A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Two bruisers caught my eye, older men with a long history of hard physical labor etched into their faces. They resembled figures from the past, out of step with the present and glad of it, one with a bottle of Mackeson’s Triple Stout—a first in my experience—and the other sipping a vodka and Finches Lemonade. They fell silent when I approached the bar. Strangers don’t wander into the Fountain very often, so a newcomer bears examining. The scrutiny, though harmless, still caused me to twitch, and I half expected them to mutter a derogatory comment and maybe upbraid me for nosing around where I didn’t belong.

  Quite the opposite happened, though. The young barman, green and inept, ignored me to watch the soccer match, so the larger and more leonine bruiser banged a fist on the bar—kapow!—and nodded in my direction. The lad’s cheeks burned, and he leaped to attention, as if the fist had struck him on the head. The bruiser’s gesture on my behalf, so polite and aware, had less to do with my discomfort, I believe, than with a desire to uphold the dignity of the Liberties, his home turf, and show it in the best possible light. It’s not as tough as you’ve heard, stranger, he might have said. He accepted my thanks, but he refused the offer of another vodka, since he felt no need to be repaid for a simple good deed.

  Sunday once constituted the big day for Irish pubs, a festival that began right after Mass and could continue for hours. The hungover gents who’d survived the service, often with heads as inflated as beachballs, were the first in line for a barstool, but there were also couples whose only visit of the week occurred after church, more for the society than the alcohol. In some households, the rib roast or leg of lamb due to be carved for lunch at two o’clock rested on a sideboard until five or six, when a child might be dispatched to collect the paterfamilias. Because St. Catherine’s was such a focal point in the Liberties, I returned to see if the ritual might still have some currency, but the folks in the pubs appeared to be the same ones who had closed them down the night before, at least to judge by the absence of finery and the mild aura of woe.

  Fortunately, I had a backup plan. A friend had advised me that if I wanted to hear a real session of traditional music, I should hike over to the Cobblestone across the Liffey, where the Sunday afternoons are special. The route I followed took me by Christ Church and past the Brazen Head, once again thronged with tourists. I didn’t intend to stop, but curiosity got the better of me, and I saw that music was the draw here, too, although in a much more informal setting than on my last trip. The musicians sat at a corner table near the bar—no stage, no microphones, and no patter. They were pros, but they seemed relaxed and in no hurry to please. They had the look of contented, road-weary troubadours, who were glad to have an audience and yet might have been just as happy playing to an empty room.

  Their music—guitar, fiddle, bodhran, and bones—was much less folksy, too, and might have sounded the same fifty or a hundred years ago. It was so fast, furious, and irresistible that I had a problem with my left foot: it wouldn’t quit tapping. Perhaps that wasn’t so odd, since the tunes were originally created to accompany the jigs, reels, and hornpipes that itinerant dancing masters once taught from village to village, often with a blind fiddler as a partner. (Smallpox usually caused the blindness, and the afflicted took up the fiddle.) When I left after an hour, I felt satisfied rather than diminished. The Brazen Head had redeemed itself for the time being. Any trophy pub that’s a tourist haven probably deserves a medal for getting it right even half the time.

  The Cobblestone is located on the edge of Smithfield Market, a cobbled square that’s described, in long-winded terms, as the “largest purpose-built open civic space in Europe.” Cattle were first sold there in 1541, driven in from farms in County Meath and herded through Oxmantown Green. The cattle were gone by 1665, and the market gradually diversified and still housed some wholesale dealers of fruit and vegetables when I first settled in Dublin. They’re gone now, banished in the throes of a massive redevelopment project that has turned the square into a patchwork of apartments, office blocks, and stores with such corporate anchors as a Comfort Inn, a Subway “restaurant,” and a Thomas Read pub. Smithfield belongs to the new city of glass and steel, not the old one of bricks and mortar, but it regains a bit of soul when the horse fair, a centuries-old tradition, occurs on the first Sunday of every month.

  I’d attended the fair and can testify that the horses will never run at the Curragh, Ireland’s premier racetrack, or anywhere else, not when you can pick up one for three hundred dollars or so. You might be better off buying a donkey or a ragged, piebald pony such as those that are prized by a subculture of teenage boys who live on the outskirts of Dublin, often in stacks of subsidized flats with some open space around them. They’re disadvantaged kids, but they manage to scrape together enough money to swap it for a nag of their own. The pony might pull a trap some day, but the boys prefer to show off and ride it bareback, dressed in their hoodies, jeans, and sneakers over roads where it shouldn’t go, adopting it as a status symbol and an emblem of their bravery, although their boldness gets them into trouble if they veer too close to a highway.

  Long ago, the turfmen from the bogs of Kildare took a similar risk when they brought their peat to Smithfield. First they canvassed the adjoining streets, crying “Turf! Turf!” and selling clamps of it for tuppence a dozen. They also sold bundled twigs to light a fire, and when they were done, they might steal a nap on the cobbles beneath their cart. They often spent their profits on ale and whiskey, so a turfman, drunk and asleep, was frequently spied trotting home along the Lucan Road and counting on his horse to know the way. Trams were a danger, and so many turfmen were killed near a pub in Palmerstown that it acquired the nickname of Deadman Murphy’s.

  At an average Smithfield fair, there may be fifty horses for sale, paraded around by the bridle and depositing steamy piles of manure, while the potential buyers pry open a mouth to inspect the stubby brown teeth or kneel to poke a suspicious hock. Pony boys are on the prowl, ready to trade their current mount for a new one, if only for the hell of it. Travelers are present, too—members of the gypsy tribe formerly called tinkers, who once crossed Ireland in caravans and worked as tinsmiths and peddlers, fortune tellers and entertainers, confidence artists and farmhands. They conversed in shelta, a language “concocted for the purposes of secrecy,” as one linguist has put it, “by a community living in the midst of Irish speakers.” Horses were important to them, so they bred the Irish cob, stocky and powerful, with a kindly disposition, to pull their wagons.

  Alcohol complicates the lives of travelers. They’re often barred from pubs, even though it’s illegal. Drink makes them feisty, the argument goes, and brings out a violent streak that leads to brawls and worse. The violence is seldom directed at outsiders. Instead it erupts as the result of a smoldering feud. Travelers can be clannish and slow to forgive or forget an insult or an imagined slight. At times, they throw huge wedding celebrations that are even more elaborate and expensive than the shindigs in the Liberties, and invite anyone even remotely acquainted with the bride or the groom. The receptions can be incendiary, because of the quantity of booze consumed. A bash at Tinakilly House, an elegant hotel in Wicklow, had generated fodder for the tabloids not long ago, in fact, when two warring factions attacked each other with machetes, axes, slash-hooks, knives, and shotguns, much to the consternation of the paying guests.

  The Cobblestone turned out to be plain and unaffected, deliberately so, as if to thumb its nose at the Comfort Inn and the Subway. Inside, I found a diverse crowd—young and old, men and women—perched around a cushioned nook by the front door, where some players were seated and tuning up. The walls of the downstairs bar are lined with posters for gigs and photos of musicians, some famous and some not, and there’s also an upstairs lounge where you can hear a different type of music every night—folk rock, flamenco, jazz, and so on. Much to my delight, the Cobblestone doesn’t have a TV. Moreover, the Sunday session is free of charge.

  I took a stool at the bar,
ten feet away from the players. They were a mirror image of the crowd, mixed in terms of their age and sex—Jan on the uillean pipes; Dan on the mandola, bigger than a mandolin and related to the lute; Deidre on the fiddle; and Mick on the flute. Also sitting in, sort of, was Aisling, Deidre’s daughter, whose fingers flew over the controls of a Nintendo Game Boy, as if to coax some companionable notes from it. The players did not work together professionally, and may never have met before for all I knew. Insofar as they had a leader, it was probably Mick by virtue of his seniority. Benign and grandfatherly, he wore a tie and a maroon cardigan, and established a mood of respectful decorum.

  Though Mick sometimes launched a tune, he chose not to dominate the group. Anyone could begin with a bar or two, and the others would join in or remain silent. The piper gave many tunes a pass. Every tune was improvised and more spirited because of it, reeled off at a fever pitch and rich in unexpected twists and discoveries, with the players bouncing off one another and coming at it from new angles rather than sticking to the old ones—exploratory, that was the word for it. The sound was fresh instead of canned, full of juice instead of sucked dry.

  Sitting so close, I could feel an invisible barrier that the players created around themselves, as if to protect the magic. Their pace was leisurely, not forced. They had no set list or time limitations. They were communing with the eternal. They broke for long, meditative pauses between tunes, talking amiably and content to wait for inspiration to spark the next move, and then someone would strike a chord in the same way that a person clears his throat, and the fever was on them again. I was surprised by the music’s power. The emotion welled up out of nowhere, it seemed, and caught me unawares. The music came to me as a gift, and it nourished me. There was no question of longing for Ireland, or pining for Glocca Morra. I knew myself to be in the presence of the genuine, absolutely rooted in it.

  I’d have been grateful enough for that, but the Cobblestone had more in store. A darkly handsome young man—jet-black hair, a cleft chin, flashing eyes, every inch the cinematic image of a wandering minstrel—emerged from the rear of the bar and asked Mick if he could sit in. He felt poorly, he confided, because two pals had “kidnapped” him and hauled him from pub to pub for the past week, capping their adventure by polishing off a case of beer, or twenty-four half-quart cans, the night before. “I’d say that’s a friendship you can’t afford,” Jan, the piper, joked, and the youth—we’ll call him Derek—grinned ruefully and replied, “The cash is gettin’ low.” He ordered a Guinness at the bar and mumbled, “Hair of the dog,” and then emptied the coins from his pockets, put them in stacks by denomination, counted them, and pushed across the required sum, only to be rebuffed by Tom Mulligan, the pub’s owner, who happened to be tending bar and wouldn’t let him pay.

  Derek carried a battered case, and unlatched it to reveal a red accordion. It was more compact than the bulky version forever associated in my mind with Lawrence Welk and polka bands, so I mistook it for a concertina and later breached the etiquette of the session by asking him about it. “Accordion,” he snapped at me. “Button, not piano.” Traditional musicians bridle at such queries, apparently, because it interrupts the flow. They’re superstitious about their instruments, too, and only think of themselves as custodians. After my faux pas, Derek gave the red accordion a squeeze and—without any signal to the others—plunged into a tune. His passion and dexterity were more fuel for the blaze, so the level of intensity increased, and the players grew more frenzied. Derek’s music had the black sounds in it. It had duende. The music was a cure to him, a healing balm. It blew away the cobwebs of his hangover and restored his vigor.

  So it went through the afternoon, but the session drew no attention to itself. Some customers stayed close by and listened, but others talked quietly and treated the music as a backdrop. Two more players came along after a while, a father and his teenage daughter, who was a little older than Aisling and in the first full flush of adolescence, with braces on her teeth and a fiddle case under her arm. As she applied some rosin to her bow, her dad unpacked a set of pipes, and though the girl was not in the same league as the others, even squeakily discordant on occasion, they still welcomed her to their company and urged her on. In the warmth of the gesture, there was an implicit understanding of time and patience as traditional music’s only teachers.

  The genial Tom Mulligan presided over it all, never collecting a dime from the players for stout or tea. Affixed to his lips was a permanent smile of delight, as if the good vibrations had surpassed his desire to supply them. Mulligan had bought the Cobblestone in 1987 for about $125,000, when the pubs in rundown Smithfield were the city’s cheapest. It was “an early house with four dart-boards and plenty of odd characters behaving even odder,” he once said, but it’s worth millions now. Still, Mulligan thought the Cobblestone lived on borrowed time, operating under a preservation order due to its historical status. “It’ll be a sad day for the inner city and cultural Dublin when it is pulled down.” Like the horse fair, soon to be relocated to a vacant lot far from Smithfield, the pub would give way to more glass and steel.

  Chapter 9

  THE FOLLY OF CONG

  My attention turned to rural pubs that autumn when Charles Crockatt, a Ranelagh friend, invited me to visit his cottage in County Sligo for a couple of days. As a Birchall’s regular, Charles is a knowledgeable man with a jar, so I didn’t have to twist his arm to get him to agree to show me the locals near his spread. The plight of such pubs was in the news again due to the advocacy efforts of Paul Stevenson, who heads up the Vintners Federation of Ireland, a trade organization. More than a thousand of its members, all in the country, had closed in the past three years, Stevenson alerted the press. “There isn’t enough business—simple as that,” he said, laying the blame on a number of familiar factors including “lifestyle changes.” Publicans needed to diversify and adapt, he added, and as an example he suggested they could operate as an Internet café until the drinkers arrived at night. Even to an optimist, that sounded improbably far-fetched.

  Sligo is known and promoted as Yeats Country, of course, where the great man’s remains lie in the churchyard at Drumcliff in the shadow of Benbulben. As I packed my bag, I recalled how little affection Yeats had for pubs and imagined that he might not be disturbed by their decline. Only once did he stoop to enter a licensed premises, dragged into James Toner on Lower Baggot Street by the insistent St. John Gogarty, where he hid in a snug and sipped a sherry. “I have seen a pub,” he sniffed as he finished his drink. “Will you kindly take me home?” That hadn’t prevented Toner’s from slapping a portrait of Yeats on an outside wall, seated next to the poor, overworked James Joyce, and claiming him as a regular.

  It’s about a three-hour trip from Dublin to Sligo if you’re not caught behind a tractor or a big rig, but I hadn’t been on the road for more than an hour and a half before the pub crisis crossed my radar in the hamlet of Annaduff, just beyond the village of Dromod. I pulled over to buy a soda at a shop next to Top o’ the Hill, a pub on the highest ground for miles around, with views over green fields that could have earned a Tourist Board seal of approval. When I asked the clerk at the shop how Top o’ the Hill was doing, she replied, “Terrible!” It only opened at night to serve a few pensioners, who live nearby and can reach it on foot. The stiff penalties for driving while legally drunk had scared away most other customers. For a borderline offense, you lost your license for at least three months. If you failed a breath or a urine test, you couldn’t drive for at least two years, a serious hardship out in the country where a car is essential.

  These strict laws are relatively new in Ireland. When the government tackled the problem in the 1990s, for instance, it coined the slogan, “Just two will do.” In other words, two pints was a permissible measure for a driver, especially given the practice of rounds, but there have been so many horrific accidents on the back roads—the Republic has never had so many cars, nor so many people handling them recklessly—that
some action had to be taken. The back roads, often isolated two-lane blacktops with no streetlights, now carry fifteen times (my guess) the traffic they once did as the number of commuters grows by leaps and bounds. That growth had altered Dromod beyond recognition. “It used to be a lovely little village,” the shopwoman sighed, but a farmer had sold off one of those lush green fields a while ago, and a row of cookie-cutter houses, the area’s first surburban tract, soon replaced the sheep and the cows.

  All along the N4 highway to Sligo, I saw similar tracts of houses devouring the land that had been farmed for centuries. In Carrick-on-Shannon, the city center had almost disappeared in a welter of construction. I remembered Dessie Hynes’s idyllic description of smoking reeds on the banks of the river, and also an article I’d read by John Gormley, a leader of the Green Party and the current minister for the environment. A native of Limerick, he’d played along the Shannon as a boy, too, when the water was clear, clean, and safe for swimming, but the river is poisoned and dead near his childhood home now, polluted by industrial, domestic, and agricultural effluents. That shocked Gormley. Pollution happened in other countries, he said, while Ireland was supposed to be a “very beautiful, kindly, and spiritual place.”

  Sligo lies in the province of Connacht, famous for its poor soil and its link to Oliver Cromwell, and as a bastion of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that made life a misery for Catholics in the eighteenth century. The scale of the discrimination was astonishing. A Catholic couldn’t sit in the parliament, or be a solicitor, a gamekeeper, or a constable. They weren’t allowed to attend university, either in Ireland or abroad, nor could they keep a school. Instead, they relied on “hedge schools,” where itinerant teachers lectured students in the open air. Priests said Mass in secret, too, at rocks and sites known only to the faithful. A Catholic orphan had to be raised as a Protestant, while no Catholic could own property or receive it as a gift.