by Bill Barich
That wasn’t news to me, of course, but the story was actually much more complicated. It was about the potential impact on Ireland’s “historic identity,” and about the decline of the Irish village, where those generic logos of franchises were replacing the distinctive shopfronts. It was about the vanishing greenbelt, too, and the farmers’ struggle to survive, and also about the new suburbs that were being built without much planning. It was about values, as well, and money and a highway that threatened Tara—about the rapidity of change and the problems that come with it.
For the Irish, the revelry draws to a close on Epiphany, January sixth, known as Nollaig Bheag, or Little Christmas, and also as Women’s Christmas, a day when men are supposed to discharge the household chores and then make themselves scarce, while their wives, girlfriends, mothers, aunties, and so on gather to do whatever it is they do. I’d laid in the provisions for dinner, so I had only to become invisible, an easy enough job. I slipped from the house before the guests arrived and walked to the city center once again, around Christ Church, past the Brazen Head, and over Father Mathew Bridge to Smithfield, where all manner of activity was going on.
At one end of the square, a skating rink had been set up—Dublin on Ice, an annual extravaganza. Everywhere kids were clamoring for skates, or inspecting the bruises they’d gotten after renting a pair and taking a fall. At the other end, the last stragglers from the Sunday horse fair were leading away their bedraggled animals. A pony boy in a track suit leaped onto his mount, a sorry-looking creature shedding its hair in clumps, and dug in his heels and rode off like a prince of the city, cars and buses be damned. Nearby, a traveler and his son were trying to induce their horse, an Irish cob, to go forward rather than stand still. They slapped its hindquarters, yanked on the bridle, and bellowed in its ears until the horse obeyed.
The ancient cobbles of Smithfield were thick with steaming manure, and smeared with it where the unwary had planted a foot by mistake. Though some believe this brings good luck, I preferred no luck at all and watched my step on the way to the Cobblestone, where a drop-in session was about to begin. Mick, the flute player, was at its center again, a robust anchor for three fiddles, a second flute, and a tin whistle. In the delicate half-light of winter, I sat at the bar with my Guinness, thoroughly content and remembering Eugene Kavanagh’s line once more. About the time when pistachio oil reaches Ireland’s farthest outposts—a hamlet on the Beara Peninsula, say, where the fishermen still mend their nets—people might look up forlornly and recall the simple pleasure of a pint of plain.
How odd it was to consider that Fairytale Ireland, where Finian’s rainbow dispels the gloom and Sean Thornton still lives at White O’Mornin’, had been concocted in part from the virtues that the traditional pub embodies—civility and kindness, warmth and good humor, a love of talk and a sense of community, all those qualities I’d felt and been nourished by at M.D. Hickey, where I’d been rescued from the night. Almost everywhere, the local—as in the particular, the unique—was under siege, batted about the head by the insistently global. I had nothing against Gourmet Burger and might even eat there soon—and probably enjoy it—but I’d go to the Gravediggers to touch the soul of Ireland.
The soul of Ireland was far too weighty a topic for the Cobblestone, though, and I already knew myself to be in its presence, anyway, as I happily hoisted a glass. The scene couldn’t be manufactured or authentically replicated anywhere else on earth, and therein lay its beauty. As I floated along with the music, I wondered what had happened to Derek, the minstrel lad with the red button accordion. I hoped his Christmas had been bountiful, and that he hadn’t been kidnapped again by the same gang of friends who’d dragged him from pub to pub until his pockets were almost empty—or if he had been kidnapped that he played his squeeze-box with a celestial fire, but here the fiddles interrupted my meditation and rose to a crescendo that broke like a wave, and all fell silent again. I took a breath and a sip of stout. I felt relaxed, uplifted. As for ordinary cares, I had none.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Donall O’Keefe, the chief executive of the Licensed Vintners Association, for the useful information he supplied on the pub trade in Dublin, and to Noel Darby of the Irish Pub Company for his insights into its operation. I am grateful, as well, to the Traditional Music Archive and the National Library, where the staff members were unfailingly helpful with my research. I am indebted, of course, to the publicans who were willing to talk with and educate me about a trade more mysterious than one might assume. George Gibson and Michele Amundsen offered kind editorial advice, and Liz Darhansoff, my agent, her much-appreciated support.
Among my bibliographic sources, I must single out in particular Cian Molloy’s The Story of the Irish Pub, a fine introduction to the territory I explored; the oral histories of Kevin Kearns, invaluable to anyone who hopes to understand bedrock Dublin; Anthony Cronin’s incisive, beautifully written Dead as Doornails for its unsparing account of McDaids during its literary heyday; and Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable, compiled by Sean McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue, for the many leads and clues it provided.
Pubs differ in their approach to the apostrophe, as noted in the text. O’Donoghue’s uses it, for example, while Russells doesn’t. I have translated euros into dollars as necessary, but the exchange rate is volatile these days, so the figures should be taken as rough estimates only.
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A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Bill Barich is the author of seven books, among them Carson Valley, A Fine Place to Daydream, and the racetrack classic Laughing in the Hills. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a literary laureate of the San Francisco Public Library, and currently lives in Dublin.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance, and the Irish
Crazy for Rivers
Carson Valley
Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California
Hard to Be Good
Traveling Light
Laughing in the Hills
First published in Great Britain 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Bill Barich
This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The right of Bill Barich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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