by Bill Barich
The desire of most Dubliners to indulge in the same luxuries to be enjoyed in the other capitals of Europe, in Madrid or Paris, is understandable. Change is inevitable, after all, especially in a country so hungry for it, but what troubled me was the speed of change in Ireland and the unaddressed nature of it—what it means, if you will. The two-lane blacktops pressed into service as highways are a problem, but should Tara be threatened to correct it, simply to please the commuters? Isn’t some ancient compact among the past, present, and future being violated, a baby thrown out with the bathwater? Like Americans, the Irish are desperate to own a home, but should the country’s greenbelt be carved up and turned into one big suburb—with very little thought or advance planning—to accommodate that desire? For a developer, the land spells profit. For a farmer, the land is soil and eternal.
When I talked with my friends about what by now could only be called my obsession with the traditional pub, their eyes glazed over at times. Why bother with such an outmoded institution? They viewed me as the innocent I’d once been, the guy from California who’d seen The Quiet Man too often, listened to too many Van Morrison CDs, and bought into a nostalgia that John Ford, perhaps, had kicked off in 1952. Yet I still believed the traditional pub held a special significance for the Irish, and that nostalgia didn’t enter into the equation. Only when I went back to the National Library after my trip to Kildare, though, and began to dig through some scholarly works on culture and identity did I find some support for my belief.
First came Walter Benjamin, scarcely a name you’ll hear dropped very often at Birchall’s, who had wrestled with the issue of authenticity in his essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He wrote, “Precisely because authenticity cannot be reproduced”—how gratified I was to read those words!—“the arrival of certain techniques of reproduction . . . has provided the means to differentiate levels of authenticity.” Authenticity is actual and original, says Benjamin, and it has an aura. It isn’t in the eye of the beholder, then, despite the musings of market researchers, nor could it be attributed to Nine Fine Irishmen on the Vegas strip. The essay also explained why a trophy pub such as James Toner partakes of a measure of tradition that lifts it above most other pubs, although not quite to the level of the unspoiled ideal, where the pairing of drink and talk are supreme.
Even more instructive was a passage I found in John Berger’s “Towards Understanding Peasant Experience.” It struck me like a bolt from the blue, as pure enlightenment. “To dismiss peasant experience as belonging only to the past,” argued Berger, “as having no relevance to modern life . . . to continue to maintain, as has been maintained for centuries, that peasant experience is marginal to civilization, is to deny the value of too much history and too many lives.” The traditional pub is central to the Irish peasant experience, really, and what matters about it, maybe foremost among the qualities of Oldenburg’s third place, is its characteristic democracy, where the great divide that affects all societies can be momentarily erased. It isn’t nostalgic to see the traditional pub as both important and still relevant, if only as a repository for and a caretaker of Ireland’s “historic identity,” and its gradual disappearance may signify the loss of an authentic, irreplaceable aspect of that mystical entity called “Irishness.”
Obsessions die hard. After reading Benjamin and Berger, against my better judgment, I made one more trip that December, deeper into farm country and farther away from Dublin in hopes of getting beyond the commuter rim and the city’s influence. I settled on County Offaly in the Midlands, whose status as an agricultural hub had been franked that September when the National Ploughing Championships—a three-day fiesta centered around plows, furrows, and such seminars as “Market Situation for Beef and Veal at EU Level”—drew 166,000 paying customers to Annaharvey Farm in Tullamore. The county is a low-lying, boggy region on the Shannon floodplain, with two thirds of its population in rural areas and no large urban complex. The farmers have an average age of about fifty, and rear mostly sheep and beef cattle, with some dairying.
The weather was miserable again when I left the city. Martin Gale, a brilliant painter in Kildare, born in England but long resident in Ireland, conveys the gloom of a leaden sky better than anyone. For Gale, it’s not only gray and impenetrable but also ominous, a heavy lid that clamps down from above and inhibits the possibility of human joy. In an essay on Coming Storm, a recent painting of Gale’s, the poet Dennis O’Driscoll talks about how the clouds seem “hell-bent on eliminating everything radiant in their path,” and that describes perfectly how the horizon looked to me.
The storm broke as I passed the Curragh, not as cold as the last but far more intense, with sheets of rain so thick I could barely see. I was relieved to get off the highway at Monasterevin and onto a lightly traveled back road to Birr, a town my guidebooks had praised. Again I was surrounded by green fields, and though the rain let up as I approached Mountmellick, another place with Quaker roots, the clouds never lifted, nor did the sky brighten. Soon the Slieve Bloom Mountains came into view, carpeted with blanket bog and densely forested, and next the attractive village of Clonaslee in County Laois, where I tried to rustle up some lunch at the only supermarket.
The sandwich counter failed to whet my appetite. It could have been the tray of previously fried and deep-fried food—chicken nuggets, wedges of potato, fatty sausages—that put me off, or maybe the sign that warned customers to eat what they purchased in the next ninety minutes or suffer the unstated consequences. To the good, the market bustled with farmers in muddy rubber boots, who groused to each other about the storm and sometimes parked a tractor out front. Tractors are big in Clonaslee. Five publications on the magazine rack pictured one on the cover, while the Irish Farmers Journal featured a photo of some weanling bullocks posed against a blaze of winter sun.
I considered my options. In Clonaslee, they were not unlimited. Aside from the market, the village has two small groceries, a butcher, a garage with a gas pump, and five pubs. Blooms, the only restaurant, was closed, and that left Antonio’s, a classic chipper. I tend to avoid chippers for the same reason I gave up toasted sandwiches, but I was starving. Antonio is a sturdy fellow built like a fireplug, and when you order some chips, he takes his time to prepare them. They’re done from scratch, so it’s about a seven-minute wait. The potatoes are crucial—Maris Pipers are supposed to be the top choice—as is the temperature of the oil, but you need the skill of a master to bring all the elements together, and Antonio has it. His chips, doused with salt and vinegar, were hot, crisp, and meltingly soft within.
One pub on the main street, John Feery’s Cosy Bar, happened to be open in the early afternoon, a rarity out in the country these days. It’s a cheerful-looking spot, where a slogan on the façade boasts, “If you want a good drink, we serve only the best,” so I rose to the bait. The Cosy Bar fit its description to a tee, being tiny, intimate, and unaffected, and T. J. Wrafter, the barman, made it even cozier by virtue of his size. Though he proved to be hospitable, he loomed large behind the taps, and when I said, “I want a good drink,” I worried for a split second that he might not find me as clever as I found myself, but he just nodded, replied “Aye,” and poured my Guinness.
For once I was not alone at the bar. The other customer, a taciturn farmer, was as muddy as his peers at the market. If he’d been toiling in the boggy fields since dawn, he likely deserved the large bottle of Macardles Ale that he finished almost in a gulp. He wasn’t inclined to chat, so I toured Feery’s and read a yellowed newspaper clip about Glebe Lad, who won the Irish Grand National in 1999. The horse belonged to a Clonaslee man, and his neighbors had backed it and cleaned out the bookies in Tullamore. Meanwhile, the parched farmer polished off another Macardles just as quickly as the first. He must be on foot or on a bike, I thought, or else unafraid of the police.
The story of John Feery’s, as T. J. related it, matched those I’d heard before. His mother, Ina, is the current license holder, but non
e of her children except T. J., who’s thirty-five, care about the pub, even though it’s been in the family for almost a hundred years. The trade was slow now. Ordinarily, the bar stayed closed until tea time, but there had been a funeral that morning, and the mourners needed a nearby place where they could meet for a drink afterward, so T. J. opened as a courtesy. Once Clonaslee’s main street had been dotted with shops, he recalled, just like Ballitore, but most had gone out of business. Farming was on the skids, too, in spite of the interest in tractors. New suburbs were under construction in the Slieve Blooms, and the buyers worked elsewhere—in Birr, Tullamore, Kildare, and even Dublin, a two-plus-hour commute each way.
The Laois County Council anticipated more of the same, and had said as much in its Draft Town Plan, published that month. Clonaslee is “expected to experience pressure for development over the lifetime of this plan,” or the next six years, the council had concluded, and while its intentions were doubtlessly honorable, such plans are often drawn up after the genie’s already escaped from the bottle. The rush hours were treacherous, T. J. told me, because the local roads, no wider or better lit than those in rural Sligo, must deal with speeders, tailgaters, farm machinery, the occasional runaway chicken or cow, and, most dangerously, cyclists and pedestrians. Through November 2007, Ireland had recorded 288 traffic deaths that year, with 29 percent of the victims hit by a car rather than driving or riding in one. No wonder the people walking their dogs in Clonaslee wore bright-yellow reflector vests in broad daylight.
A second farmer arrived at the Cosy Bar. He was in his seventies, with cheeks ruddy from exposure. He’d dressed up for the visit to town in a flat cap and a tie, concerned about his appearance and dignified in manner. His voice sounded thin and creaky, like the rusty hinge of a little-used door, when he asked T. J. for a large, or double, whiskey.
“Dirty old day,” he said to me, lifting the glass in a toast.
“Awful.”
“That rain!”
“All the way from Dublin.”
He paused for a sip and coughed, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. “I live up in the mountains.”
“You must have lived up there for a while,” I said.
He smiled. “The whole time.”
The whole time. His words affected me. There’d be no other time for him, and no other place. Clonaslee constituted his whole universe, the be-all and end-all of his existence, but the village he’d always known was fading away, like the clipping about Glebe Lad. The figures in Martin Gale’s paintings, often portrayed in a field, look confused and unsure of themselves, as if a purpose they’d once grasped firmly had slipped through their fingers, and the old farmer shared that uncertainty. He had nothing more to say. He downed his whiskey in a swallow, adjusted his cap, and went out the door.
The drink-driving laws had hurt Feery’s, of course. The local cops exercise good judgment, T. J. said, but the customers still worry about a random test. On weekends, the Cosy Bar used to attract folks from ten different villages, who swapped gossip and played music, but that was impossible now. T. J. is a realist, though, and unsentimental. You can’t drink and drive, period. Clonaslee couldn’t support five pubs anymore, either, he believed. Maybe his regulars would adapt and rely on taxis, but human nature probably dictated against it. People want what they want, after all, even if it’s only a good drink, and they want it right away. In fact, the Wrafters had already listed the Cosy Bar with a real estate agent very quietly, without a sign out front—the pub; a seven-bed, two-bath house; and about an acre of land, price on application.
The sky was still gray and even darker when I resumed the drive through the Slieve Blooms to Birr. The mountains, limestone layered over older red sandstone, are just hills, really, with the highest peak topping out at about 1,700 feet, but the range is seductive in a low-impact way, cut through with streams, waterfalls, and hiking trails. In spite of the weather, I took a break and walked along the Silver River by Cadamstown in Offaly, hard by the John Dempsey pub (closed), the hamlet’s only business, and savored the rain-freshened air. If you were to depart from Dempsey’s at night, the forest with its trove of mysteries might well play upon your mind. Which trail leads toward home? What’s that noise in the thicket? Where did I put my cell phone? Here was the very moment that gives birth to those ghost stories.
“I woke one morning at eight A.M.,” a woman at the Tullamore Active Retirement Association told Fearga Kenny, who collected such tales for a book, “and I was in a strange place. I saw the whole of a dog with a small black head in the room. It was a fairy dog!” Fortunately, she recovered from her fright, because those who cling to it will be dead in a year, legend has it. In the villages of Offaly, there was frequently a house with a room locked in perpetuity to keep the ghosts inside. Strong men yanked on the knob, but the door wouldn’t budge. Ghost trains glided down the railroad tracks, a headlight visible in the distance, only to disappear. A driver bound for Dublin once picked up four hitchhikers, but they vanished before he reached the city—ghosts of those who’d been killed at the exact intersection where he met them.
The elderly of Tullamore were superstitious, too. As children, their biggest fear had been to spot a single magpie. “One for sorrow, two for joy,” as the nursery rhyme goes, so they’d shudder and hide their eyes until a parent told them that the magpie had a mate—they just couldn’t see it. As adults, they were spooked by redheads, who stood for bad luck. (In a curious reversal, black cats meant good luck.) If a redhead crossed your path while you were traveling, it was better to turn around and go home. Red in general was a forbidding color. You tempted fate if you wore it above green, but if you found a spider on your clothes, you’d soon receive a new coat. Spiders were a symbol of Our Lord, and were never swatted or squashed.
There was no sign of life at Dempsey’s after my walk, so I continued on to Birr. As previously mentioned, I had disagreed with my Rough Guide over its treatment of Athy, so I’d brought along my Lonely Planet, as well, to provide a second opinion. I’ve never had much faith in guidebooks, though, and such faith as I did have soon evaporated. “Birr is a little gem, with beautifully restored Georgian streets, classy accommodation options and excellent restaurants,” asserted the Lonely Planet, while the Rough Guide weighed in with another laudatory assessment, “A truly delightful Georgian town, with wide, airy streets and finely detailed, fan-lit houses.”
For a brief moment, I believed it would all come true. On the outskirts of Birr, I spied a grand house with exquisite grounds, the sort of estate that suggests masked balls and kegs of three-hundred-year-old port in the cellar, but the illusion did not last long. Guidebook writers practice a form of corrupted honesty and often commit what Our Lord calls a sin of omission. There may be fan-lit houses and classy accommodations in Birr, but the streets were too blocked and congested to get anywhere near them. Of the town’s 3,500 residents, approximately 3,468 seemed to be out for a spin. Instead of basking in Georgian glory, I sat gridlocked in the midst of cars, motorcycles, buses, bicycles, and obscenely large trucks—fifty, sixty, even seventy feet long—loaded with a hellish variety of freight.
One truck carried huge concrete berms—highway dividers, perhaps, each balanced precariously on a flatbed—and when the driver tried to bulldoze his way into a more strategic position in front of me, a voice from the Nine O’Clock News rang in my ear. “In Birr this afternoon, an American was crushed to death in a freak accident,” the voice said gravely, and that led to a spike in my paranoia. To calm myself, I fixed my gaze on Dooly’s Hotel in Emmet Square, where the Galway Hunt Club, celebrating during a stay in 1809, partied with such enthusiasm that they burned down Dooly’s and have been known forever after as the Galway Blazers.
In the end, I panicked. Rather than risk a turn onto Birr’s equally clogged main drag, I shot through a minuscule gap in the grid toward Banagher, sure to be less harried. I felt better right away, able to breathe again, on the open road once more. Banagher is more compact, I told
myself, indulging in a pep talk, and will be easier to negotiate. It’s a historic market town, I also told myself, and it has literary resonances. Trollope wrote The Macdermots of Ballycloran, his first novel, while he worked as a postal clerk, and Charlotte Brontë spent her honeymoon there by the Shannon. Moreover, the public houses have a notoriety that can be traced back to the livestock fairs of the eighteenth century. Banagher—I was going to love it.
Those livestock fairs were rowdy events. They left the streets cluttered with dung and kept the shopkeepers, who boarded up their windows, on edge. Porter was the beverage of choice, with whiskey as its partner in crime. One farmer involved in a stabbing incident reportedly drank a gallon of porter before noon, although he denied the charge—only a half gallon, he swore. As for the knife, he’d been cleaning his pipe with it, and lashed out in a reflex action when a ruffian attacked him. If a farmer closed a deal with a hand clasp and a gob of spit—too many different dialects were spoken for a common language to exist—he was entitled to drink up the proceeds and would hire a boy to stand barefoot in the manure and mind his stock while he imbibed.
For the impoverished of Banagher, life was hard, particularly for those who were old and alone. If they fell sick or developed an infirmity, they wound up at a hideous poorhouse in Birr that did its best to dispose of its clients even before they got there. A one-eyed drunk drove the van that collected the downtrodden, and it was pulled by a one-eyed horse, possibly in the same condition. The driver hit every bump and pothole on purpose, hoping to kill off the passenger. If he failed in his mission, his “nurse” often finished the job by placing a mattress on top of the poor (in every sense) victim, lying on it, and smothering him.
