a small craft, particularly in comparison to the enormous hulls and super-structures of the Spanish fishing trawlers in the harbor that day, and although it was barely capable of carrying more than a couple of vehicles at a time, you couldn’t really miss its cheery red paint job and its sprightly chug across the harbor. Finally I strolled across to our little supermarket and asked one of the cashiers what had happened to the boat.

  “Oh, I think now they’ve changed the times…”

  “Where are you going on the island?” asked another cashier.

  “To see Slive—you know, John B. Keane’s play.”

  She gave me an odd look. “Who?” (Ah, so I wasn’t the only one here with a significant gap in my Irish Trivial Pursuit talents.)

  “You’ll maybe need the other ferry—up the peninsula a mile or so.”

  “I didn’t know there was another ferry.”

  “Ah yes, well, that’s to be expected. Many don’t. It’s more recent, y’see.”

  “So I should take that one, then?”

  Trawlers at Castletownbere

  “Yes, I’m thinking that would be best for you…”

  “Well, thanks—you’ve saved me a wasted—”

  “Except it’ll not be running today…”

  “Oh—and why’s that?”

  “I suppose because it’s a public holiday,” said the cashier, obviously perplexed by the stupidity of my question.

  “But wouldn’t that be the perfect time to be running a ferry?”

  “Ah, yes indeed, you could be right there.”

  That’s one of those wonderfully typical ways the Irish have of ending a discussion that seems destined to go nowhere. A pleasant acknowledgment of the pointlessness of trying to derive sense out of a senseless situation. Sounds a bit like something out of Waiting for Godot. Beckett would have loved such nonsensical dialogues.

  It was too late anyhow now for the play on Bere Island, even if I’d had a chance of getting there, which apparently I didn’t. So I wandered back home with every intention of resuming a now-unraveling schedule later on in the evening after a cup of tea and a brief rest.

  And thus later on in the evening I’m down at the Beara Bay Hotel to enjoy what I’d been told was to be an evening of Beatles music—a “greatest hits” spectacular, presumably by one of those mop-top impersonator groups that keep popping up all over the globe. Like Elvis impersonators, only usually worse. But—bear in mind—this is the Beara, and anything in the way of live entertainment is a must on my—and everyone else’s—list.

  However, just as with the play, this was another “not to be” event on this increasingly noneventful day.

  “Eh, well, he’ll not be here. Unfortunately,” said the man at the desk outside the concert room (otherwise known during the week as Skipper’s Bar).

  “How do you mean, ‘he’? I thought it was a ‘they.’ Y’ know, the whole Beatles band. All four of ’em.”

  “Oh-no-no. Just the one fella. With a lot of nifty synthesizer stuff. Got quite a range. Give him a glass slide tube and a resonator guitar and he’ll out-blues the great bluesman himself—Robert Johnson. Not bad with Hawaiian slack key guitar too. Pretty neat act…”

  “But we won’t be having his nifty act tonight, then?”

  “No, no-no-no. We won’t. Regrettably he’s stuck somewhere between Waterford and Cork. Something wrong with his truck.”

  “Well, that’s a shame, then.”

  “Yes, yes. ’Tis, ’tis.”

  “Well—so I guess that just leaves the old set dancing at Twomey’s.” (I was intending to enjoy them both, but one would have to suffice now.)

  “Ah, well, no.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No, that’s not on, either. It’s been canceled because of our show.”

  “You me
an the show you’re not going to have now because the Beatle man is stuck between Waterford and Cork.”

  “Yeah, that just about sums it up nicely.”

  “So there’s nothing going on tonight, then? Anywhere?”

  “Yeah…guess so—well, except for our show…”

  “You just said your show was canceled…”

  “Oh, no-no-no—I’m talking about the other show. The late show. At eleven-thirty P.M. Euro-Centerfolds. Very…what you might call…exotic.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything on the Beara being described as “exotic,” with the possible exception of those tumultuously tropical Garinish Gardens at Glengarriff, and the sumptuous Derreen Garden at Lauragh…but I soon got the point as he grinned a lascivious grin and indicated a lurid poster at the side of the door. In prose and photos that left little to the imagination, it advertised a late evening of sensual delights featuring extraordinarily large-chested ladies dressed in leather belts and thongs and little else, prancing across the stage with whips and other pernicious instruments of sadomasochistic application and a sign saying YOUR EVERY PLEASURE GUARANTEED. And all this in our little Castletownbere!

  Well, maybe I was wrong then about the lack of pagan festivities for Bealtaine. Apparently here they all were for the delight and titillation of the tanked-up, testosterone-crazed youths and not-so-youths of my normally quiet—or relatively so—little town.

  “So—you think you’ll be coming then?” asked the hotel barman, still smirking lasciviously.

  “Well…”

  “Should be an even bigger show than last night…,” said the man with a widening sneer.

  “Last night?! What the heck did I miss last night?!”

  “You! Well, you missed nothing. But the ladies had a great time. All these guys—Chippendale types, y’know—big bodies, bulging muscles out to here…They put on a real great bling-bling bada-bing show…”