At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  “A NICE QUIET LIVING” is definitely not what Richard Murphy is making out at his enormous 20,000-square-foot fish and seafood processing and packing plant on Dinish Island near the Castletownbere golf course. Founded in 1987 by Richard and his partner, Shellfish De La Mer—winner of an Irish Seafood Exporter of the Year award and creator of over 130 different products primarily from local boat catches—appears to be one of Beara’s true economic success stories.

  “I’ve always been optimistic about Beara,” Richard told me as we sipped coffee in his award-draped, file-strewn office. He was a handsome, strapping prototype of an ambitious, driven CEO, and I could tell he had a low quota of patience. That was particularly obvious when an urgent call came in from Spain while we were talking from some unfortunate salesperson who’d obviously botched a huge shellfish deal. And, well, all I can say is that I was glad to be me and not the fellow a thousand miles to the south whose day, or maybe rest of the year, would be utterly wrecked by what transpired in that crushing conversation.

  We toured the vast plant, watching whitecoat-clad and hairnetted employees do amazing things with crabs and prawns and a host of other aquatic creatures (making chowders, seafood pies, hors d’oeuvre platters, cute little crab claw bites, et al). Richard emphasized that “what we need ’round here is a bit more initiative and risk taking. Another ‘value-added’ processing factory for local catches of mackerel and whatnot, for example. Then we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the deadening effect of quotas. I’m sick of seeing the waste of boats and human expertise here. I started off myself as a crab and lobster fisherman who couldn’t sell brown crabs except to local restaurants. So I decided we should make the meat—beautiful meat—more appealing and saleable. And now—well—we’re supplying over a thousand restaurants with customized products. The key is not to wait for government handouts and all that nonsense. Just get in there with some reliable friends—and make something happen!”

  You don’t hear that kind of rhetoric on Beara too often. Richard is obviously one of the true Celtic Tiger types, and so far his vision is helping keep Castletownbere alive and thriving.

  Which brings us right back to the fisherman at O’Donoghue’s who complained: “It’s getting worse and worse.”

  To which, I imagine, Richard would roar a Tiger-inspired reply of: “Not from where I’m standing!”

  BUT THEN THERE WERE the all-too-human horror stories of the fragility of fishermen’s lives among the pernicious coastal shoals and during sudden dramatic swings in local microclimates. One of the saddest events of our stay on Beara was in the late summer when two fishermen out in a small underpowered dinghy were capsized by a fierce squall under the black cliffs below Dzogchen Beara. One lost his life jacket and was drowned; the other managed to reach the jagged rocks at the base of the cliffs and scramble to safety.

  The funeral was held in the massive church on the hill above main street and was packed to overflowing; fishermen and families from miles around stood outside in the dour, drizzling morning. “At times like this,” one of the drowned man’s friends told us, “we’re all one family.”

  When the coffin emerged, it was taken for a ritual circular procession around the harbor past all the fishing boats, some partially cloaked with black cloth awnings. The streets and squares were so filled with mourners that the traffic was completely blocked for well over half an hour, but not a single horn was heard. Funerals here are major community events, and everything else ceases. Even lights were turned off in the stores and banks and all the offices along the main street. This was one of the saddest—yet most impressive—demonstrations of the solidarity and mutual support of Bearans we ever saw. In hindsight, the words of Oscar Wilde ring true for the people who live here and whose lives are tied to the ocean and the oh-so-fickle climate of southwest Ireland: “When people talk to me here about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.”

  Yes, indeed. The idiosyncrasies of the local climate may be intriguing—even amusing—to us blow-ins, but talk with the local fishermen whose fortunes and existences are linked inextricably to the moods and mayhem of the weather and you’ll get a far different interpretation.

  Margaret knows all about this, as do Grant, Susan, Richard, and the scores of fishermen who float in and out of the harborside taverns, trading tales and sharing somber wisdom. They all recognize the precariousness of their lives—and yet they continue to struggle, in larger and larger boats, hoping the shoals will keep running…

  23

  This Farming Life

  “THERE’S REALLY NOT A LOT GOIN’ on over the seasons beyond what you’d expect from normal farmin’,” said Noel O’Sullivan. Anne and I sat chatting with him at his farmhouse near the cable car contraption that carries the few remaining residents and occasional hikers across to Dursey Island a mile or so down the road.

  We’d been introduced to Noel by Jim O’Sullivan, our mentor and guide in things Beara. “If you want to get a sense of farm life the way it once was—he’s a good man to talk to. And there aren’t too many of his type around anymore. Farming’s not what it used to be…but Noel’s a true holdout!”

  We were in his front parlor, which was painted a vibrant semi-gloss turquoise. “It was a cheap paint remnant—seemed a shame to let such a cheerful color go to waste,” Noel said, his sixty-odd-year-old red-purple face glowing in the intense heat of his turf fire. A tray of tea, cookies, Jacob’s Cream Crackers, Irish butter, Irish blue cheese, and thin slices of tenderloin lamb with fresh mint sauce lay before us on the low table. Every other surface in the room seemed to be crammed with framed family photographs. The mood was jocular and convivial. Previous chats with Noel, often in the company of Michael O’Sullivan, official chief of the O’Sullivan clan, had always been friendly and open, and we were beginning to feel almost like family.

  “Help y’selves to whatever y’want. Y’ don’t need me to wait on you now.”

  We gazed out the small four-panel window set in the stone wall almost three feet thick at a million-dollar vista across the so-called Kenmare River (actually an enormous elongated ria estuary separating the Ring of Beara from the Ring of Kerry) to the soaring monoliths of the Macgillycuddy’s Reeks range.

  Way in the west on the horizon we could just make out the two dragon-backed profiles of the Skellig islands—Little and Michael. Immediately below us, gentle lines of surf lapped an almost-white sand beach. Then, abruptly out of the ragged, rock-bound bay, rose a tumble of velvety green meadows with not a scintilla of gorse on them to mar their verdant perfection. Ancient drystone walls, sage green and mossy with age, wriggled snakelike up the steep hillsides. These were Noel’s fields, along with others he rented elsewhere on the peninsula, and they were littered with the woolly balls of his sheep and their now-large lambs.

  “Bin a good year, all in all. One point five lambs per ewe on average, and a good shearing too, though t’be honest, it’s hardly worth it. The cost of cutting the fleeces is more than the wool brings in nowadays. No one seems to want it, even though they make such a fuss of pure wool fashions and whatnot. And this is good wool—not like the upland Blackface Cheviots. Their wool is coarse and hard to work. Only good for house insulation and the like. But I just don’t understand about our fleeces. I mean—look at them. Look at how soft and fluffy they are. Not stringy at all…just gorgeous!”

  We watched the sheep. There was something hypnotic in their slow, waddling movements as they munched their mellow way around the pastures, pausing occasionally to look around and check out the flock before easing themselves on, nibbling the vibrant green shoots of grass and frilly white daisies and golden dandelions and iron-rich clover. And they would do this for hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Cute, cuddly munching machines. Visibly plumping themselves and with nothing to do with their time except…eat. That and lambing was all that was expected of them. And apparently nothing much was expected of Noel either beyond the occasional bit of wall repair, supervising the b
iannual dipping of his flocks, organizing their ultimate marketing, and casting a proprietary eye over his little fiefdom of immaculate velvet pastures. And pretty well ditto for his cows too.

  Beara Shepherd (a Rare Sight)

  “So much then for the image of the poor, diligent, worn-to-the-bone farmer with hardly a minute of peace or comfort for himself,” I said after Noel’s “not a lot going on” remark.

  “Who the hell told you all that nonsense?!”

  “Well—it seems to be the typical picture in most other parts of the world.”

  “Ah well y’see, here we’ve learned our lessons from our own sheep. Sit back, watch, and learn to be wise, is what I say.”

  “So that’s what you do, is it? Just sit back and watch them and become wise?”

  “And sleep. There’s a lot to be said for a good sleep now and then in the day.”

  “Sounds like a darn good life to me.”

  “Well—and who says it isn’t? Certainly not me!” Noel laughed a cigarette smoker’s laugh and proceeded to light up his sixth Benson & Hedges since our arrival. “Terrible habit, this.” He chuckled. “Still—I stopped with the drink over twenty years ago. Not a drop has passed these nicotine-stained lips and teeth of mine in all that time. Which is perhaps a God-given blessing because what with two bottles of the Powers whiskey a day and a fine temper to go along with it and a tendency to treat the boreens like my own personal car racing track—I don’t think I had much time in this world left for me, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not much time? As a farmer or a man?” asked Anne with a smile.

  “Aha—mainly the man, though there was a time when farming was goin’ bad in places like Beara. Obviously you know all about the potato famines of the mid-1800s—Skibbereen and down by the Mizen Head Peninsula well southwest of Bantry—that was one of the worst places. But farming’s always been the backbone. Even now there’s almost three-quarters of the land of Ireland used for agriculture. Which is pretty amazing when y’think of all the bog country in the middle of the country and the rock deserts of the Burren and whatnot in the northwest. But we were old hands at the job. Some of the earliest small farms in Europe were discovered at the Céide Fields in County Mayo—said to date from before 3000 BC. Then there were the Celts, who rolled in around 300 BC with the brehon system of tribal land tenure. Then the Normans in the twelfth century—they didn’t mess around too much. It was those damned Anglo-Irish ‘Ascendancy’ plantations in the seventeenth century that locked us into a feudal system, with almost all the land being owned by those bloody blueblood British outsiders. Took us three hundred years to start to get our farms back. Finally we had to boot most of ’em out, and good riddance!” Noel smiled, seemingly proud at his erudite recitation of Irish history. He was an odd but intriguing mix of blunt, back-to-the-earth farmer with a quieter, well-read, and sensitive persona.

  “And you lucked out too when Ireland joined the EU—right?” I suggested, having heard of the extremely generous subsidies that had been made available to small farmers.

  “Ay well—y’could say that. The fishermen round here definitely think so. We got the subsidies, and they got stuck with tiny quotas and buyouts of their boats. Y’wouldn’t think so, but we’re still a country of farmers—over 130,000 still left. And bigger acreages too. Mostly animals—sheep and cattle. The land never was much good for crops. Great for grass, though—the Emerald Isle and all that stuff.”

  “What about the famous potatoes—once your staple diet?” asked Anne.

  “Well, after the famines, we kind of lost some of our appetite for them, although set a tureen of colcannon or boxty on the table, and you’ll still see it gone in a flash! And listen, talkin’ about food, I’ve laid out all this stuff here—some of my best cold lamb, fresh soda bread, some of Norman Steele’s beautiful cheeses—so let’s just get on with it.”

  So we got on with it, and a fine afternoon it turned out to be, chatting between the cheeses and watching those little woolly balls of sheep munch their myopic way across his salt-spray sea meadows far below by the churning surf.

  “Magic,” said Anne. “Again! That word just keeps popping up!”

  Norman laughed. “Magic—y’want to know about magic? There’s still plenty of it about, y’know. A lot of new people comin’ in too. Some have the powers. Definitely. When I was young, all raw and splintery, you always knew who had the powers—specially second sight and the like. A lot of people would go to them long before they’d go to the local priest. They could help solve problems. Not just pray about them—but really solve them, if y’know what I mean.”

  We both nodded. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, and we were intrigued.

  “Y’wanna hear a story? A true one, not a piseog—not a superstition. Happened to my friend’s grandmother, who had special powers. Some said she was a ‘changeling’—a mysterious being left by fairies when they steal a real mortal child. I think she was just very wise—and gifted in the healing powers. She helped many people round here through the fevers and suchlike. She was a fine ‘keener’ too at funerals—could let out real good banshee wails for the wakers. ’Course—don’t get me wrong—wakes weren’t all wailin’ and moanin’ by any means. They were big social events too, sort of honoring the spirit of the deceased with céilí songs, whiskey, flirtations, and all that. There was one pretty raunchy game—like a mock wedding that the clergy thought disgusting. Of course in those days it was all pretty innocent. Not like today, with young women as fresh and free as horny rabbits! Oh, and some claimed when she was younger she could turn into a lianhan shee fairy—sort of like a sexy seductress who lures fellas into Tír na nÓg—the underground fairy world, or as some call it, “The Land of Eternal Youth”—for a bit of you know what. And then she’d leave them to get lost or sit them on the back of a pooka—a huge horse spirit that whirls ’em off on a terrible wild ride before—if they’re lucky—dumping them back at home to be battered senseless by a furious wife with a rolling pin!”

  “Quite a life!” said Anne.

  “Well, listen. This is how it ended when she got old and finally died. Y’know that when you’re in your coffin and being carried into the church you’re always supposed to go in feetfirst. Only priests get to go in headfirst. So what happened at her funeral was that they were carrying her in same as they would any other normal person, but the bloody coffin—soon as it got close to the door—turned itself and all the bearers around until she was headfirst. And they’d back off and try again and—wham! The coffin’d swing like a compass needle, and she’d be headfirst again…”

  “So what happened?” asked Anne.

  “How the heck do I know. I was just a little kid, but I imagine she got her way. People don’t like to mess with fairy stuff, even if the church is involved. Once you start playing around with that, it goes beyond religion.”

  There was a sudden knock on the door and in walked a friend of Noel’s from a farm just down the road. “C’mon in, Tom—I was just tellin’ m’guests here the story of Michael’s grandmother…”

  “Oh yes, indeed—fine lady. Very gifted for the healing and suchlike. Tapping into special powers and all that. And talking about higher powers, did you tell them that story about the movin’ Madonna statue?”

  “No,” said Noel. “We hadn’t got that far yet. Why don’t you tell it?”

  Tom laughed. “I only came round to pinch a few cigarettes but—well, it just goes to show how you’ve got to be careful with things y’don’t understand ‘specially at a time before the Celtic Tiger came roarin’ in and things were pretty hard all around. Anyway, there was in this lovely little village of Ballyspittle a statue of our Holy Mother by the church that started to move. I mean move so you could actually see it shiftin’. And the papers picked it up and people started comin’ from all over to see this statue, and the little village was getting’ fat and flush from all this attention. And this, of course, was very nice for Ballyspittle, which got a prematur
e taste of the Tiger, so to speak. But other nearby villages in a rough state economically were getting a little envious, and more reports of moving Holy Lady statues started to flood in. But the movements were always very small—more like little wobbles. So one imaginative young man in a village way up in Kerry decided he could create a real rocker of a statue. He was a trainee engineer and knew about pulleys and guy lines and the like, so he set up this elaborate system of nylon filaments like near invisible but very strong fishing lines—and started rocking the Virgin high up on her pedestal way above the main door. And people saw it and the word spread and the papers and TV came and all agreed that this was the best rocking virgin of them all and the village started to get rich from all the visitors…until…”

  Old Tractor near Dursey Island

  “Ah—the inevitable ‘until,’” Anne said.

  “D’y want me to finish this? We’re just getting to the best bit…One night the young trainee engineer came down from his hidden nook where he’d been pulling the lines. There were a few people about but most had gone home. And as he came out of the front door of the church he didn’t notice that one of those almost invisible fishing lines had somehow come loose and he caught his foot on it and it jerked the statue completely off its plinth and it started to fall…”

  “A messy end!” said Anne.

  “Ah—not so fast,” said Tom. “It was coming straight for his head and would have smashed it like a fat juicy watermelon but—six inches from impact—the statue suddenly stopped apparently in midair, and everyone round about gasped and shouted and photographed and videoed and the young man still didn’t know what all the fuss was about.

  When the crowd pointed to the statue slowly revolving about his head he lost his nerve and ran and was not seen around the village for quite a long while after that. But the photos were, and everyone agreed that, despite all the fakery with the lines, the fact the statue had stopped in midflight and spared the engineer’s life was a miracle easily equal in notoriety to all the other moving statues around the country. And so the little village continued to prosper!”