by Mike Parker
Croagh Patrick, or the Reek as it’s known locally, succeeds on all fronts. A 2,510ft (765m) cone of quartz, it rears out of the landscape at the bottom of the island-spattered Clew Bay on the wild coast of County Mayo. The rounded shoulders of the Connemara mountains sit at a discreet distance, leaving Croagh Patrick to wallow in its own glory, commanding land, sea and air – not that you can always tell which is which. The boundaries between them fuzz in the ever-changing light, as sea mists roll in, clouds billow over, sunlight bursts through in day-glo shafts and rainbows shimmer briefly into life. No-one can resist the holy pull of the Reek. To climb it is as much a part of the Irish identity as is doing the Hajj to Mecca for a Muslim. Especially on Reek Sunday, the final weekend of July, a date that harks back to the ancient Celtic harvest festival of Lughnasa, when anything between twenty and thirty thousand people sweat and grind their way up its unyielding slopes. And although the Reek’s origins as a place of pilgrimage far pre-date Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church has done everything in its power to appropriate the mountain as one of its own. There might be many a pagan overtone, but the journey would be played out against the backdrop of muscular Papism, in all its shredded splendour.
Returning to County Mayo would be a thrilling prospect too. I’d been there only once, 20 years ago, but stayed for weeks, so bewitched was I by its landscape and life. It was high on my list of places I’d enjoyed so much that I was nervous of returning, lest the experience prove anything other than utterly magical and shatter the precious memories. That 1991 Irish trip was possibly the happiest of my life, as I was 24 years old and had just waltzed out of the world of proper jobs, after barely two years of even trying. Two spiky guidebooks under my belt, published to near universal indifference, I was nonetheless convinced that the world would eagerly lap up my observations about it. Ireland was to be the first of an endless series of award-winning books by the firebrand young writer, and in the months leading up to it and my six weeks travelling around the country, I soaked myself in Irish history and literature and filled two massive notebooks with my earnest musings on it all. And there they stayed, the publishing industry proving strangely immune to their genius.
The venue and time for my pilgrimage presented themselves, and so did the method of transport to reach it. There was only one possible way to get to a Catholic pilgrimage in Mayo, and that was to fly into Knock Airport, the Virgin Mary’s own international aviation facility. As befits a name that sounds like the start of a joke, the airport has been the butt of incredulous laughter for decades. Since it opened a quarter of a century ago, it has had four names: Knock Airport, then the Monsignor Horan International, after the local priest who came up with the grand idea of sticking a runway on top of a foggy, boggy mountain in Mayo, then the Connaught Regional Airport, and now the Ireland West Airport Knock. And it’s nearest to Charlestown, not Knock.
Who’s there?
Absolutely feckin’ no-one, went the sardonic reply. The idea that folk would choose to fly into the peat bogs of western Ireland, and all because the local priest thought his village could do with its own airport, was an Irish joke that shot around the world in the 1970s and early 1980s. The people of County Mayo weren’t laughing though. They trusted Monsignor James Horan to come up with the goods; his track record certainly suggested he might. The Monsignor was devoutly local and a brilliant populist, capable of coming up with ever-grander schemes to enthuse his parishioners. In one of his earlier parishes at nearby Tooreen, he’d bullied the GPO in Dublin into opening a post office there, and then, convinced that it was partly a lack of social opportunity for young people that was driving them out of the west, built them an outsized dance hall. It became one of Ireland’s most famous venues of the 1950s and 1960s, though not entirely for the reasons Father Horan had anticipated. For over half a century, legend has persisted that one night the Devil himself attended a dance at the Tooreen Hall, whisking some local colleen off her feet before disappearing in a sulphurous cloud and a brief glimpse of cloven hooves. A drama of the supposed event was the 2009 Christmas-night blockbuster on TG4, the Irish-language TV station, and included some ageing gobshites insisting that they had witnessed Old Nick’s dirty dancing and malodorous departure one far-off night in 1958.
Difficult though it is to pick out hard truth from the mists of time and the even denser fog of Mayo mythmaking, a more prosaic explanation comes from a tract that had just been published at the time by the Catholic Truth Society, called The Devil at Dances. This had fulminated angrily against the Church organising sinful dances in country parishes by weaving a clumsy allegory about an actual visitation by the Horned One to a western village hall. Somehow, the story stuck to Tooreen: one theory is that this was thanks to some concerted smearing by a rival dance promoter eager to squash the success of Fr Horan’s new hall. This rival was none other than Albert Reynolds, future Taioseach. True or not, it didn’t kill Horan’s hall: quite the opposite. Now infamous for its diabolic visitation, Tooreen became one of the busiest dancehalls in the land, the acrid tang of rising rural hormones the perfect olfactory complement to the satanic sulphur.
In 1963, Horan became the curate – and shortly afterwards, the parish priest – at nearby Knock, transforming the rundown village into a shrine of global renown. In August 1879, the Virgin Mary, together with St John and St Joseph, had manifested in an apparition to a group of villagers on the gable end of their dowdy parish church. Knock had been a fairly low-level shrine ever since, but Horan was determined to elevate it to the Catholic Premier League, a name synonymous with Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje (incidentally, all destinations served by Knock Airport, alongside more secular shrines such as Gran Canaria and Alicante). A vast shed of a new church, dedicated to Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, and able to hold a congregation of 10,000, was built and consecrated in 1976. In a PR masterstroke, Horan succeeded in securing a visit to celebrate the centenary of the 1879 apparition by the charismatic new Polish Pope, John Paul II. The Monsignor expertly capitalised on the publicity, using it to add some considerable traction to the idea of a holy airport for Knock.
Buoyed by the post-Pope euphoria, the government swung in behind the Monsignor. The Minister of Transport, Horan’s old sparring partner Albert Reynolds, performed a sod-cutting ceremony on 2 May 1981 – the lump of stringy turf he pulled out, and the spade with which he dug it, are preserved with all of the solemnity normally accorded to a saint’s relics in the airport’s arrivals hall (arrivals corridor, if we’re being picky). An election soon followed, which resulted in a change of government and a change of heart regarding the airport; true to good Catholic teaching, the new government pulled out at the last minute.
The people of Knock were not to be ignored, however. Rallied by the man in a dog collar and hard hat, they poured on to the unpromising peaty peak of Barr na Cùige, levelled the ground and began to lay the runway themselves. On 25 October 1985, two jets took off in the only direction they knew, from Knock to Rome. More flights followed; not many, but enough to quieten the worst of the scoffers. On 30 May of the following year, 20,000 cheering Mayomen attended the airport’s official opening by the swaggeringly bent three-times Taioseach Charlie Haughey, who loved to play up his humble Mayo origins. Just two months later, Monsignor Horan died suddenly on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Not a great advert for the healing powers of Lourdes, but a terrific boost for his immaculately conceived airport, and it has gone from modest strength to strength ever since.
I’ve always loved the story of Knock Airport, one Monsignor against the world. It worked too: an utterly marginalised economy at the very edge of Europe was given a blood transfusion. In a Westport gift shop, I mentioned to the dotty lady owner that I was flying back home from Knock. ‘Ah, praise be for the airport,’ she wheezed back, as if breathing the Catechism. There have been numerous books about the story, and even a musical. Its inevitable title – though no less brilliant for that – is On a Wing and a Prayer. It can surely only be a matter of time unti
l the Hollywood movie, its paddywhackery dial turned up to 11.
My plane swung in low over the squelchy sump of eastern Mayo and banked down on to the top of the hill. From the air, the terminal building looked like Lego, an impression that doesn’t shift much on entering it. Inside the main hall was a perky little blue booth, with a sign on top reading ‘KNOCK SHRINE OFFICE’. A few intriguing posters were displayed, telling punters that while it was all well and good getting excited about the Virgin’s 1879 appearance in the village, they were not to believe any more recent sightings claimed of her at the shrine.
This was a coy reference to the hullabaloo of autumn 2009, when Dublin healer and soi-disant mystic Joe Coleman declared publicly that Mary herself had appeared to him and promised that she would be back at Knock on the afternoon of 11 October. Twenty thousand pilgrims came to see. Expectation and excitement built up as Coleman secreted himself in the basilica. He appeared outside, and processed through the crowd holding a huge crucifix. Folk trampled on each other to touch it. And then the sun came out from behind a cloud. People started clapping, and saying that they could see the Virgin in it. Cameras and eyes were pointed straight at the sun. After a minute or so squinting at it, people started to see strange shapes and had the sensation that the sun was spinning around. They shrieked and hollered. It’s a miracle! Or it could have been the warning signs of retinal detachment: cases of solar retinopathy soared in Ireland in the months after. Either way, Coleman announced that Mary had enjoyed herself so much, she’d be back again on 31 October. Only about a quarter of the crowd came back this time, and it wasn’t quite as sunny. It had caused enough of a ruckus though for the Church to put up posters at the airport and distance themselves from Coleman and his visions. The Archbishop of Tuam stuck a tart message on his website: ‘Unfortunately, recent events at the Shrine obscure [our] essential message. They risk misleading God’s people and undermining faith. For this reason such events are to be regretted rather than encouraged.’ It would seem that the Blessed Virgin has an Appear By date on her, except of course when she returns as an image in a tree trunk or a pizza.
This was exactly why I wanted to go and do my pilgrimage in Ireland. A country where some nutter could make thousands of people travel across the country to convince themselves that they had seen the face of God in a cloud is somewhere that takes this stuff deadly seriously. A place where people might sink to their knees, burst into tears, shriek in Latin or tongues and wave their stick at the heavens. You just wouldn’t get that in the C of E. The week before I left, an old episode of Father Ted had been on TV. In it, Mrs Doyle is heading off on her Lenten retreat, which includes a pilgrimage up St Patrick’s Hill, a barely disguised Croagh Patrick. Dougal asks Ted what’s so special about the hill, and Ted replies: ‘Ah, it’s a big mountain. You have to take your socks off to go up it, and once you reach the top, they chase you back down again with a big plank. It’s great fun.’ Mrs Doyle is not impressed: ‘Oh, I don’t want it to be any fun at all, Father. I want a good, miserable time.’ My sentiments entirely, and I was sorely disappointed that it wasn’t Ryanair operating the route I needed into Knock.
Croagh Patrick took its name from the 40 biblical days and nights that St Patrick spent on its summit in AD 441. He’d travelled there from Ballintober Abbey, 20 miles further inland, along an ancient track that is believed to have been constructed to ferry druids and pilgrims from the seat of the Kings of Connaught to the holy mountain. The path, called the Tóchar Phádraig, or Patrick’s Causeway, has been re-opened over the past 25 years, though it passes across 63 different pockets of private land and is only freely open on a few days of the year. One of those days was Reek Sunday, and the Abbey was organising a pilgrimage for those who wanted to process to the Reek along this venerable route, before joining the rest of the throng ascending the mountain. I signed up immediately, and booked a B&B for the weekend in Ballintober.
It all fitted: Ballintober Abbey had played a major part in my fondly remembered trip of 20 years ago, for I’d had two startlingly different experiences there just a couple of days apart. The first was with a friend, a very English and very Anglican priest, who had come visiting me in the west from his job as a chaplain in a Cambridge college. We’d landed in Westport, County Mayo’s sweetest honeypot, full of folksy young Europeans twiddling their tin whistles in pubs that jumped with music. This was pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, even pre-Eurovision and Riverdance, but there was definitely a sense that the country was swelling with pride and a new confidence, for both traditionalists and liberals. The previous summer, in the World Cup that saw England tiptoe into the semi-finals before the inevitable penalty ejection by Germany (actually, West Germany: it really has been that long), Ireland, under the sainted tutelage of Jackie Charlton and a crack squad of genealogists, had made it into the quarters. ‘That did it,’ a man over breakfast in a Galway B&B had said to me a year afterwards. ‘That made us think that, finally, we were as good as anyone else.’ The same year had seen the surprise election of liberal lawyer Mary Robinson as President of the Republic. Mayo’s own Mrs Robinson was proving a catalyst for a long-awaited social revolution, and Ireland was on the cusp of becoming the coolest place in Europe.
To my friend, the Reverend, it was still all a bit of a shock. On the train to Westport, his eyes had nearly leapt from their sockets at the sight of people fingering their rosary beads as they quietly murmured Hail Marys – ‘Good God, it’s medieval,’ he whispered to me. A ferociously bright, angular man, he had no soft edges or small talk. Going into a Westport pub, he pushed me in front of him, hissing, ‘You go first – you seem to know how to talk to the indig pop.’ ‘To the what?’ I replied. ‘The indig pop – you know, the indigenous population. You talk to them.’ I flew through the door on the end of a bony shove. On the occasions that he did chip in to a pub chat, it was mainly to deliver a dry monologue against the patriarchy of Popery or the fetishising of saints. It didn’t always create quite the mood I was hoping for.
From Westport, we hired bikes and pedalled over to Ballintober. In the churchyard, biblical tableaux had been recently built with an impressive literalness: there is a suburban rockery garden to represent Gethsemane; the house of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, contained a sewing machine and a dresser piled high with tea crockery; an empty cave – with signs that read ‘He Is Not Here’ and ‘He Is Risen’ – demonstrated the Resurrection. The Reverend could barely contain his disdain. ‘It’s all just tasteless mumbo-jumbo,’ he grumbled. When we reached a modern stone cromlech annotated with a sign stating that this represented the Assumption, he exploded. ‘Exactly!’ he hissed. ‘The Assumption! That’s all it is – one big bloody assumption!’
Less than a week later, and with the Rev safely back in his more familiar assumptions of Cambridge liberation theology, I returned to Ballintober, on a coach tour organised as part of the George Moore Summer School. Moore (1852–1933) was a precocious and contrary scion of Mayo Anglo-Irish gentry. He’d escaped his native land at the first opportunity and headed to sample the absinthe and hookers of Paris, while churning out the occasional book of withering memoir and some provocative new realist novels. News reached his incredulous ears that things were stirring back in the old country. A literary revival, spearheaded by the likes of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, was pumping intellectual fibre into the fight for Irish independence. Moore swept imperiously back to Ireland, installed himself in Dublin and hurled himself into the thick of the action. This had been the period that I’d been studying particularly keenly, and I was thrilled to see that my time in Mayo coincided with the summer school.
The coach trip, from the car park at Claremorris train station, was the first event of the weekend. I arrived early and was welcomed like a long-lost friend, none more so than by an unshaven Dublin academic, who lurched on to the bus, spotted me and plumped noisily down by my side. Despite being hung-over from the welcome session the previous night, he spray-gunned me with spittle, trenchant opinions
and some libellous asides about our fellow summer-school attendees. After nearly an hour of bouncing around the Mayo lanes, the coach pulled into Ballintober Abbey, a few miles up the road from the burned-out shell of the family’s Moore Hall. The Professor took one look at the glutinous Crucifixion scene at the Abbey’s entrance. ‘Fuck this,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a drink.’ It was 11.05 a.m. The bar opposite the Abbey had just opened, and in no time he’d ordered a Guinness for me and a Smithwick’s and a Jameson’s chaser for himself. I’d not managed half the first Guinness when a second, and before long a third, landed at my side. A bearded head, slightly swimming in and out of focus, peered around the bar door. ‘Ah, there you are, you two,’ it said, and not with any hint of surprise. ‘Coach is off now, come on.’ I downed the third pint almost in one, and prayed that I wouldn’t be sick.
If the Professor had been voluble on the first leg of the trip, now that he was fortified by three pints and three whiskeys, there was no stopping him. He told me of a thwarted love affair with one of his male postgraduate students in Dublin, fixed me with a watery stare and slid his hand over my knee. For the rest of the weekend, he showered me with drinks and books, wrote poetry to me and told me some of the best gossip and the funniest, filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. On his insistence, I stayed with him on my way back through Dublin a few weeks later. On his insistence, I shared his bed. On my insistence, I all but stuck a bolster down the middle and primly rebuffed his hourly advances. Next day, as I prepared to leave for the boat and home, he presented me with a poem that he’d written in those dark, frustrated hours: ‘It is time to prise the lock apart / into the secret garden / which I address / on a sombre and ardent night. / The love-charged baton / crescendoes in eloquent silence’ (I don’t think I could have resisted the ‘garden/hard on’ rhyme myself, so fair play to him). In defence of my cock-teasing, I was 24, as prissy as porcelain and secretly convinced that there would be many other men who would want to write poetry to me. There weren’t, as it turned out.