McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland Read online

  McCARTHY’S BAR

  A Journey of Discovery in Ireland

  Pete McCarthy

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  McCARTHY’S BAR. Copyright © 2000 by Pete McCarthy. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN 0-312-27210-3 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-31133-8 (pbk)

  First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  To Irene, Alice, Isabella and Coral

  and to Margaret and Ken,

  for taking me there

  Prologue

  The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist’s pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter.

  St Patrick’s Day, and McCarthy’s Bar was heaving.

  The Eighth Rule of Travel states: Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name On It. Other rules include: No. 7, Never Eat in a Restaurant with Laminated Menus; No. 13, Never Ask a British Airways Stewardess for Another Glass of Wine Until She’s Good and Ready; and No. 17, Never Try and Score Dope From Hassidic Jews While Under the Impression They’re Rastafarians, as someone I know once did on a Sunday afternoon in Central Park.

  There’s an excellent P. McCarthy’s at the top of the main street in Westport, County Mayo, where they once made seventeen cheese-and-onion toasties for five of us, all on the same toaster, and never grumbled. I also like Pete’s Pub in Boston, Massachusetts, full of second-generation Irish postal workers still arguing about JFK and Nixon; or at least they were the day I spent the afternoon there and the barman gave me his shirt—a very selfless gesture, I thought, especially for such a fat bloke.

  But I’d chosen this McCarthy’s to spend St Patrick’s Day in, even though it was just a plain surname, with no P in front of it. I’d invested ₤149 in a three-day, two-night St Patrick’s Day package from London Gatwick to be here, tempted back by hazy memories of my first visit, when I really had just spotted the sign, obeyed the rule, and walked in off the street.

  Turned out Con the barman was from Skibbereen, just eight miles from where my mother grew up. There was a comprehensive collection of Irish matchboxes from the 1930s and 1940s, and one of Roy Keane’s Manchester United shirts in a glass case behind the bar. The grainy old wood and dusty stained glass were full of character, and that was just the harp player’s spectacles.

  I’d been lured here this time by the dread of spending another St Patrick’s night in the Home Counties of England. Each 17 March brings to a head the inability of the English middle classes to deal with the Irish Problem, in the sense that Ireland is a problem because it exists. This is when the radio phone-ins, and the letter columns of local newspapers, are taken over by the Knights of St George, the League of Anti-European Loyalists, and other assorted flag-fetishists and embittered headcases.

  The gist of their bile is that, despite a glorious empire, two World Wars, the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher and a Queen Mother who has retained an impressive capacity for gin and Dubonnet well into her nineties, the English refuse to celebrate St George’s Day. No one knows when it is; and in any case, St George is also claimed as celestial patron by Alsace. So it’s just not fair that we let all these paddies make such a fuss for the Irish saint, who was Welsh anyway; and while we’re at it, how come we let Irish people who live over here vote, instead of locking them up? After all, it’s not as if the Irish are just Catholic. They’re Catholic and pagan, and that’s just not on.

  So some time in February—the worst of all months in England, when the desire to hibernate or flee is almost uncontrollable, and feelings of deepest malice towards Australians and their weather well up whenever the cricket highlights appear on the telly—the thought struck me. Why not get away this year for Paddy’s Day? Why spend a feast-day—one that carries echoes of my earliest childhood memories—in an English pub, drinking overpriced Guinness and listening to Van Morrison’s Greatest Hits, when for just ₤149, according to the weekend papers, I could do exactly the same thing in an Irish pub, only in more convivial company?

  I briefly considered New York, with its green beer and good-natured, ruddy-cheeked, homophobic Irish policemen; or Dublin, with its rich literary heritage, and its scores of English stag parties throwing up on the streets of Temple Bar. But, deep down, I knew it had to be McCarthy’s. After all, it had my name on it.

  Well, it was a fine evening. At one point the harp player fell off again, only backwards. And what a cosmopolitan crowd we were. As well as the Irish and the English, there were Americans, Italians, French and Scots, some sinister, well-heeled Russians, and even a couple of Hungarians—all agreeing loudly in half a dozen languages that the craic was indeed mighty.

  It must have been some time after eleven when I realised that, in a profound and very real way, Con the barman was my best friend, and quite probably a close relative. It was important he should know what I really felt. So I told him I didn’t feel English.

  ‘You sound English to me, sorr.’

  ‘But it’s what you feel inside that counts, Con. In here! And I…’

  I knew it was important somehow to convey that this wasn’t the drink talking; that I meant it, and what’s more, I’d still mean it the next day. So I grabbed him and shouted.

  ‘I…inside I feel Irish. I know where I belong!’

  To emphasise my sincerity, I knocked a drink over.

  ‘Ah, that’s great, sorr. Good luck to ye now.’

  Outside, I stood under the green neon shamrock and looked up at the sign. ‘McCarthy’s,’ it said. ‘Hungary’s Top Irish Pub.’

  I turned up my collar. Budapest can still be quite chilly in March.

  Sod this, I thought. Next year I’ll go to Ireland.

  Chapter One

  The Whiff

  A year later, and I’m on the plane to Cork.

  In a cold sweat.

  The man across the aisle from me has a menacing aura, and a dog-collar. He may be a priest, but something about him—the way he seems to threaten violence even while asleep, perhaps—makes me suspect him of being a Christian Brother.

  From the age of ten, I was taught by the Christian Brothers: the carrot and stick method of education, but without the carrot. My first school report said: ‘Peter is an unpleasant and frivolous boy who talks too much and will never make anything of himself, but he does take a punch well.’

  At primary school, before the Brothers, it had been the Sisters: six impressionable years trying to work out whether nuns had hair. Curiously, both the convent primary schools I attended have now been turned into pubs. And the Christian Brothers, for their part, have a make of brandy named after them. God moves in mysterious ways, especially after a few drinks.

  From an early age it was taken for granted that Jesus was Catholic, God himself was Irish, and I had been born into a wicked, pagan country. On St Patrick’s Day you could spot all the kids from Irish families wearing huge bunches of shamrock on their blazers, in a proud display of religious and cultural heritage that also made fights much easier to start. Though my dad was English, half-Irish counted as Irish when the insults were flying.

  We lived in the industrial north-west, in Warrington, where the air tasted of detergent from the soap-powder factory, so at least you knew it was clean. The rugby league team was called the Wire, after the town
’s main product. The Brothers’ school was eight miles away, in St Helens; a town so devastated by heavy industry it made Warrington look like an area of outstanding natural beauty.

  I went abroad for the first time when I was twelve.

  We’d been going to Ireland every year since I’d been born, but Ireland didn’t count as abroad. It was much nearer than London, or Bristol or Newcastle or Edinburgh for that matter, and was regarded simply as an extension of home. But in my second year at the Brothers’ school we went on a school trip to proper abroad. To our twin town.

  To Stuttgart.

  I’ve never really approved of the idea of twinning, because places are invariably matched with other places just like them. So if you live in, say, a stunningly beautiful medieval town with a perfectly preserved castle, or a glamorous seaside resort with a fishing harbour and miles of sandy beach, then you’ll be twinned with your exquisite European equivalent. And if you live in Warrington, or St Helens, then you’ll be twinned with another industrial casualty.

  Like Stuttgart.

  So having spent the first dozen years of my life surrounded by wireworks, glass factories and chemical plants, I found myself transported to a place where the high spot of the visit was a trip to a ball-bearing factory. To make matters worse, I contracted hepatitis. I lost a stone in a week and turned yellow, which is quite interesting when you’ve twelve. So the doctor arrived—a rather severe-looking elderly German gentleman in wire-framed glasses: not the most reassuring sight in the world when you’ve spent the last term doing a project on Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.

  I’d led a sheltered life till this point, and so far was unaware of the existence of suppositories. The news came as a terrible shock. The doctor explained in schoolboy German what had to be done; when my custard-coloured eyes glazed over in disbelief, he mimed it, but it was still difficult to comprehend.

  Surely not? Not with those big tablets? After all, if my parents had wanted me to have foreign objects pushed up my bottom, they could have sent me to public school.

  Finally, though, the message got through. The course of medication lasted a week. The first couple of days were the worst. After that, the doctor came back and mimed taking the tinfoil wrapper off, and things got much easier.

  It didn’t half put me off going abroad, though.

  So for the next five years—until I was seventeen, when I went to Stuttgart again, out of force of habit—I gave up on abroad, and stuck with Ireland. West Cork, to be precise. Today, it’s a glamorous destination, a haven for upmarket tourists, English expats, and Dutch cannabis importers, but in the 1950s and 1960s it was the arse end of the back of beyond, and that may be talking it up.

  We stayed at Butlersgift, the small farm where my mother grew up. One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing near an open gate by a muddy boreen when an enormous sow came through it, grunting and snuffling, the terrifying ring through her nose glinting in the sunlight as she looked down on me. I burst into tears, and ran back towards the farmhouse, screaming for help. The sow trundled along behind, as far as I was concerned, in pursuit, but probably just joining in the fun.

  Twenty or thirty yards away my grandfather stood by the back door of the house, roaring with laughter as I approached. I could only have been two or three at the time, because he died when I was four.

  I went over with my mum for the funeral. Dad had to stay in England and make wire. After much umming and ahhing between my uncles on the upstairs landing, I was taken in to view the body. To this day the family all deny it happened; but I remember him, laid out in a brown suit and a gold sash, as clearly as I remember not being allowed to go to the funeral itself. I spent that afternoon at an auntie’s house near a remote bog, by a lake. I remember hearing the sound of my mother’s footsteps on the gravel outside when she returned. Although in your memories your parents are always more or less the same age, I have a vivid picture of her being younger then—younger than I am now—and I know she was attentive to me, though she’d just buried her father.

  During the summer holidays we made hay with pitchforks, drew water from the well with an enamel bucket, and went to market by horse and cart. Work stopped in the fields for the angelus. Mass was in Latin. We searched fuchsia hedgerows for leprechauns, with a net and a jar. And although it’s statistically impossible in a country as moist as Ireland, I’m certain that the sun always shone.

  But these golden childhood memories have become a problem; for now, when I return to Ireland, I feel that I belong, in a way that I have never belonged in the land of my birth. Even though I loved growing up in the north, England leaves me feeling detached: an outsider, an observer, in some way passing through. But as soon as I hit the tarmac or the quayside over there, I feel involved, engaged—as if I’ve come home, even though I’ve never actually lived there.

  So what I’m wondering is this. Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you’ve never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

  Across the aisle, the Christian Brother is still asleep. I’d wake him and ask him his opinion, if experience hadn’t taught me that the clergy can be lethal if riled in a confined space.

  I’d briefly considered spending the holiday in Dublin, but I find I like it less since the ruthless redevelopment and marketing of Temple Bar.

  Continental café culture has arrived, a forced planting of non-indigenous chrome counters, almond-flavoured latte, and seared yellowfin tuna in balsamic lemongrass and rhubarb jus. Japanese-besuited media ponces sit in windows sipping bottles of over-priced cooking lager, imported from Mexico, and other top brewing spots, to the banks of the Liffey. Plain, unadorned, authentic pubs, previously unchanged for decades, now reek of new wood and paint, as they’re gutted and refurbished to conform to the notion of Irishness demanded by the stag nights from Northampton and conference delegates from Frankfurt who fill the streets, interchangeable in their smug fat smiles and Manchester United replica shirts.

  Last time I was in Dublin I met a German who actually believed that ‘Manchester United’ was a place in Ireland. Mind you, in Germany once, in the military garrison town of Erlangen, I had a few drinks with three American GIs who were planning to visit England ‘because it would be neat to see where John Lennon and Elvis grew up’. They also wanted to know if they could use dollars, and would the street signs be in English? I tried to tell them about Elvis coming from Tennessee, but it seemed to make them want to kill me. The Twenty-eighth Rule states: Never Get Drunk with Soldiers (particularly in countries where the streets are named after dates).

  What finally decided me against Dublin was reading that they were bringing some expert over from the States to dye the Liffey green. And anyway, Cork seemed the natural choice. Though it’s Ireland’s second city, a population of 180,000 compared to Dublin’s one million, it’s still just a small town; and only forty-five miles to the west is Butlersgift, where my mother grew up, my grandfather died, and my cousin still farms.

  As we cross the tarmac at Cork airport and head for the terminal, we are greeted by someone dressed as St Patrick. He has a sidekick who is wearing, and I promise I’m not making this up, a rubber Celtic cross costume. They are lampooning the priests and the religion that held total sway in this country from the seventh century till, oh, about a week last Wednesday. Midgets in leprechaun costumes are running amok in the baggage hall, but luckily I’ve only brought hand luggage.

  I’ve come for the big parade tonight, but my gracious, silver-haired taxi driver tells me it started at two o’clock, about an hour ago. Never mind. I ask him to take me to the Ambassador’s Hotel, if he knows it.

  ‘Ah, yes. Used to be the Hospital for Incurable Diseases. I’m told it’s very nice inside. Now, see this now. That no right turn sign. Well, they’re very strict on that sorta thing these days.’

  Then he asks me to watch out left, because this juncti
on’s a bastard, and, like the three cars in front of us, we turn right.

  ‘Very strict, they are.’

  We turn into a street with a sign saying: ‘This Way To Hospice’. The first building you see is the morgue, which must be a great comfort to people on their way to the hospice. Once inside my comfortably appointed Room with Trouser Press in the former Hospital for Incurable Diseases, there’s just time to calculate how many people must have died in here during the hospital’s eighty-year lifetime—about 4,000, I reckon—before hitting the streets. As I pass through the lobby I notice, almost subliminally, that lots of overdressed families are sitting round eating salmon, while a priest plays the piano. I pretend this is normal, and smile.

  Outside, people are streaming back up the hill from the direction of Patrick’s Bridge, carrying tricolour flags and balloons. It only takes me five or ten minutes to twig that the parade’s already over. There are lots of cheeky kids with freckles and rosy cheeks, watery eyes and a slightly pinched look, as if they’ve been standing in a cold breeze. Despite the much-vaunted Celtic Tiger economy, these people dress and look poorer than people where I live.

  In the space of 100 yards I pass two newsagents, three antique shops, four restaurants, and more pubs than all of them put together. In the absence of a parade, there’s nothing else for it but to observe the First Rule of Travel: On Arrival, Buy a Local Paper and Go for a Drink. The court cases, property prices and obituaries will tell you more than any guidebook, and the drink will help you feel you understand things that in reality are beyond your comprehension. The Greyhound, on the north side of Patrick’s Bridge, will do for starters. I need to ease myself gently back into the seductive mêlée of Irish pub life, and it’s reasonably quiet in here, despite the fact that Cheltenham Races (TV) and Van Morrison (CD) are on simultaneously.