A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  The Galway road was wet and slippery after the frost, and a thick fog hung in the hollows. I proceeded with care past Ballysadare and through Ballinacarrow, where a “For Sale” sign outside Jimmy G’s, a pub on a wooded half acre with a three-bedroom house, caught my eye. I parked on the main street, still deserted at ten o’clock except for a little terrier who befriended me, and called Padraig, the listing agent, on my cell phone. He’d tried to sell Jimmy G’s at auction a month ago, but there weren’t any takers. Ballinacarrow boasted two new subdivisions, the pompously named Owenmore Paddock and Temple Manor, so I assumed the land alone would be valuable, and Padraig agreed, although the pub’s license also carried an intrinsic worth and would fetch about $260,000 on the open market.

  Padraig couldn’t imagine Jimmy G’s operating as a pub again, and blamed the drink-driving laws. He hoped to sell the land and the license separately. A rural pub’s license used to cost nothing because it was site-specific and couldn’t be transferred to another location, but you can move it anywhere now, and that accounts for the inflated price. The figure Padraig quoted is about average and roughly equal to what you’d pay in Dublin, where a license went for about $700,000 before the new law led to parity. It isn’t just would-be publicans who bid for the licenses, either. Any business that wants to sell alcohol—restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, even gas stations—is a potential buyer.

  As for the campaign against drink-driving, I’d begun to wonder if it might be a knee-jerk excuse offered on behalf of pubs that were already faltering for reasons unrelated to road safety. The impact of “lifestyle changes” in rural Ireland had to be just as profound. A village such as Ballinacarrow isn’t so cut off anymore. The residents of Owenmore Paddock and Temple Manor, like those in Dromod and Ballyscannel, are commuters, probably to Sligo or even Galway, and their lives are diverse and globally intertwined via the media and the Internet—Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy writ large. They don’t share a single core narrative as farmers do, toiling through the cycle of the seasons with their fingers crossed, so the concept of place may be incidental to their destiny. The pub as a community center and a source of oral history may be doomed in that context.

  Meanwhile, I had to deal with an overly affectionate terrier. The little guy threw me doe-eyed glances and tried to jump into my car to ride shotgun, so I gave him a very gentle nudge of the toe and rolled on to Curry, where the Yeats Country Inn (as opposed to the Yeats Country Hotel & Spa in Rosses Point) dominated the scenery. In Bellaghy, Paddy Mac’s was on the block, and so it continued through each town and village, with pubs keeling over before my eyes. The future belonged to the suburbs, it seemed, and not to Jimmy G’s or Paddy Mac’s. Fields were selling faster than licensed premises in Ireland, and you had only to check the statistics to verify it.

  In 1980, there were 223,400 farms in Ireland, but only about 130,000 remain. For the most part, they’re family owned and hold an average of about eighty acres, but they yield just 3 percent of the gross domestic product. The bulk of the acreage is planted to grass, with beef cattle and milk providing a little over half of the total agricultural output. Ireland is the biggest beef dealer in the EU, in fact, with nine of every ten cattle sold for export. A great many farmers are old—one in five is sixty-five or over—and unmarried, so they have no children to succeed them. Farmers who do have families often find that their offspring are as reluctant as publicans’ kids to follow in their footsteps. Though farming can sometimes be lucrative, it’s usually a struggle, and most farmers work a second job to pay the bills.

  To be a farmer in modern Ireland, you need computer skills and high-speed broadband access, as well as a tractor and a mower. The ability to download complicated government forms and unscramble the instructions is a necessity. Without the subsidies farmers receive from both the state and the EU, they’d be in an even deeper mess. Under the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme, a program to reduce overstocking, erosion, and the runoff of nitrates that pollute the Shannon and other rivers, the average farm gets about $10,000 a year. Grants from the EU used to be pegged to production, but they’re geared to the acreage planted now, so you earn the same amount regardless of what you grow or husband, and that makes it tougher on little farms.

  The fierce attachment of the Irish to the land, documented with such fidelity in John B. Keane’s The Field, may be fading fast, along with the agrarian life. There are still some Bull McCabes around, headstrong, brutal men who’ll battle to hang on to their rocky patch, but they, too, are a dying breed. (Keane’s play is based on the case of Moss Morris, an American bachelor farmer, whose neighbor was suspected of murdering him in a dispute about the position of a fence.) As I crossed over from Sligo to east Mayo, though, and skirted the fringe of Knock, a devotional shrine ever since the Virgin Mary materialized on the gable of a parish church in 1879, the countryside was so orderly and serene that you’d never guess the farms, each precisely demarcated by dry stone walls, were in trouble.

  From Claremorris I drove southwest through Ballinrobe until I reached Cong, population 150. The village loomed so large in the romantic view of Ireland that I hadn’t expected it to be so small. It felt like a place beyond which lay nothing—an ethereal, watery place. Cung in Gaelic means a narrow strip of land, and Cong does seem to float on a thin isthmus between Loughs Corrib and Mask, both rich in salmon and brown trout, as is the Cong River. The Augustinian monks at Cong Abbey, founded in 1120 by Turlough Mor O’Connor, an Irish high king and the ruler of Connacht, constructed a fishing hut over the river, with a trap door for hoisting up their catch. They ran a cord to the abbey’s kitchen, and when they yanked it, a bell rang to alert the cooks to light a fire.

  Tourist season was almost over in Cong, as it had been in Yeats Country. I covered the village on foot in a matter of minutes. Pat Cohan’s pub was closed at three in the afternoon, alas, but the Quiet Man Cottage Museum, a whitewashed, thatched replica of Sean Thornton’s White O’Mornin’, readily admitted me. (The actual cottage, now a ruin, is in Malm Cross, thirteen miles away.) For five euros, I was treated to “authentic reproductions” of the Duke and Maureen O’Hara’s costumes, Thornton’s dresser and bed, and a tandem bicycle the lovers rode. (Even as I write these words, I can’t believe I traveled to Cong and paid five euros to gape at a replica of a tandem bike.) The exhibits were nicely curated, but I drew the line at John Wayne’s shoes. As base as it sounds, I’d rather have spent the fiver on a pint at Pat Cohan’s.

  Perhaps the Quiet Man pub would meet my needs and rectify the situation, I thought, but I circled Cong twice, reading signs and peering at storefronts, without seeing a trace of it. The pub was too quiet—it was invisible, or known only to the initiates of the QM Movie Club, possibly a secret society with a special handshake and a coded language. Nobody in town had heard of it, either. Could the bar’s components still be moldering in a Hollywood warehouse or, worse, an attic in Cong? Ryan’s pub was open, but it had no customers because the barman had cranked up Led Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven” to a decibel-shattering level. Barry Fitzgerald, in his role as the leprechaunlike Michaleen, would’ve thrown a fit.

  Forced to look elsewhere for amusement, I roamed through the Quiet Man Gift Shop, where the shelves were stacked with books, memorabilia, and 8” × 10” glossies of the principal actors—Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Mildred Natwick, you could collect the entire cast. Quiet Man aprons dangled from a rack, and there were piles of dusty, emblematic stuff you had to root through to even begin to identify. The proprietor was startlingly uninterested in me, too, given that she had no one else to wait on. A short, snippy woman with wiry black hair, she confessed to being in a bad mood, rankled by the tourists, primarily Americans, who had failed to buy her souvenirs and geegaws on the scale she’d anticipated and probably even dreamed of.

  “What kind of tourists are those?” she carped. You have to imagine the Irish version of a Bronx accent, that grating sound of chalk on a blackboard. I mentioned the painfully weak dollar a
nd alluded to its crippling effect on my own finances, casting about for a bit of sympathy she’d never extend in a bazillion years. “Iraq!” she all but shouted. “Don’t go where you don’t belong! Saddam kept those people in line.” She cheered up, marginally, when I plucked Guide to Quiet Man from her treasure trove, a booklet whose author had been on Ford’s set in his youth. It included info about Cong’s flora and fauna, and anecdotes about the stars—Wayne in a drunken pub brawl, Bond hooking a salmon, McLaglen tearing into a juicy steak at the Imperial Hotel in Tuam, that sort of thing.

  Speaking of food, the proprietor hurried me toward the door, because she was going home for lunch. She had to pick up some groceries first, but only what she could pay for in cash. She disliked credit cards and had never applied for one. “If you can’t afford it, do without it,” she cautioned me, then pointed to a vacant lot across the street, where an apartment complex would soon be built, Cong’s first little tract. She did not approve of it, nor did she think much of some of the American women she’d met, who gorged on junk food and were often three stone, or forty-two pounds, overweight. “Eat healthy!” That was her parting advice.

  She locked the door behind her, and there I stood, alone and friendless in Cong, when I could have been reading a book by the Aga and preparing for a night at Jordans. To while away the eternity that time had become, I walked through the abbey and along the river in a light drizzle until the gates of Pat Cohan’s finally swung open. The pub’s focus, suffice it to say, was on The Quiet Man, a film I’d started to loathe, however unfairly. There were no farmers or anglers inside, just two Japanese guys with crewcuts and a limited command of English, and an Irish-American couple from Albany, who were very sweet and a fount of QM trivia. Cohan’s might have gotten more spritely later on, but I’d headed for Dublin by then, kicking myself once per mile.

  As for the mystery of the Quiet Man pub, Paddy Rock of the QM Movie Club, who leads tours of the film’s locations, solved it for me. The story about the club importing Ford’s prop bar from Hollywood was inaccurate, he told me on the phone, yet Paddy and his mates did intend to turn Pat Cohan’s into an authentic reproduction of its cinematic equivalent. (My confusion over this authenticity issue was extreme by now.) They’d gone about it assidulously, too, analyzing the movie frame by frame. Gus Marshall, another club member and a pub fitter by trade, estimated that he’d studied thirty thousand blown-up stills to gauge the bar’s correct dimensions. The bar, put together in Dublin, would be transported to Cong soon and installed by Marshall and his crew.

  Paddy Rock sounded keyed up about the venture. He’d even devised a gimmick to launch it, although he wouldn’t reveal it in advance. Instead he urged me to watch the QMMC Web site for further details. (“Pat Cohan’s Bar will soon pull its first pint ever,” went the most recent dispatch. In fact, the bar opened in September 2008.) To make Cong and its environs the ultimate experience for fans, Paddy needed only one more piece to complete the jigsaw puzzle, and that was the original White O’Mornin’ at Malm Cross. The owner, a Californian from Orange County, had let the cottage crumble rather than release it to Paddy and his chums, who were eager to establish a trust to restore it. “Maybe you can get somewhere with him,” Paddy suggested. He gave me the number, but I never called. The Californian might be holding out for a better offer from a developer with deep pockets, I figured, someone ready to build Malm Cross Meadows or White O’Mornin’ Villas.

  Chapter 10

  A WISE MAN, INDEED

  The folly of Cong marked the low point of my journey. Some fantasies are so pernicious you can’t talk yourself out of them, even when you’re aware of their probable distance from reality. I knew better than to expect anything special from a venture designed to rope in tourists, yet some twisted part of me still held out a minuscule hope that the Quiet Man pub would rise above its origins and deliver a memorable experience. Fairytale Ireland—romantic, changeless—packs a powerful punch, and it weaves a witchy spell that keeps those plastic pubs around the world in business. People long for the mythical kingdom of harps and Guinness, bards and crumbling castles, where conflict doesn’t exist and Tim Finnegan wakes from the dead, buoyed back to life by a baptismal splash of whiskey.

  Fairytale Ireland, with its accent on authentic replication, is an empire built on kitsch, but there’s a good deal of hand-wringing in its real-life counterpart at present over what it actually means to be Irish. Identity is a slippery concept, particularly in a global context, and the Irish feel protective toward their own, although they’re not adept at defining it precisely. Yet it’s so valued and talismanic that Síle de Valera, a former Minister of the Arts, fretted about Ireland’s participation in the EU and saw it as a potential threat to the “core of our historic identity,” a catchall phrase broad enough to include Tara, the Book of Kells, and the traditional pub. In fact, the Irish are far more comfortable identifying with America than with Europe. “We’re closer spiritually to Boston than Berlin,” Mary Harney, a prominent politician, once said.

  America has always been the land of opportunity for the Irish, of course, where an immigrant can take advantage of breaks that didn’t exist at home until quite recently. The component of longing in Fairytale Ireland may well have its roots in the displacement so many of the Irish endured when they left home and crossed the Atlantic to better themselves. America stands for the future, while England brings to mind the colonial past. Perhaps that accounts for the transformation of Ranelagh into a weirdly American hybrid, with Russells as our virtual Santa Monica and McSorley & Sons as our virtual Upper East Side. TriBeCa is the busiest eatery on Ranelagh Road, and Gourmet Burger is the most popular new café, but does that imply that Ireland, through its sudden boom, is becoming virtual, too, and losing its distinctive Irishness?

  And what constitutes Irishness, anyway? When the Irish Times asked its readers to list six aspects of it some years ago, the question prompted a spate of self-deprecatory humor salted with liberal lashings of the truth. Among the traits mentioned were an innate ability to talk about the weather; a natural capacity for arriving late; being a Roman Catholic and harboring a slight suspicion that sex is still a sin; a love of the horse races; the spontaneous singing of ballads; a string of relatives in the U.S.; a tendency to exaggerate; and a strong desire to avoid marriage before forty (men only). Yet the single factor referred to most often was the pub, as in knowing what time it closes; an unnatural capacity for drink, especially the late one; an inside knowledge of the local public house; and the inability to leave public houses before closing time.

  My quest, conceived in very simple terms, had evolved into something far more complicated and not so easy to resolve. I felt guilty about my rash decision to abandon Sligo, too, and thought I’d make amends by exploring the fertile agricultural areas of County Kildare, where the soil is kinder than rocky Connacht’s and farming is still a bread-and-butter activity. After careful consideration, I drew up a plan and promised to stick to it, regardless of the potential distractions. The town of Athy was on the menu for certain, because it’s known for the sheer quantity of its pubs. Athy (“a thigh,” as Joyce has it) is also the malting capital of Ireland, where barley is processed and dispatched to Guinness and other brewers. Before that, though, I’d visit Ballitore, a village settled by some Quakers from Yorkshire in the late sixteenth century, whose exploits I’d read about in the work of Mary Leadbeater, one of the first Irish women writers to appear in print.

  I set out on an October morning with a hint of winter in the air, glad to be on the road again and putting the Cong episode behind me. Like the batter who strikes out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, I wanted to improve my game. In spite of the chill, the fields of Kildare were a delight to see, so crisp in the clear light and stocked with horses, sheep, and cattle. Cows have been a fixture on Irish farms since the Pagan Iron Age, at least, when they were esteemed as gifts and accepted as currency. You could pay a debt with a cow, or tender one in tribute. On S
t. Patrick’s list of “heinous crimes,” those against cows occupied the top three spots—killing trained oxen, burning byres and cattle enclosures, and rustling.

  Geographers divide Kildare into three regions. To the north lies the portion of racing fame, an imposing swath of stud farms, hunt clubs, grand Georgian estates, and green pastures. Here you find both the Curragh and the National Stud, whose founder, Colonel William Hall Walker, believed horses were subject to the same astrological forces as human beings. Walker’s stallion boxes, still in use, have lantern roofs that open to allow the moon and stars to exert their influence. To the west of Kildare are the huge peat bogs that once stretched all the way to the Shannon, and to the south, where Ballitore is located, tillage farms are common.

  Mary Leadbeater described the village as “encompassed by gently rising hills, except where the river Griese takes its meandering course . . . to its union with the Barrow near Jerusalem, a little hamlet in the country of Kildare. Ballitore derives its name,” she went on, “from its former marsh condition [‘bally’ in Irish signifies a town or village, and ‘togher’ a bog] from which it was reclaimed by drainage and careful cultivation.” Those responsible for the groves, orchards, and thick hedgerows were Mary’s forebears, the Yorkshire Quakers, who did the planting in a vale “very barren of trees.”

  Abraham Shackleton, Mary’s grandfather, created an extraordinary school in Ballitore in 1726. It housed between fifty and sixty boarders, and also took in day students. The boarders came from as far away as the West Indies. Mary recorded how Jesse Balrieves, a Jamaican, woke to his first snowy morning and shouted to his dorm mates, “O boys! See all the sugar!” Two other lads from the islands were so “small and lively” that her mother literally pinned them to her apron to prevent them from harm. Mary, the only girl at the school, could read at the age of four and later captured the rowdy atmosphere of recess in a poem: