At the end of the afternoon, we stopped at the Hi-B. Some of the usual types were holding forth: a poet called “The Ancient Mariner;” the first mate on a replica Famine ship that never seemed to get out of dry dock; and a witheringly funny electrical contractor who refused to ever open the proverbial gate to his self. Kieran O’Connor was there too, and he revealed that playing hurling as a youth had rewarded his scalp with two hundred stitches. “It toughened me, like, and you should have seen the other guys,” he laughed. That’s Kieran, that’s the pluck of the Irish who are so fabled for responding, when cornered in a dark alley with odds that are ten to one, “I got them where I want them.”
But the resident Oisín, Brian O’Donnell, was nowhere in sight, and was in fact rarely apparent on the premises anymore. Noisy, vulgar fools were sloshing drinks in the background, the kind of dullards Brian would only yesterday have driven away at a glance, without even bothering to cut up their ties. I took a wary look around as a local character wandered in, sporting a face like a gargoyle’s. His left eye was nearly swollen shut and his cheeks offered a florid show of blue, black, and purple.
“What happened to you?” I asked curiously.
“I got in the way of myself the other night.”
“Oh, I see.”
One could imagine tables crashing, a whiskey bottle toppling, a lamp falling on his head as he polished off his final nightcap and lurched forward – an indoor hurling match conducted by a team of one. Another barroom denizen appeared hanging onto a cane. No puzzle there – I had seen him reach his arm out to emphasize a point to someone a few evenings before, only to mysteriously crumple on the floor. “Drink taken,” as they say in Ireland.
The talk was lively, but I grew quiet. The Irish love affair with alcohol, which had seemed like such fun in our early going, was revealing its darker side. One study indicated that the country’s citizens had officially topped the Luxembourgians as the top quaffers in the world. Some pundits beat their chests, calling drink “the spiritual disease of the Irish,” but mostly everybody laughed, and why wouldn’t they with newspaper advertisements featuring twelve twenty-ounce pints lined up in rows above a slogan saying “Live life to the power of Guinness.” God knows increasing numbers were doing their best, now that Ireland’s former legions of “pioneer” adherents to the Father Mathew message of abstemiousness had largely disappeared. The Irish understandably despise the stereotype of being regarded as a nation riddled with alcoholics, and the fact is the vast majority use the drink as moderately as any other people.
But tonight there were far too many riffraff in sight, vacant-eyed and menacing, while acting as if a bright afternoon was all the excuse needed for going bananas after dark. Statistics say that in the last decade the country’s per capita consumption of wine has risen by 300 percent, hard cider by 500 percent, and beer by 26 percent, the latter growth sounding modest possibly because it couldn’t get much higher. The average intake of the hops, barley, and malt has reached 150 liters for every citizen over fifteen, despite the fact Irish women generally eschew the stuff, and the very young and senior citizens drag down the national statistics. Even the suds-loving Germans manage to swill only an average of 127 liters, although the Czechs still rule at 163 liters of beer per head. In terms of the pure alcohol equivalent, Ireland’s per capita intake has risen from five liters in 1960 to 12.3 liters today, double the U.S. rate of 6.6, and well ahead of the boisterous Aussies, who down but 7.5 liters. Various souls behind Burkie now looked as if they were making a beer push to leave the Czechs in the dust.
A month or so later during the World Cup appearance by the lads in green, the Irish were clocked drinking twenty million more pints than on the equivalent weekend the year before – not bad for a country of 3.8 million citizens.
There are of course hilarious sides to all this, as evidenced by a recent 3:30 a.m. search of a County Mayo pub where the gardaí learned much after-hours singing and raucousness had been in progress. The owner protested that he was merely cleaning up, but he could not explain the presence of his daughter, two bar staff, and five customers huddled together in the toilet. His solicitor explained everything in short order: “My client advises me that he was giving a lift to some of the people and some were waiting for taxis. He normally runs a good house.”
“There was nobody driving, as such,” added the publican from Knock, a place normally known for the tens of thousands of pilgrims who annually trudge barefoot up the local mountain to commune with the hallowed spot where St. Patrick, with a foot on a viper, had his Moses-like tryst with God.
A lot of Irish people saw no humor, however, in a report a couple of days later about a drunken twenty-one-year-old Cobh mother being arrested after her two-year-old son was found with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Archbishop Sean Brady, the Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, put it thus:
It is not just the social and the sporting events – religious occasions are involved. From baptism to confirmation, marriage to funerals, we have developed a culture of drinking that is sometimes shocking.
Sometimes I fear that we may be witnessing another lost generation – a generation of young people who, instead of emigrating abroad, are leaving the shores of moderation, responsibility, and spirituality.
I was beginning to worry that this particular rising tide could lift all boats, including my own . . . and for that matter, my children’s a few years down the road. Sometimes when driving Laura to the bus station at dawn we saw disheveled teenagers only a few years older than herself staggering in the streets, the girls’ low-cut party dresses askew, the boyfriends looking deranged after an all-night binge in celebration of some major examination just passed or failed. Oscar Wilde humorously labeled such rituals “the first tottering steps in the dance of the damned.” But not funny, as the Archbish observed, is the fact that as many as 20 percent of Irish children have taken their first drink by the age of nine, and that the country has the highest rate of teenage binge-drinking in Europe, which undoubtedly has much to do with the appalling rate of road fatalities among the young.
One eye-opening statistic would be a tally of the number of stupid and abusive rants that occur in pubs after heavy swilling – the scary second Janus face of the Irish drinker. Experts at this sport develop invisible, hydraulically activated gauges in their heads that keep them upright when those of other nationalities would topple over hours earlier.
A couple of decades ago, these gauges came imprinted with the get-even word “British.” Whisper the B-word in the evening’s declining hours and you would immediately witness gears turning in slack faces and vacant eyes burning with fresh life – chugga-chugga bang went the internal hydraulics and out came a tirade about the last eight hundred years. It was hard to argue with some of the underlying notions; but then again, no refinement or elaboration was ever sought to temper these outpourings, whose main point was to demonstrate the super-human flush of brilliance and virtue that had suddenly erupted in the speech gearbox of the elocutionist.
Float the word “Nigerian” to the wrong person some night in an Irish pub, and you will see a similar display of astonishing nonstop vitriol, so passionately do a few misbegotten souls despise this particular group of impoverished immigrants, a small minority of whom, it must be said, are not always model citizens. The Irish have had so little prior exposure to people of color on their shores that one can almost fathom the mental flailings the subject induces – until receiving the same treatment.
Irish-Americans have long thought of themselves as being blood brothers with their forebears across the seas, like Jews come home to Israel. Unfortunately, many visitors will soon confront the unpleasant surprise that, in contrast to Burkie, certain ornery swillers with those hydraulic gauges in their heads no longer like Americans much at all.
“Are you American, is it?” begins a typical conversation.
“Why, yes,” responds the visitor proudly, not suspecting in the least that he is wa
lking into a trap.
“What part?”
“The northeast.”
“Aye, it’s a big country ye hail from.” Bleary eyes is buying time now, sizing up his target, rehearsing his rant, honing his verbal razors, assuring himself of his supreme cleverness.
“Ever been there?”
From this type, you will not be getting a disquisition about his six successful butcher, baker and lawyer cousins and an uncle working “the high steel,” as the Irish sometimes call construction jobs on skyscrapers, on foreign shores. Instead you might be asked: “Tell me, what do ye think of Cambodia?”
The wise would do well at this point to race for the door.
“I don’t really ponder the place frequently.”
“Oh no?” Behold now a bemused but dangerous smile. “Well, what about Vietnam then?”
Responses like “Fortunately, I never served,” will not save you; nothing will.
“Nicaragua?”
“Granada?”
“Guatemala?”
“Panama?”
“Palestine?”
“Chile?”
Your swiller has the whole world in his pocket and wants nothing more than to drop all of it, every shard of his superior, lord-of-history knowledge at your feet. And fool that you are, you could try to say something mollifying back. Don’t.
“I’m telling ye now, ye come from a nation of bullies. Ye have bullied the entire world but ye will never bully us, because we are a proud and independent people and we do not need you. Ye bullied the blacks and the Indians and the Mexicans, and ye even put your flag on the moon.”
Don’t dare mention that “ye” are being bullied now – although you will pay for the silent tactic as well.
“Why, you’re very smug, drinking your pint on our soil, and saying nothing like you’re very clever indeed. Ye are a very arrogant people.”
This class of booze-hound by now will be convinced that he has boxed you into a masterful corner. But he’s not done.
“Would you like another pint?”
That is when you leave.
Having been through this two dozen times before, I was not nearly so offended as the man wished. Ten to one, he’d be grinning at me on the street the next morning, Janus head rearranged as if we were best of friends. I wasn’t thrilled with a lot of my homeland’s recent gunboat diplomacy myself, and of course had no vision of how far it would eventually head. By the time the Iraq war started, I might have had a rant or two to offer myself. But still.
Return to beginning of chapter
Chapter 23
In America, our lives had been overwhelmingly focused upon raising the children. But changing adult tangents and diversions had taken hold in Ireland, and sometimes it felt as if the kids were getting short shrift. In Connecticut, we would rise at dawn from October to April to ferry all three to Saturday morning ice-hockey games where every participant’s progress was closely admired by their parents, despite the fact that excursions to practice also ate up two evenings each week. After-school skiing and family sledding on our snowy driveway in the woods further enriched the children’s life. The spring brought baseball and tennis; the summer, swimming competitions, fishing, and canoeing at the lake two minutes from our door. But Ireland had no ice, no snow, no baseball, and waters so cold bathers jumped out of them screaming “fecking hell!”
Jamie and I had more than enough to occupy ourselves – the start of my magazine venture lay as close as locating one believing benefactor with a pot of gold, and Ulster Television’s John McCann still seemed close to biting. Jamie, meanwhile, was enamored with the bright challenge of introducing sometimes deprived kids to the magic of live theater. But we had occasional misgivings about our kids’ unrelieved city living, where the boys, at least, spent so much of their free time booting balls about the hard pavement of our treeless street. The only sport Christian Brothers offered was rugby, and Harris and Owen were still coming to terms with these Saturday morning contests, which few parents bothered attending, perhaps because they were often drowned in epochal torrents of rain. The contrast between the wholesome, if often over-organized, pastimes that our kids had been offered in the U.S. and the more fend-for-oneself Irish way of rearing sometimes seemed stark.
Obviously, Irish children – and our own street-living offspring – seemed basically as well adjusted as kids anywhere. Laura, having faraway school friends, waxed a bit lonely some weekends but was always happy when roping in a classmate for a crisps- and cookie-strewn sleepover. But there were scarcely any nearby fields for the boys to play in, save those owned by the local GAA clubs with their offerings of hurling, rugby, and Gaelic football. The problem was that the ones near us seemed a tad rough.
One Saturday the Christian Brothers rugby teams had their games scheduled at a “gah” club about four miles from our house. Upon arrival, the boys were exhorted to scurry off to the club’s locker room.
“The what?” Owen asked in confusion.
“In there,” his coach said, pointing at what looked like a steel container fallen off the stern of an ocean-going freighter.
Meanwhile, a prodigious deluge commenced.
“I don’t want to change in there, Dad,” Owen remonstrated.
“Go on, you’re a rugby player,” I urged.
“It looks like somebody’s chopped the place up with an axe. And the rain is pouring through the roof.”
Well, Owen was right. The “changing room” appeared to have been attacked by a pike-wielding maniac, with holes in the gaping roof and long gashes in the walls baring jagged twists of rusted, tetanus-breeding shrapnel. Empty Scrumpy Jack cans glowered from beneath the graffiti-scarred benches.
The congenitally muddy playing fields outside oozed like a pig wallow. Then somebody blew a whistle and the kids set to throwing each other head first into the muck. I tried chatting with another father, but neither of us could see the other through the rain streaming down our wiper-less eyeglasses.
Gradually it became clear that Irish parents compensate for some of the weaknesses of organized kids’ activities in their culture through a variety of inventive alternatives, some of these involving their on-again, off-again affection for the Catholic Church. Young Owen’s upcoming First Holy Communion, for which Christian Brothers had been prepping its little angels for months, provided an object lesson there. Little did we know what a national rite of passage awaited. The occasion is at heart a festival of hope. But the rub is that First Communion must duly be preceded by the cleansing of First Confession, in which parents, even very sinful ones, are expected to lift their duffs off the pews and step forward as proper models of penitence. The prospect was petrifying.
The church nonetheless resonated with song and pageantry on the First Penance day. Owen looked to be in deep conversation with the Lord as he and his classmates stepped up to the altar and expressed their sanctified contrition, as did little girls from neighboring schools. A forty-something priest stood at the lectern, beaming at the assemblage of innocence. A much older one stared out from stage left. The first looked kind, the second stern, and it felt as if they had worked out some kind of spiritual balancing act. Father Kind gently invited the parents to come forward to vouchsafe their stature as proper role models. “I realize many of you will not be regular confessants, but it would be helpful for you to demonstrate the power of your own redemptive faith to your children. All you have to say is, “I am sorry for my sins” – nothing more.”
“This is a good deal,” I thought. As a boy I had regularly cringed in murky confessionals before opaque screens behind which invisible beings threatened eternal damnation. If no sins could be remembered, you made them up in order to be done fast with whatever string of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” were demanded. When the voice cracked with puberty, it got worse.
So this new confession-lite sounded nifty. The only problem was that Father Stern did not look happy.
The liturgy proceeded, and the seven- and eight-y
ear-olds advanced to whisper their offences against their families, teachers, and the Lord. Touching it was to behold.
Now it was the adults’ turn. A mass inertia seized the congregation, as if this were Lourdes in reverse – instead of the lame miraculously walking, parents in the prime of life seemed to undergo a collective paralysis. Father Kind smiled patiently, but Father Stern scowled. After a lengthy pause, a few adults inched forward. Muttering soon broke out in the next pew.
“Don’t go to the older priest. He’s changed the terms,” an attractive brunette whispered to her husband. “I said ‘I’m sorry for my sins,’ but that wasn’t good enough for him. ‘You’ll have to tell me something more specific,” he insisted.
Forewarned, I veered toward Father Kind and got off easy.
The real First Communion followed a couple of weeks later. The children were enthralled, the boys sporting rosettes on their pressed blazers, the elaborately coiffed girls wearing immaculate white dresses and veils, like little brides of the Lord. Four priests in brocaded vestments presided, and the dolled-up mothers betrayed moist, doting gazes. Goodness shined. Jamie’s mother and wheelchair-bound sister, freshly arrived from the States, cooed.
We certainly felt some reverence ourselves. Children need faith; we all do – at least in something more elevated than our own selfishness. Our little boy had been beaming for weeks, clasping his uplifted hands in prayer at every church service, announcing that on Tuesdays, for some reason, he was making an effort to be especially good. I asked Owen about what private prayers he had offered before receiving his First Holy Communion. “That Aunt Martha will be able to walk again,” he whispered.
And what could be wrong with that? In America, the pendulum of individual entitlement had swung so harshly that mentioning the very notion of God in school was a cardinal sin, and in fact a potential firing offence for teachers. American schools have lost so much common purpose that they breed another kind of anarchy, a spiritual one, perhaps more disruptive than the unraveling apparent on Ireland’s streets. Self-direction is the rule in dress, behavior, and belief. One of Laura’s third-grade classmates announced that he recognized no obligation to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag – a thirty-second reflective pause employed to settle American kids down for the beginning of the school day. Then again, the father’s benediction to his boy’s teachers was to announce – “My son will show you respect when you have earned it.”
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