Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  “Why didn’t you ever mention this before, Dad? Why don’t you ever talk about some of the fabulous people you have met?” asked Laura, finally grasping the depths of her father’s Irish connections.

  Cough. “Because they charged me for that drink.”

  “You’re a regular lord of the manor,” said Laura.

  Winding through the back roads outside Kanturk about an hour later, I slowed before an ivy-entangled plaque asserting that seven thousand Irishmen had died in the next field during the mother of all battles in the Williamite wars. A quick check with the mental calculator confirmed that this amounted to more fatalities than were suffered in about every other battle in Irish history combined, even including the exploits of that most supreme warrior, Cuchulainn, hound of Ulster, who could lop off as many heads as the day is long, park his chariot, down a quaff of mead, and disembowel a few captives while he blathered around the campfire to a circle of obsequious bards.

  Harris, lifting his eyes from the dementia of some electronic game, suddenly got picky.

  “Wait. We just learned in school about the battle of Kilmichael. My teacher said maybe twenty-one British soldiers died there, but that this was the most important battle in the history of Ireland.”

  “Right.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” the ten-year-old said, peering at stupefying rows of cabbage without so much as a commemorative spear sticking up between their green heads.

  “Well, nobody in the entire world understands the Williamite wars, and the good and bad guys are impossible to sort out, so I guess they’re easy to forget.”

  The sun meandered higher for another week and at last we arrived at Firbolg, which is (very) nominally regarded as the beginning of spring in Ireland, although it is but the first day of February.

  “Where are we going now?” whined Laura, as I began ferrying the Wellies, cameras, binoculars, and the rest toward the miserably claustrophobic car.

  “East Cork,” I muttered with a “don’t defy me” look back over my shoulder.

  And, of course, the entire family snickered.

  “Dad, you’ve got to stop trying to provide for our every second over here,” said Laura.

  For a man with a hurling stick, remote-controlled toy car, and skateboard under one arm, an eight-foot salmon net under the other, and a map in his mouth, this little chorus of know-it-alls took the biscuit.

  At least the scoundrels climbed into their appointed seats without protest, and toned down their ridicule as the Opel, the “estate” car, for the Lord’s sake, coughed onto the open road. The first stop was Midleton, a bustling market town with decent restaurants, a splendid farmer’s market, and some very oddly named enterprises. The sign over Wallis’ Bar, for example, said “Auctioneers, Valuers, Monumental Sculptors, Undertakers,” while at the other end of the decorous main street there was Hyde’s (“Funeral Services, Children’s Ware”). In Midleton, they can take your money coming and going. But then again, in Fermoy, a half-hour’s drive north, one can comparison shop at Jackie O’Brien’s (“Lounge Bar, Undertakers”) and idle away one’s final hours after a last supper at the local ersatz McDonald’s – Supermacs – whose sign says “100 percent Gaelic” and “mainstir fhear mai” (perhaps meaning “special sauce”). “Are you okay?” the clerks in these places may ask waiting customers in the customary Cork way. “Yes, thanks, I’m dead.”

  Midleton, as Laura well knew, boasts another venerable Protestant secondary school, an arch rival of Bandon Grammar. The chief building there proved to be a three-story affair shored up with enough finely cut stone to fit out a castle for a British earl, though the satellite buildings are a mishmash of thrown-together cubby holes and bright new classrooms. The gentry not enjoying the same clout they once did, the place also holds forlorn, cramped dormitories that Irish kids nonetheless accept more or less cheerfully.

  On the other hand, Midleton College happens to boast the only outdoor school swimming pool in Cork and expansive green playing fields dotted with interesting sculptures. These are dwarfed into inconsequence by a ring of nearby exhaust towers wafting peculiarly attention-getting fumes over the tranquil campus. Their job, I explained to the boys, is to vent the by-products of pastoral Erin’s most potent industry – distilling whiskey. Gargantuan aluminum tanks holding that stuff – Paddy’s, Power’s, Jameson’s, even Cork Gin (all owned now by the French Pernod Ricard conglomerate) – loom over the campus like a brace of Apollo moon rockets. Irish tourist brochures tout other awe-inspiring sights like the Cliffs of Moher and Giant’s Causeway, but not one of those inspires the imagination like the eighty-proof firepower arrayed beside Midleton College’s Jameson Hall of Science. “What did you study in chemistry class today, Finbarr?” asks a local father. Young eyes roll dreamily. “Cripes, dad, how could I remember, yerrah?”

  Flann O’Brien had further thoughts on this subject, suggesting that his newspaper columns be printed in a special alcoholic ink, to be called Trink, in order to mesmerize the wandering populace into more attentive reading.

  Drive five miles in any direction in East Cork and one encounters shocking contrasts between the garishness of modernity and the timelessness of the past. The imagination can barely square the scenes the English writer William Cobbett described two hundred years ago:

  I went to a hamlet near to the town of Midleton. It contained about 40 or 50 hovels . . . They all consisted of mud walls, with a covering of rafters and straw. None of them so good as the place where you keep your little horse . . . The floor, the bare ground. No fire-place, no chimney, the fire (made of Potato haulm) made on one side against the wall, and the smoke going out a hole in the roof. No table, no chair . . . There was a mud wall about 4 feet high to separate off the end of the shed for the family to sleep, lest the hog should kill and eat the little children when the father and mother were both out, and when the hog was shut in. No bed: no mattress; some large flat stones laid on other stones, to keep the bodies from the damp ground; some dirty straw and a bundle of rags were all the bedding . . . There is a nasty dunghill (no privy) to each hovel. The dung that the hog makes in the hovel is carefully put into a heap by itself, as being the most precious. This dung and the pig are the main thing to raise the rent [for absentee English landlords] and get fuel with. The poor creatures sometimes keep the dung in the hovel, when their hard-hearted tyrants will not suffer to let it be at the door!

  Just a couple of miles south of Midleton now lies one of the ghastly modern housing developments springing up across Ireland with the vengeance of mushrooms after an autumn rain. Invariably, they are called something like Celtic Woods, though a prospective resident would have to execute one of Cuchulainn’s gravity-defying salmon leaps to land in the nearest copse. Every dwelling is inevitably an identical stucco and polyvinyl-chloride affair with a prissy front sitting room, a television-dominated entertainment room, and a mod-con happy kitchen in the back. Under the eaves will run the inevitable plastic dipsy-doodle molding, the notion being to add an infantile Hansel and Gretel touch of “character,” often reinforced by a few would-be Tudor boards and gaudy stained-glass Dutch tulips flowering in the front door. The tiny lawn in front of the tenth-of-an-acre lot – soon to be enchanted with insidious prefab leprechauns – will undoubtedly be dressed with a mean concrete wall, and capped by a pair of four-foot columns fronting a tiled drive, with this touch meant to suggest a great house of grandeur. The cost: a quarter of a million pounds, or about enough to buy an eighteenth-century château surrounded by olive groves in the south of France.

  Prospective purchasers will not utter a word of complaint about this crass homogenization. Somehow, the mod-con Irish are strangely inured to their physical surroundings, perhaps due to a collective memory of the deprivations described by Cobbett and of the eighteenth-century days when Catholics weren’t allowed to buy property at all, and owned only 5 percent of their native land, while paying 98.5 percent of the country’s rents.

  How a people with s
uch visionary powers could be so architecturally blind nonetheless remains one of Ireland’s abiding mysteries. Despite being rooted in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, the Irish do not fret much about blighting jaw-dropping panoramas with phoney, slapped-together haciendas. Of course, until recently people didn’t have the money to worry much about the niceties of aesthetics, and the Irish government perniciously proffers substantial tax deductions to anyone who invests in a horrid concrete-block rental scheme by the sea.

  An architect friend put it this way: “This country creates some of the most ungodly building horrors on earth, and the only way I can explain it is that people were so poor and oppressed for so long that they put all their imagination into other things – like ballads, hurling, and horse racing – because a good house was the one thing they knew could never be theirs. Yes, we as a people therefore remain architecturally blind.”

  One bitter anomaly amidst the gaudy new developments is that haunting reminders of the past will inevitably lie in the next field – because in Ireland ancient mysteries lurk everywhere. So some abomination of a faux-Mediterranean bungalow will sprout beside a four-thousand-year-old circle of standing stones. Outside Clonakilty, a come-hither hotel advertisement lists against the edge of one such mystic circle. Another unspeakably ugly development has been flung together beside one of the thousands of “mass rocks” that epitomized the oppression of yore. These were crude fieldstone altars from which priests offered the Eucharist to secret assemblies after the English, during the Penal Law period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bolted Papist churches shut, banned the speaking of Irish, and forbade natives from owning horses worth more than five pounds.

  Incongruity is forever Ireland’s magic card. Only minutes down the road from the gleaming Celtic Woods slumbers the village of Cloyne, seemingly eternally gloaming in the mist and haunted by a vast underground cave with its only access through a wishing-glass hole in the gardens of the local big house. Cloyne’s bungalows huddle together as if praying for warmth, and the place whispers of an earlier Ireland – closed in, with no hint of the hectic pace that has taken over the remote metropolis of, say, Midleton.

  The first of its resident bishops was one St. Colman, who was persuaded to give up his pagan ways by St. Brendan the Navigator, the famous sixth-century voyager who is said to have waved goodbye as he sailed across a sea strewn with flowers. In searching for the Isles of the Happy, Brendan purportedly reached Iceland and perhaps Newfoundland, then pointed his animal-skin boat back to his happier homeland. In 1976, the explorer Tim Severin successfully reenacted the Newfoundland voyage from Dingle, County Kerry, in a similar craft. Not to be outdone, in 1998 a team of Rastafarian-styled dreamers from Toronto raided their local dump for salvage timbers and discarded tarpaulins and set off for Ireland in a vessel that looked like a floating squatters’ camp. Transatlantic freighters circled in disbelief at the sight of this outlandish junkheap bobbing its merry way toward Cork. Ireland being a place where the make-believe can easily pass for truth, the crew announced after arriving in Cork that they would soon circumnavigate the rest of the globe in a hot-air balloon constructed out of “found” scrap objects in the surrealist tradition of Marcel Duchamp.

  As Charles Smith related in 1774, East Cork’s strangeness has been obvious for a long time:

  In the winter of 1695, and a good part of the following spring, there fell, in several places, of this province, a kind of thick dew, which the country people called butter, from its colour and consistence, being soft, clammy, and of a dark yellow, as doctor St. George Ash, then local bishop of Cloyne, has recorded in the Philosophical Transactions; it fell in the night, and chiefly in marshy low grounds, on the top of the grass, and on the thatch of the cabins, seldom twice in the same place; it commonly lay a fortnight without changing colour, but then dried, and turned black; cattle fed as well where it lay, as in other fields; it often fell in lumps, as big as the end of one’s finger, thin and scatteringly; it had strong ill scent, somewhat like that of churchyards and graves; and there were most of the season very stinking fogs, some sediment of which the bishop thought might possibly have occasioned this stinking dew; it was not kept long, nor did it breed worms or other insects; yet the country people who had scald or sore heads, rubbed them with this substance, and said it healed them.

  Smith, like most of the other exotic blood in East Cork then, came from England. Throughout the region, the planters built their stately houses with finely arched doorways, imposing stone facades, and meandering drives through manicured pastures leading to the gated entrances in their omnipresent walls. Some treated the natives under their employ with steadfast benevolence, but others, including a local branch of the Wilkinson clan, exacted brutal tithes while blithely spending most of their days in still grander residences in England. During the War of Independence, IRA Flying Columns enjoyed some pay-back time by burning many such big houses to ruination, sending their owners fleeing back to Mother England in an exodus that quickly reduced the Protestant class from 10 to 3 percent of Ireland’s citizenry. This has recently been recounted with exquisite poignancy in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault.

  Many who hung on watched their estates list into rainy oblivion, with the roofs leaking, the timbers rotting, the brocaded paper peeling away from weeping walls, while the bulbs in the crystal chandeliers went dim one by one. The inexorable decline produced some of the most potted eccentrics in the world. In a Cork village called Castlefreke, one unraveling scion spent his twilight years quaffing port and pumping bullets into dining room portraits of his ancestors. Up in Westmeath, the late Adolphus Cooke became so obsessed with hot-air balloons that he had miniature versions of them attached to his dining room chairs, perhaps hoping his guests could join him for nonstop flights to St. Brendan’s Isles of the Happy. Alas, this peculiar romantic became terrified of the idea that vindictive foxes were eyeballing him from the hedges. More unnerving, he believed he would be reincarnated as one of those fretful creatures – after all, his father had come back as a dog – and forsook his dreams of blithely ballooning to the ends of this earth in order to devote his remaining energies to fighting off the sly bastards who were watching his every move.

  Despite such marvelously eccentric histories, the great Irish country houses eventually could be bought for a song, provided one possessed a fortune for subsequent restoration. Over the last few decades, rock idols, celebrities, financiers, and the Irish nouveau riche have been doing that with a vengeance. One tranquil East Cork inlet features a turreted mock castle that was inhabited in the 1990s by a family of German teenage pop stars called, for some reason, the Kellys. The great lawns and walled gardens used to be patrolled by Prussian security guards yelping into their walkie-talkies, but now an erstwhile Wall Street fat cat named Glucksman (meaning “lucky man!”) has moved in with his Irish-American wife. The new earl has spread his philanthropy freely enough to become wined and dined by the powers that be in Dublin, and pocketed an overnight honorary doctoral degree from Trinity College there.

  So, in observance of the honored tradition of what is called “the touch,” this couple became my first target to back the new Cork Magazine. Alas, the appeal fell on deaf ears. “I don’t know you, Mr. Monagan, and I am not interested in hearing your presentation,” growled the keeper of the castle after one phone call. Maybe he had more Cork blood than I realized.

  As it happened, we were soon treated to a far more gracious taste of East Cork “big house” living, at a place that embodies the potential of the old manors to become reintegrated into Ireland’s evolving modern fabric. This transpired at Ballymaloe Country House, which has become world famous for its exquisite restaurant and gourmet cooking school looking out over peacock-infested island gardens and flowing green fields.

  The lady in charge is named Darina Allen, and she is a champion of the Irish culinary renaissance now being supplied by a new artisan class of local growers, herdsmen, cheese-makers, bakers, and
butchers. Meanwhile, her mandolin-playing brother-in-law, Rory, is seeking to expand the place’s spirit with regular sessions of Irish traditional music. Better yet, he likes to fill the dining room with a sprinkling of guests whose sole function is to contribute laughter and talk – not a bad job assignment, I reasoned after an invitation popped up. So we sidled inside, not quite sure what entertainment we could contribute. Perhaps Jamie would have to trot out her “looking for a noodle” song.

  Elizabeth Rush, an American friend with a house nearby, was the intermediary, but she proved to be Elizabeth Slow in appearing herself. No bother. All one has to do to get comfortable at any Irish table is start talking – about anything – and the interweaving circles fall into place, the conversation spreading as easily as mist. Here was a charming accordion, or “box,” player who proved to be a close friend of a friend; here a pretty Australian flautist fresh from a decade in Vienna. So the talk flowed and the wine was poured. It felt like balloons were lifting every conversation and elevating our own identities into the free-floating ether that sometimes surrounds a person who has changed countries. Far from home, the relentless ordinariness of life can, on certain magic nights, be transposed into moments of endless charm, provided the right balloon power is arrayed at every neighboring chair, so that you yourself no longer feel as humdrum as you once were. So in a brief shining moment of forbearance and grace, one is allowed to recount the campaigns that got you to where you are tonight, like a dottering retired British colonel reliving his glory days with Lord Gordon in Khartoum.

  Now, for some chamber music in the drawing room.

  But naturally.

  Let me just adjust my balloon.