Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  A bit worse for wear, we made it the thirty-some miles to Clonakilty, a pretty town with trim houses painted in the lovely pastels the Irish use to defeat the winter murk – vermilion and aquamarine, lavender, plum, and peach are just a few of the improbable hues that one discovers upon entering “Clon.” One stretch is so self-consciously florid that local wags call those dwellings “the Smartie houses,” seeing that they resemble the colors of an English candy called Smarties.

  Life in these parts was once anything but bright. The brutal legacy of the Famine in the west of Ireland was in fact the anvil of future revenge. In an 1846 letter to the Duke of Wellington, a Cork merchant named Nicholas Cummins captured a few choice vignettes from the nearby hamlet of Myross, today as sweet-looking as could be. Cummins could have been talking about any parish in this region, whose ruthless landlords kept exporting grain to England in the midst of the Famine’s unspeakable want:

  In the first [hovel], six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed to be a ragged horse-cloth and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror and found by a low moaning that they were alive; they were in fever – four children, a woman, and what had once been a man . . . Suffice it to say that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far the greater number were delirious, either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain . . . My clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavours to escape from the throng of pestilence around when my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn. I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant, just born, in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins – the sole covering of herself and the babe. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands, which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by the rats. A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag out the corpse of a child . . .

  Perhaps inevitably, Clonakilty produced Michael Collins, the War of Independence commander who cracked the British intelligence system and orchestrated the insurrection’s relentless campaign of ambush, sabotage, and arson, including burnings of many of the great nearby houses of the Anglo-Irish. As ruthless as he was charismatic, Michael Collins was also responsible for the fatal ambushes of numerous agents of the Crown as they slept in their beds. To his generation, the Famine was yesterday and they therefore felt no qualms in treating the British to a helping of the same quagmires the Americans would later discover in Vietnam and, ultimately, Iraq. But Michael Collins was also forced to negotiate the thankless compromises that led to the formation of the Irish Free State, the bitterly rued pill ever since being that the British retain control of the heavily “planted” (in other words, deliberately stocked with chiefly Scottish colonialist farmers) six Protestant counties of Northern Ireland. For his troubles, Collins was promptly murdered just down the road from Clonakilty in the 1922 Civil War, during the brief carnage in which dissident IRA guerrillas rebelled against their Free State brethren for having acquiesced to the notorious “treaty.”

  Modern Clonakilty, we could quickly see, had shaken off its brooding on its Famine past and now embodies the brightest aspects of the Republic’s burgeoning progress. It is an amazingly thriving place, with geranium-bedecked restaurants, tasteful shops, and stone-fronted guesthouses arising in such an outburst of civic pride that the community was recently named the winner of Ireland’s national “Tidy Towns” competition. At the center of the main street sits O’Donovan’s Hotel, one of Ireland’s numerous comfortable, independent hostelries which are so much more engaging than the mass cut-rate hotel franchises that provide accommodation in too many countries. O’Donovan’s also boasts an Asian café in the back alleyway where Irish peasant women used to spend their days skinning and salting fish for daily wages that wouldn’t buy a fork of fried rice now. We decided to order a restorative drink in the hotel’s pub, motioning the children to mill about in the rumpled lobby.

  The call was for two pints of Murphy’s, the softer, mellower Cork version of the better-known Guinness, which is no longer owned by that august Anglo-Irish family but rather a Spanish conglomerate called Diageo that also controls other important international cultural icons such as Burger King and the Pillsbury doughboy. Murphy’s – long managed by a powerful Cork family of that name – has become the property of the Dutch brewer Heineken, which has predictably re-baptized its stout operations as “Heineken Ireland.” This is equivalent to the Japanese taking over the American national landmark the Rockefeller Center, which they in fact did some time ago. In both cases, nobody complained. Such is progress.

  We moved into the cafeteria with the kids and assembled trays of fried fish and sandpaper-surfaced chicken nuggets, called “gougons” in Ireland, complemented by the usual mountains of chips. A young woman impassively waited at the till.

  “Are you okay?” the teenager asked, which did not help my road-frayed nerves. Did we look terminally ill? The phrase was dumbfounding, and in this country, where language is so often wielded with a fine brush, such mindless utterances fall with a deafening thud. For the last few weeks we had heard, ad nauseam, the same words greeting shoppers who approached Irish cash registers with their arms wrapped around masses of expensive clothing or toys. In most countries, people thrusting wads of cash over checkout counters are not asked, “Are you okay?” but rather, “May I help you?” We couldn’t help wondering if the phrase “Are you okay?” really was a nod to the old indolence of the land, meaning, “Why the hell are you bothering me?”

  “I’m grand. How are you?” I responded, waiting for the inevitable three-beat response. Ever-observant Laura, knowing my hobbyhorses inside out, caught the sarcasm and scowled. Variants of such amiable how-are-yous are asked all over the world, and in many places are even answered brightly. In Ireland, no positive reply can be offered – that’s bragging. Better to feign unhappiness.

  “Not too bad,” the clerk said right on cue. Irish people always say that to inquiries regarding how they are faring. The words convey that the people mumbling them are not yet dead, nor have they had their entrails recently cut out by invading Norsemen, nor their entire family stricken with typhoid only to depart in the night on a pestilential Famine ship. The response expresses the Irish infatuation with poor-mouthing, meaning a stoic sharing of life’s miseries with the rest of the unfortunate inhabitants of their godforsaken wet bog of an island. “Not too bad,” I knew by now, is never, ever to be rendered with a smile. The point is to convey that one’s as miserable as everyone else, even though public opinion polls consistently show that the Irish today are actually among the most cheerful and optimistic people in Europe. The phrase is undoubtedly a remnant of the post-Famine psychology that has never caught up with the “Smartie” age.

  Eating helped my mood, and we ventured outside, by now forgetting the frenzy on the roads. The music festival was materializing, with traffic diverted and the town’s main thoroughfare flooding with pedestrians. A great cluster of them gathered in front of a bevel-windowed old pub called De Barra’s, which, Ireland being what it is, has hosted as its most celebrated regular and provider of Friday night entertainment the former wah-wah amplified bass guitarist for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Noel Redding. Today, three trad musicians sat on stools on the sidewalk, all as clean-cut as bankers, tuning wah-wah-deprived fiddles. As it turned out, their first song was based on a series of letters a heartbroken father had written to a son who had emigrated to Boston in 1860 – never, like millions of participants in the Irish diaspora, to be seen again by his family. The words could have as easily been penned to one Owen Monaghan, namesake of the little son I’d just hoisted onto my shoulders, who departed forever from County Monaghan in 1844 to a miserable factory
job twenty miles deeper into Massachusetts. They could have been directed as well to millions of others who would never return from Australia and South Africa, Argentina and Ontario, anywhere at all that would have them.

  The ballad was so poignant, its mournful fiddles and tin whistles and aching words so expressive of the terrible exodus from places just like Clonakilty, that I began brushing away tears. Jamie, I saw, was doing the same thing. Laura looked from one parent to another and caught our emotion; even Harris stared off wistfully. Here lies then, ye transplanted children, another sad initiation rite to your past, I thought. Yet the level of literacy and devotion to history that resonated through the singers’ rich baritones, and through the crowd’s rapt appreciation, seemed immensely reassuring to me, a sign that even the young Irish remained steeped in the tragic poetry of their past.

  On this gentle afternoon, the band, called Natural Gas, had no intention of dwelling on a mordant note. Their next offering concerned the universal pub musicians’ impatience with donkey-eared listeners, and it started with a refrain epitomizing the disrespectful “foostering,” or fool’s play, of loudmouthed drinkers.

  “Hey you with the head! Put down your bloody bohdran! Pick up your pint instead!” the number begins, referring to the tambourine-like skin drum (pronounced BOW-ron) used by Irish traditional bands. “Say two acts of contrition for the poor pub musician. If I had a son, that’s not what he’d be, for they have to put up with hooflers and tricksters and chancers dropping ten quid in their fee.”

  This flourish coaxed forth a peculiar dark-eyed man with a loud red-and-white-striped shirt, enormous yellow tie, and brace suspenders holding up a pair of floppy vaudevillian trousers. Transported by some private reverie, he butterflied his arms forward as if swimming through waves of incoming visions. Fish-mouthing all the while, he laboriously worked his legs in various directions as if his pants contained stilts. For reasons known only to Clonakilty, this impromptu entertainer, whose face was as rigidly unchanging as a Noh actor’s, is called Chicken George. When not performing, he’s said to be a great conversationalist. But head-scrambling contradictions are the rule in modern Ireland, for De Barra’s has also served as a favored venue for David Bowie and Paul McCartney. How could one not love the place?

  Joining the crowd outside was a coven of barefoot individuals in brown sackcloth topped by mangy rats’ nests of hair. The women, with blackened teeth and blue whorls and lines smeared across their faces, looked like hundred-year-old hags and cackled accordingly. The even wilder-haired and possibly uglier men sported ten-foot pikes.

  “These festivals get over the top,” I whispered to my wife, for in Ireland festivals break out in dizzying variety. Every town with enough children to fill a school can muster a pair of August festivals without a second thought, and the bigger localities keep it up for nine months – folk, food, fiddle, and farm festivals, dance, jazz, film, choral, art, literary, heritage, matchmaking, midsummer, spring, and autumn festivals keep coming at you and one sometimes imagines hordes of festival merrymakers changing their costumes behind the next ridge and descending like a thousand Comanches on every unsuspecting crossroads that has not fenced them out.

  “They’re a bunch of crusties,” Jamie said, using the Irish term for a certain wave of recent New Age immigrants who are alleged to be soap shy. “Festival crusties.”

  There was no doubt about it. Not long ago, the west of Ireland was full of native Gaelic speakers who lived in a timeless world into which the Creator seemed to breathe an inordinate share of the world’s dreams. The waves moaned on briny rocks and old women heard the terrible cry of the banshees; a mouse moved in a hayrick and the fairies were heard to be back at their mischief; a woman died young and her suitor saw her image in the moonlight for the rest of his forlorn years. In modern Ireland, loads of New Age people still see, or try to see, such visions, often sitting cross-legged before the few remaining stone hovels buried in the depths of some hollow or bramble-ridden boreen – which means a little lane, though a Cork City avenue is called Boreenmanna Road, which translates into “Little Big Lane Road.”

  These pike-wielding cacklers were indeed crusties, or in other words hippies yearning for a return to the land. The crusties moved in droves to the secret spaces of Ireland’s west in the 1970s and 1980s to forge more spiritually rooted lives than they believed possible in the mass population centers of Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany. Many have acclimated nicely and are tipping away now at producing superb cheeses and organic vegetables, along with the usual baskets, clay pots, and water-divining trades. But some of the newest Rastafarian-styled recruits sit on Cork corners banging bongo drums with an irritating monotony. An aging troupe called Skibbamba will dance in place for hours in tie-dyed pajamas, with some of the mothers sporting babies in papooses who jolt their heads backward and forward in perfect, if helpless, time to the beat. Anyone so inclined can rent the entire bunch for a party, which just last week I’d promised Laura I would do for her wedding celebration in, oh, another decade or two.

  “That’s not funny, Dad,” she stammered in disgust. Natives in West Cork, however, retain a tolerant balance in dealing with such exotics. Clonakilty recently suffered an interminable visit by a Californian who screeched rock anthems at otherwise harmonious street corners that the Lord expressly created for Irish people to complain about the weather and their aches and pains. Worse still, he began posting announcements of his forthcoming lecture on The True Meaning of the Age of Aquarius. When the hour of illumination arrived, not a single person showed up. Such is Cork cuteness, and the man vanished.

  But modern Ireland is actually hugely enriched by the presence of myriad foreigners – from the actor Jeremy Irons, who recently painted his Cork castle pink, to Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones playing Buddha in the Wicklow Mountains, and the Swiss wheelers and dealers who in the 1980s bought an estate outside Skibberreen as a refuge for their government to weather nuclear war. In fact, a four-room schoolhouse not far from Clonakilty now educates nine different nationalities among its seventy pupils, including kids from a family who had just fled their ranch in troubled Zimbabwe. Through a mutual connection, we stopped at their rented farmhouse on our way back to Cork City and found a party in full tear. Inside, young Dutchmen with shaved heads were making horrible noises on their electric guitars, but on the lawn we were charmed by an aristocratic English writer, whose debut book had to do with the bank robbery he committed when fresh out of Oxford.

  Next, a dark-tressed, dimple-cheeked young woman slunk our way, her bare midriff sporting a gold naval ring. She was Una, and it transpired that she had been raised on a crusty houseboat captained by a tin-whistle playing American mother.

  “How interesting,” I said. “Where does she live now?”

  “Well, she’s a divinity student these days and lives in a tiny little town called Cornwall, Connecticut.”

  “Una,” I guffawed. “Your mother’s eaten dinner at our house there several times.”

  Ah serendipity – Ireland is thy name.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 8

  September dawned. “Hey, you with the heads, it’s show time!” I called to the sleeping boys in their bunks, it being the first day of school.

  This fateful morning is of course uneasy anywhere, but now our beloved boys, God save them, were about to be served up as not only the new kids in their classes, every child’s worst fear to begin with, but – and here comes another initiation rite, kiddoes – also shoved forward for public inspection in strange uniforms amidst a gabble of accents, backgrounds, and expectations entirely foreign to their own. Even in the intimacy of his tiny American school, Harris the Procrastinator had always dreaded this turning point, so resolutely in fact that he had utterly refused to relinquish his grip on my leg when I tried to usher him into the first grade in the U.S. On that traumatic day, I had to bring him back twice. So there was no mystery regarding his motivation in fussing “for just anoth
er minute” over a Lego creation beside his pillow.

  Owen is different: he adores any challenge that appeals to his particularly opinionated, and sometimes self-set nature. Fascinated since he was two by the inner workings of all things, he had recently unfolded a paper clip and driven both ends into a power point so he could be sure about the live power of circulating electrical currents. Never mind that his fingers were serrated like barbecued meat, he’d found out what he needed to know, and didn’t cry. So he was raring for a crack at a new Irish school, was in fact eager to study his ancient ancestral tongue.

  Porridge – what else? – was served and then the boys struggled into their new Catholic school regalia of gray trousers, white polyester shirts, and black clodhoppers. They were then tourniqueted with striped ties and black blazers ennobled with priceless braided rings of gold and school crests embossed on their breast pockets. A door-stoop photograph was quickly choreographed, with Laura, whose first day at school would be tomorrow, reluctantly appearing in the soon-to-be requisite black tights, gray skirt, red blouse, and striped tie of her more distant school, with her long strawberry hair falling over the shoulders of her official blazer. For years we had endured pitched morning battles about who would deign to wear what to school. So the simplicity of consigning the ingrates to unchanging uniforms was a relief. But the big question was whether Ireland’s academic strictness, religiosity, and fierce attention to basics – the latter long since softened over in self-esteem-obsessed American schools – was about to consign them to a thousand emotional deaths, or expand their horizons.