Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  ‘The Wran’ was the biggest day of the year in our young lives. No other day came close. Paguine Flaherty’s pub was the base for the Green and Gold Wran from the Holyground. The Green and Gold was always considered the best overall, for music, colour and spectacle. They would have spent weeks in preparation in Paguine’s. I used to envy my first cousins, Etna, Mazzarella, Fergus and Kar l–they were right in the middle of the action. Masks, hoods, straws and other costumes were made up; fifes were softened for practice; drums were tightened and banners were painted and sewn. There was absolute secrecy because there was huge competitiveness among the Wrans.

  Our local Wran was the Sráid Eoin. The ‘Kerryman’, a huge, gentle giant of a man, was the driving force, even though young Maurice Rohan was emerging as the leader. It was in Rohan’s pub that the Sráid Eoin met for practice and arrangements. Maurice made sure everything was under control. Even when he became a teacher and moved to West Clare, he still returned each year to take charge of the Sráid Eoin Wran. But West Clare also got the benefit of Maurice’s organisational skills, as he went on to be one of the founders and main organisers of the Willie Clancy Summer School.

  There were other Wrans – from Goat Street, The Quay and Milltown. Some were imaginative in deciding a theme for their group. Others were better at the music. Wrans from outlying areas, especially Lispole and Ventry, came into the town. Each had its own carefully respected traditions. In the Sráid Eoin Wran the hobbyhorse was central. It was made from light, curved, wooden hoops shaped like the torso of a horse. A white sheet covered the main trunk, the tail was stuck on the back, a carved head lead at the front, and the whole thing was carried on the shoulders of one of the Wran members who had a rope stretching back from the horse’s mouth, which he could aggressively snap open and shut at passersby or at other Wrans.

  All the Wrans did at least two rounds of the town. They each had favourite pub stops where they took a sos. It was the leader’s job to make sure that they regrouped after a drink and continued on to the next ‘filling station’.

  The cry ‘Fall In’ was the signal to get outside and into band formation. The more stops they made the harder it was to get them restarted. You could hear the leader cursing at the lads in the bar.

  ‘For fuck’s sake lads, fall in.’

  But he lost a few at each stop, and by early afternoon there was drink flowing in every one of Dingle’s fifty-six pubs. Essentially, the Wran was a celebration to mark the passing of the shortest day of the year, and it was as old as mankind. It was the defeat of winter and the optimism of the coming spring, with its lengthening days and benign weather. Nowhere was this more evident than in the defining and defiant cry of the Sráid Eoin Wran: ‘We never died a winter yet. Up Sráid Eoin.’

  Things would be well heated up by the start of the second round of the town. Drink was taking effect. Even without the alcohol people were intoxicated by the music, the shouting, the dancing and the occasion. Inhibitions were lost. Nobody recognised anybody under the hoods and masks. It was a time when it was okay to grab a woman and feel her in ways that at any other time would have been out of the question. Anonymity gave protection.

  If the first circuit of the town was for entertainment, the second was for the collection. The man with the collection box was crucial. People at their windows, usually upstairs to get a better view of proceedings, would throw down their contributions to the collector. Shopkeepers and merchants were watched carefully to ensure they paid up, and the givers were careful to make sure that they gave something extra to their local Wran.

  In those days the collection was for the Wran Ball. Well, it was called a Ball, but it was another excuse for a great drinking session. Towards evening time there was the last round-up. This was where all the Wrans and the various bands came together for one final tour of the town. It was marvellous. The streets streamed with colour and resounded with music, dancing, shouting, singing.

  There was no time quite like it. Your blood would be pounding through your veins and the small hairs standing on your neck with sheer excitement and emotion. Dingle that day was like no other place. It was wild, mad, drunk and pagan. Pagan in the symbolism of the straw men and the hobbyhorse. Menacing and theatrical in the masks and disguises. Wild and atavistic in the driving wren tunes and provocative dancing. Add alcohol to that mix and all boundaries, inhibitions and limits collapsed.

  Is it any wonder that the Church was less than enthusiastic about it? This pagan day had occasions for drink, sex and a slackening of morals generally, and it diverted collections away from the Church.

  Many of my family and friends still make the annual pilgrimage to Dingle to take part in the Wran, leaving their homes before cockcrow on St Stephen’s morning. Of course, it has changed and developed over the years. But it still quintessentially ‘us’. Of all my friends I am the only one I know not to have gone back for the Wran since leaving Dingle. Why? Well, my memories of the day are so great, that I am afraid that returning would corrupt the magic. Maybe, like Oisín returning from Tír na nÓg and suddenly changing into a feeble, old and babbling man, confronting the reality of four decades of change in the Wran would steal my youth, too. But the memory remains untouchable.

  The Dingle peninsula, comprising town, village, country, sea and mountain, is best described by its ancient barony title of Corca Dhuibhne rather than by any of its other names, such as West Kerry, which makes it seem just a portion of a greater integrity.

  It is often said of the peninsula – the most westerly point of Europe – that ‘the next parish is America’. There is something casually dismissive about that description that I don’t like; does it imply that Dingle was ‘the arsehole of Ireland’, or at the very least a twilight zone between the real Ireland and the vast ocean? We who were born between Blennerville bridge and the Blasket Islands have a different perception. When we stand on Coumenole or Clogher strands, addressing the Atlantic Ocean, and with the land mass of two continents guarding our backs, we truly feel that we are the vanguard of Europe. Slea Head and Dunmore Head, cleaving aggressively into the Atlantic Ocean, give direction to the continent of Europe.

  Yet Corca Dhuibhne is more an attitude than a place. Its mark is indelible; there is no leaving it behind. No matter how far we journey, that attitude travels with us and influences and informs what we do throughout our lives. We are unnaturally and irrationally proud of our birthplace

  The peninsula is an elemental place, open to the vagaries and moods of Mother Nature. On a bright summer’s day, when the sun, sea and scenery are in harmony, it is a perfect heaven. In winter, the sight of fearsome Atlantic waves charging ahead of a southwestern storm and smashing against the fastness of the rocky headlands and cliffs is an awesome and exhilarating experience. Then again, there are few more depressing feelings than being in a sodden and damp Dingle in those airless times when the clouds of oppressive mist that roll in from Greenmount, Conor Pass and Cnoc a’ Chairn have hung around the town for four or five consecutive days. You can almost feel the weight of it. On Sunday afternoons, and sometimes on the Thursday half-day, it was not uncommon for people to ‘go for a soak’, that is, retreat to their beds, away from the depressive surroundings. I remember a former mental health consultant from Killarney making the point that Kerry had a higher than average level of certain types of mental illness and that the weather must have been a significant factor in this. What Dingle people suffered in the reduced daylight of autumn and winter would probably now be diagnosed as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). For us schoolchildren, the shortening days were exacerbated by those teachers who insisted, by way of topical nature study, on drawing our attention to the gathering hordes of swallows getting ready to desert us at the first cool breeze. My schoolboy mind used to wonder whether we couldn’t hold back the winter by trapping all the swallows and not letting them migrate – a hope about as futile as that of the other seasider, Canute, plotting against the elements.

  The sea was central to life and
livelihoods in Dingle, and we were constantly being reminded that it, and not us, was in charge. One day, the arrival of a new fifty-foot trawler, the Ros Mór, was the talk of the town. The boast was that it could handle the roughest of seas. A short time later, a huge storm blew up and the trawler was blown from the pier moorings and lifted over the quay wall, to be deposited, without dignity, as damaged goods on the Milltown Road.

  The Blasket Island Sound is a dangerous and treacherous place, which has been the death row of seafarers for centuries. The bones, bodies, relics and wrecks on its seabed are eclectically representative of most of Europe’s ‘glorious’ wars, from the galleons of the Spanish Armada to the U-boats and fighter planes of the twentieth century. The death list also includes ordinary farmers, fishermen and islanders crossing the Sound in naomhógs or trawlers in the mundane pursuit of food and provisions. Old stories hint that sometimes the odds were unfairly stacked against ships that plied these waters. Driven by desperation and the needs of starving families, folk from the coast or the island would lure the vessels towards the treacherous rocks by misplacing navigation lights, in the hope of salvaging survival from the holds and cargo of the wrecks. Who knows whether there was truth in these rumours? Certainly, the most damning insult to any family would be to charge them with robbing the valuables of drowned seafarers who had been washed ashore: ‘Didn’t your crowd rob dead sailors?’ That was considered as low as it was possible to go.

  But the sea also brought life and new blood to these shores. Corca Dhuibhne was a trading point from the Continent to Ireland; for centuries, sailors and smugglers, soldiers and swindlers arrived. The stranger and the traveller was part of daily life, and each one brought something of themselves. Some stayed, some loved and left, but either way gave their blood and their genes to add to the glorious mix of what makes Corca Dhuibhne. There is no trace of the dullness of inbreeding. Only those of us with mixed blood are true-blooded Corca Dhuibhne! This is our defining mark and it facilitates openness to change, difference and novelty.

  When I was growing up in Dingle in the 1950s and early 1960s fishing was the main source of employment. Fishermen were individually liked and popular, but they worked in dangerous conditions and were poorly rewarded for their labour. At that time, under the rules of the Catholic Church, every Friday was a ‘fast’ day, which meant that no meat could be eaten, under pain of sin. It seems daft now, but then fish was very much the poor relation to meat, so being ‘reduced’ to eating fish once a week was seen as a penance. And eating fish by choice on any other day was almost unheard of. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a ruling being complied with nowadays. Should we blame the Church or was it a question of our own ignorance and servility? Whatever, it meant that while there was an enormous consumption of fish on Fridays, the other days of the week were not very rewarding for the fishing industry. And, of course, long-term, as everyone now acknowledges, it created a sort of stigma about eating fish that took decades to erode. Can it be any wonder that Irish people were so low in the international league of fish-eaters, when, for generations, eating it was a penance? The negative attitude towards fish resulted in a poor market and low income and consequently a low place in the social order for fishermen and their families. Negativity towards the fishing industry permeated through national policy. Extraordinarily, fishing did not merit a mention in the programmes for economic expansion published in the 1950s. There was no structured investment in the fishing industry and we effectively gave away our fishing grounds in our early European agreements.

  ‘It’s not swanky to eat fish,’ a woman said to my mother once, and that probably summed up the whole general attitude. It wasn’t swanky. There were some exceptions – fish that was expensive, such as salmon or lobster, could be eaten without any loss of face. We would eat scallops, too, and a favourite treat was crab claws, we called them ‘thumbs’, and cod’s roe, which was known as ‘payse’. The roe was boiled in its sac and then fried in the pan. It was beautiful. After coming to live in Dublin, I wasted many trips to fish shops asking for ‘payse’, only to be met by blank incomprehension.

  The low esteem in which fish was held is reflected in the saying, ‘Making fish of one and flesh of another’, the implication being that the latter was getting the preferential treatment. I had a friend whose uncle came over from England for a fortnight every summer. He was a parish priest, therefore an important man, and the family treated him as such. They had the best of food every day. And it was always meat – steak or roasts. The family was reasonably comfortably off, nonetheless the cost of such expensive grub for the few weeks made a dent in the budget. I happened to be there on the occasion of the important guest’s departure. We sang and waved our goodbyes. As the GB-registered car moved off, the woman of the house turned for the door, saying, ‘That’s it now. Fish for a month!’

  Because of the nature of their work, the fishermen had many superstitions and pisreogaí that informed the way they went about their business. Redheaded women were considered very bad luck, and a fisherman who met such a lady on his way to the boat was almost certain to turn back. Along with the redheads, feathered fowl and furry animals were never mentioned on board. This had some unusual consequences. My uncle John, who supplied the boats with basic materials such as ropes and the like, was universally known by the nickname ‘Foxy John’. But reference to a fox at sea was considered a direct challenge to nature, so the fishermen called him ‘Nasty Name’ or ‘Nasty’ for short. Tough on Uncle John, I used to think, but he didn’t mind at all.

  It is easy with hindsight to laugh at or belittle such notions, but when not just your livelihood but also your life depended on the whims of nature, then it made sense not to take any risks with forces that were beyond your control. The largest boat in the Dingle fleet at that time was fifty feet. Week after week, these boats headed out into the Atlantic Ocean in all seasons. If the weather turned against them, or the forecast was bad, tough decisions had to be made and sometimes they did not work out.

  On the day of a storm, the fishermen would be lined up along the shops, bars and houses at the head of the pier, anxiously watching their boats riding the bucking white horses at their moorings a few hundred yards out from the pier. An abiding memory is the tension that would grip the whole town when a boat was caught out at sea in a storm; the anxious wait as wives and friends tried to raise the crew on the radio; the relief when the boat was spotted rounding the harbour mouth between the lighthouse and the Tuairín Bán, heading into the relative safety of Dingle harbour.

  There were times, thankfully very rarely, when a boat did not return and lives were lost. This cast a gloom over the peninsula. After comforting the grieving on their loss, finding the bodies became the single-minded concern of all. Our belief was that the bodies of those lost at sea rose to the surface after nine days. This would have been learned from centuries of experience and tradition, but there were, in fact, sound chemical and biological reasons to support the theory. However, bodies did not always come to the surface, to be picked up by the fleet of trawlers, or turn up on the local shoreline. They might have caught in nets, rocks, or debris. They might have been dragged way out to sea by Atlantic currents during the nine days. On such occasions, a religious ceremony was performed by the water’s edge, at the point nearest to the drowning site. The priest, in a practice frowned on by many bishops and dismissed by other priests as being pagan, would float a sheaf of oats, bearing a lighted candle, into the water. The belief was that it would drift with the currents to where the body was located and it could then be recovered. Sometimes, whether for scientific, religious or pagan reasons, it did. What was most feared by family and relatives was that the body would rise off the ocean floor and remain suspended somewhere between the surface and the seabed, never to be discovered, a state described by the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as ‘báite idir dhá uisce’, drowned between two waters.

  My memory of the pier at Dingle in the evening time, when the fishing catch was be
ing landed, is of hundreds of dogfish floating dead in the water. They are horrible-looking fish, like small shark. Dogfish were considered inedible, and therefore unusable, so they would be dumped overboard when the fish were being sorted into boxes on the pier. The fishermen themselves were left with the unsaleable fish. These would include John Dory, monkfish and the Red Gurnard, which we called gurnet. Many of these fish are sold in the best shops and most expensive restaurants today. They were not eaten and impossible to sell thirty years ago, and dogfish, which even the fishermen baulked at eating, are now fancifully for sale as rock salmon in most supermarkets. Fresh fish was the rarest of commodities in Dingle. All the best stuff was iced and shipped out to the cities immediately. The locals were left with the rest. What a change today when many fishermen can get a ready market in the restaurants, hotels and shops locally.

  Dingle at that time was a town living on old money and memories of better days. The population had dropped alarmingly over the previous half-century. Killarney was the major tourist destination in Kerry and Tralee was the county town. Apart from east coast Gaeilgeoirí on their way to the Gaeltacht – not great spenders – there were few enough visitors. The town had no public toilet, one public telephone and the only restaurant was the dining room of Benner’s Hotel on the Main Street. In June 1953 the Dingle–Tralee light railway was closed down, which was another blow to the town.

  The rural electrification scheme did not reach Dingle until about 1954. I well remember going to school on the day when they started lifting the flagstones in the streets to plant the new electricity poles. Just between the National Bank and Benner’s Hotel they had dug a huge hole to receive one of those metal poles that were strategically placed to take the main strain away from the normal wooden ones. A block and tackle mounted on the back of a truck helped hoist the pole upright. It does sound foolish in hindsight, but that pole was the biggest thing I had ever been close to; it dwarfed everything around it. It stretched across the road and its sheer dominance frightened me. I really thought it was the end of the world.