Jaywalking with the Irish (16 page)

The snow quickly melted, the monsoons eddied into the precincts of memory, and the January sun strengthened with frosty nights followed by mercifully lengthening days. Naturally, the world’s greatest weather martyrs cursed every twitch of the thermometer, but compared to the New England winters we’d known, the season was easy street.

There were many fresh articles to write while I plotted and schemed to launch my Irish magazine, and Jamie was beginning to turn the corner too. Ultimately she found her way through to yea-sayers to her talents that should have been obvious all along. Suddenly, she was tending burgeoning projects with the Cork Opera House, the main performing-arts theater in Ireland’s southwest, and the Crawford Municipal Gallery of Art, and thereby meeting a dozen new people every day. Our purgatory of nonexistence seemed to be ended, the six-month probation period complete. Jamie’s enthusiasm fed my own, and the horizon spelled opportunity.

If Ireland no longer lived up to its nostalgic time-worn billings, there was at least a positive side to it. Cork, county of 430,000, urban center of 220,000, was bursting with new enterprises, unsung artistic pursuits, and heady schemes for the future. Promise scented the air. Spanish urban planners had been enlisted to make over the city center, with new pedestrian thoroughfares and public spaces, even as a massive drainage scheme began to alleviate the River Lee’s nose-holding foulness. Developers rubbed their hands and whispered over tables at the projected doubling of the airport’s size and the prospect of recasting derelict dockyards into a new world of waterfront cafés and boutiques.

Constantly, in that capital of our transplanted lives, too, I met
beacons of a changing Irish world: an air-conditioning contractor (
air-conditioning in Ireland?
) who signed up £100,000 in new glass-sheathed corporate park assignments in one day; a thirty-three-year-old who had bought his third glamorously remodeled super-pub; a fellow with a garage fish-smoking operation now supplying delectable wild salmon and mackerel to New York; people who flew back and forth to London as if they were commuting down the road.

The Cork that captured my attention was a small and irrepressible city fueled by grandiose visions, a little engine that could. The entire county clearly danced to a resurgent tune, bent on erasing the ancestral defeatism of the Famine-obsessed poor-mouthers and begrudgers of the past – and the imagery of quaint backwardness milked forever by the Irish tourist board. A Clonakilty spa was busy enticing Irish matrons to toss off their inhibitions and lie naked for £300 seaweed baths and peculiar prone showers while an
Englishman
kneads them into contented pliancy. In the old days, such a Brit would have been shot for his naughty caprice. But flashy indoor tennis, squash, and swimming palaces were cropping up right and left, and California dreams of walloping squash balls and splashing into pools were imprinted on the population’s freshly minted credit cards. A car wash used to be something God bequeathed upon Ireland with a downpour, but they too had become ubiquitous, typically part of gas station complexes selling throwaway nappies, gourmet coffees, and everything a family could need for a week.

“We’re in danger of becoming the fifty-second state,” warned a local character, without quite putting his finger on the fifty-first.

Whether the tourist approves or disapproves, ould Ireland is all but gone. Take any recent British or American innovation, repackage it for the island of heady notions, and one might make money. The country in fact seemed to offer one of the most entrepreneurial environments I’d ever seen.

Troubling issues, however, came with the territory.Were fattening wallets killing the nation’s identity? Rising mountains of waste, choking traffic jams, and unchecked development were obviously taking their toll. In its zeal for progress at all costs, the government
was pushing a $6 billion master plan for building thousands of miles of new motorways that would bisect six thousand farms, while, near to home, wreaking havoc on the beautiful valley of the River Lee.

Lawlessness had also become rampant with the nightly incidence of violent assaults, often upon innocent pedestrians, having risen exponentially, while rape and armed robbery, almost unheard of in Ireland’s dirt-poor past, exploded in kind. The flood of dark-skinned “asylum seekers” from impoverished lands too often encountered ugly confrontations with the downtrodden rungs of the social scale. The threads of change lay in unraveled skeins on all sides.

As far as I could see, the local newspaper was but scraping the surface of these profound transformations. So here came one peculiar transplant’s notion: launch a provocative, color monthly magazine celebrating Cork’s renaissance, while probing the vast nether regions of all that Ireland conveniently ignored. Didn’t nearly 450 regional magazines thrive in America, mother lode of new business ideas?

“Go for it,” most said. “Munster, the entire southwest of Ireland, is crying for a new vision.”

The only problem was raising, oh, about half a million quid.

The kids quickly noted the change in their parents’ spirits. “If you start this magazine, Dad, won’t we have to stay here for years and years?” the ever-penetrating Laura asked as she idly dipped a finger in a sugar bowl one night. There was mascara under her blue eyes, silver polish on her nails, and she looked half a head taller and disconcertingly more mature than when we boarded the plane back in August. “It’s obvious that you are all geared up.”

“I like Ireland, but America is way, way, double hundred times better,” protested Owen. Only days before, this innocent tadpole had dispatched a postcard to his beloved friend Myles, his soul twin, saying, “I am far away, but you will always be the friend I love.”

Harris sometimes looked dazed. His fellow urchins incessantly blasted the doorbell and seemed to swing out of the trees to join in
with his life, but the boy had by now been subjected to his fourth change of teacher, the latest seeming to be far more decent than her predecessors. His beloved reptiles, his favorite sports, his formerly intimate world, his security, all had been taken away from him by the people he should have been able to trust. Rugby, the only competitive sport Christian Brothers offered, felt to him like an ass-backward knock into the mud. And so he retreated into a hermetic, fantastical world of enemy-zapping electronic games, with a boy’s dreams filled in by grunting Esperanto-speaking shades.

“We really need to create more special experiences for the kids,” Jamie said one night, and she was right. I worried that this Irish adventure had become top heavy with our own concerns.

The next evening we all went to the “panto” which is a slapstick holiday season theater experience traditional across Ireland and the U.K., if largely unknown elsewhere. This particular pantomime was a
Cinderella
extravaganza involving a mugging/dancing/singing cast of two hundred, with a couple of dozen of these comprised by a chorus line of three- to six-year-old girls in sequined blue dresses. In true panto tradition, the ugly sisters offered many a bawdy double entendre for older listeners, and audience participation was mandatory. “O
H, NO
I
WON’T
!” an ugly sister loudly declaimed about some grubby chore she, rather than Cinderella, was meant to execute. “O
H, YES YOU WILL
!” five hundred children bellowed back on cue, in a hallowed panto interchange. Great stuff, as the Irish say.

“Things are going so well. Shouldn’t we all stay in Ireland for a long time?” I probed while tucking the kids into bed.

“O
H, NO WE WON’T
!” they roared back.

Return to beginning of chapter

I discussed the Great Irish Magazine Idea with anyone who would listen. And behold, Ireland’s tricky turnstiles began to unjam. Despite scant prior experience, Jamie set to successfully raising funds for a major Picasso exhibit for the erudite director of the Crawford Gallery, and he became interested in my quest as well. Quickly, the erudite Peter Murray pointed the way to a rich cast of local designers, photographers, and writers, along with the astonishing number of Cork-born multimillionaires abroad who might contribute to a publication about their home soil.

A hot Dublin investment firm referred influential local consultants, whom I hired to help beat venture capital out of the bushes. Suddenly, Ireland seemed like a place where movers and shakers could be more easily approached than anywhere I had ever been, once one was armed with a master thread.

So I called on an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old named Trevor White, who was at that moment launching a glossy monthly called the
Dubliner
. In cluttered upstairs digs there, I found the young publisher disconsolately staring at stacks of invoices on his desk. Ghostly pale, perhaps from reading his pile of bills, and boyishly handsome, he had the alabaster mien of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray at the precise point when the first cracks began to spread across his until then untroubled features.

“I’m not sure you want to be getting into this,” he warned. “But go on and tell me what you’re thinking.”

The scheme was laid out in punishing detail. Trevor’s head slumped over his desk as I spoke.

“I don’t know if you realize how hard this will be,” the young publisher offered, aging even as he spoke. “Ireland can be an
unbelievably stingy and closed shop, especially when it comes to advertising. You better be fearless.”

“Are you saying ‘Don’t do it?’”

“No, you’re the man. Just learn something from what has happened to me. Cork is overdue for your idea and I think you’re the person who’s going to make it happen.”

I chose to be heartened, and became more so upon discovering an omen above the departure platform at the cavernous railway depot of Heuston Station – a huge billboard promoting another new regional magazine called
Galway Now
.

Imagining that nuggets of information lay waiting everywhere, I called to the Hi-B the next rain-soaked night. Owen was holding court, talking about some “fierce” or “massive” thing. A charming property agent named Hugh McPhillips – a potential advertiser for my magazine? – appeared, fresh from rally racing his expensive sports car through death-defying terrain to the north. The water shedding off his clothing, and pooling at his feet, suggested he should have been nosing a hydrofoil up the River Lee.

“It’s a full-moon tide and the river is windblown and coming up fast. I’d get out of here if I were you, boy – that is, if you want to make it home tonight, because the streets are already sloshing,” said Hugh.

Ridiculous, I thought while descending to the hideous basement men’s room, where I found my feet engulfed by a half-inch film of rapidly rising water.

The Lo-B.

I lingered a while longer, partly because a scrawny, fortyish man from the North had started talking passionately about the troubles there. I related a story about hitchhiking with my German girlfriend through Derry in July 1974. She and I confronted British armored vehicles and buses dripping broken glass, the occupants of the latter banging drums and bawling military ballads. It was a classic aftermath of the annual Orange Day parades, when hoards of jeering, jingoistic Protestants bluster through “Taig” strongholds to proclaim that they, the descendants of William of Orange, vanquisher of the 1690 Catholic uprising at the Battle of the Boyne, still rule the North.

In the seething border town of Strabane, I had ventured into a pub to buy cigarettes. The bartender grabbed his telephone, figuring me and the affected beret of my youth to bear all the hallmarks of a dodgy unknown. I hurriedly made my purchase and left. The next afternoon, a masked gunman raked the local mayor and chief of police with a murderous fusillade in the same loo where I had stopped for a piss.

In the Hi-B, the Tyrone man listened closely, his eyes squinting beady and hard. He leaned forward, his breath stinking. “What if I told you my cousin did that?”

“That would be shocking,” I said, feeling unnerved.

“What if I told you he didn’t, and I was just winding you up, for fuck’s sake?” the visitor said with a coiled menace that suggested the first question might have been nearer to the truth.

I studied his sallow face closely and said nothing.

“I’m just playing with you now, so forget you ever heard this carry on, and go back to the States or wherever the feck you come from,” he said, draining his whiskey and departing abruptly. A circle of coldness remained where he had just stood, as is often the case when a certain type of Northern man makes his presence felt in Cork. By now, I had met several locals who claimed to be active in the IRA, but they were, as far as I knew, pretenders. In all save the roughest social strata, such sympathies are often worn as nothing more than a rhetorical badge. Tough young males with a Northern accent are generally given a wide berth in Cork, so weary are citizens of the Republic of the hard carriage and explosive anger that is bred by a lifetime’s exposure to daily menace up north, where Protestant pipe bombs are still thrown into Catholic kitchens with a sickening frequency, while the IRA keeps shooting out the knees of whoever crosses their thuggery.

The waters on Oliver Plunkett Street were assuredly rising. But there is no stopping Owen when he gets discoursing, especially after learning about the conversation I had weathered.

“Your man was talking shite. Aye, you simply never –
never
, do you understand? – pass on even the suggestion of some secret knowledge like that. Not a whisper – do you hear me? – if you’re from the North and you value your family’s safety,” Owen, who
was brought up in Donegal town, six miles from the Derry border, said with more than his usual vehemence.

“I’ve seen those parades. I know them frightfully well,” he said of the 2800 sectarian marches that take place in Northern Ireland every summer, three-quarters of them loyalist tantrums meant to exercise the ever-growing Catholic minority into a fresh crossfire of primitive violence. “They make bad blood boil from one end to the other of the Six Counties. But c’mere, when I was growing up in Donegal, there were such fine, welcoming feelings between Protestants and Catholics, we’d even march in each other’s parades to show respect for our neighbors’ traditions. But if you drove for twenty minutes, the world became sheer ugliness. Every family knew someone who had been maimed or killed across the border.”

“Jesus Christ,” interrupted Hugh, glancing out at the floodwaters below, at least a foot deep now. “They’ll be coming down the street in canoes before you know it.”

“We might as well wait for the ebb tide,” winked Owen. Brian O’Donnell soon offered his usual command for everyone to get lost, regardless of the prevailing meteorological conditions. “Drink up now. Last call!”

The regulars pretended to be hard of hearing. In Irish public houses, everyone knows that the first plea to depart is soon followed by a clock-stopping period officially designated as “drinking-up time.” Stalwarts linger through this period to probe for possible openings into a more uncharted dimension known as “after-hours.”

“He’s looking like Oisín tonight,” whispered Hugh. He was referring to the voyager through a magical Irish reality known as Tir na nÓg, where time altogether ceases. The legendary pre-Christian Oisín was led there on a white fairy horse and told, if he should wander, to never, ever, get off his supernatural steed. Oisín spent three centuries in Tir na nÓg, never aging one minute, while cavorting with the comely maiden who brought him there. But being Irish, Oisín eventually set out for a bit of roving. Naturally, upon reaching his home province, he climbed off his high horse, and thereupon set to aging hideously, his face instantly transformed into that of the 320-year-old man he in fact was.

On this mad night, Brian O’Donnell wore his Oisín look avidly, perhaps because his eyes were making merry upon a maiden fair. So it was that certain denizens hunkered low and rode off on our personal white steeds, which happened to have four legs made of wood. Oisín O’Donnell worked his imaginary baton over the Wagner crescendos that emanated from Tir na nÓg’s trackless regions. Time was other people’s problem, life eternal.

At some point, Oisín tired. He shut off his arias and the transformation that ensued was gruesome to behold. In seconds, the proprietor’s face easily took on the weight of three centuries. Into streets still ankle deep were the assembled human wrecks banished, wetting their trouser cuffs as they proceeded. Pitiful was the departure to behold.

Was the wife happy upon confronting the hideously aged figure who returned to her side?

Guess.

The next morning, Jamie climbed into the saddle with me for a journey to County Kerry to visit Noelle Campbell-Sharp, erstwhile doyenne of the Irish print media, and another potential helper for my magazine scheme. Various gut-wrenching turns through the mountains finally brought us down a near cattle track to the coast and the tourist coach-pounded Ring of Kerry road with a turn soon looping toward Ballinskelligs. This continued to a magnificent headland north of Waterville, still so unblighted by holiday-home horrors that the area serves as a prime playground for some of the most influential people in Ireland, among them our hostess and her friends.

Noelle’s art gallery was the rendezvous. A circular, thatched-roof stone affair, it looked like a deluxe bungalow in a game resort I once visited in South Africa. But its whitewashed interior walls displayed an array of finely executed landscape paintings and quirky sculptures, which piqued my curiosity.

Now in her late fifties, Noelle Campbell-Sharp had thrived as a shrewd marketing maven in Dublin, and then became a Bentley-driving publisher of a long list of magazines aimed at capitalizing on the Irish public’s craving for glossy images befitting a modern
“fifty-second state.” In a radio interview she’d once summed up her editorial vision as “Let them eat strawberries.” Her most successful publication was
Irish Tatler
, an offspring of the English flagship of gossip that had made her a handsome profit when she’d sold it off a decade or so before.

Hardly glamorous, she was in full Kerry mode upon arriving, a windbreaker yanked over her shoulders and her blond hair straggling around a broad face showing no trace of makeup. We sipped tea at the far end of her gallery beside an enormous hearth, smoldering with fragrant brown clumps of proper, hand-dug turf.

One could hardly imagine her being best friends with the Irish gossip columnist queen Terry Keane, who was rumoured to have spent twenty-seven years consorting with Charlie Haughey, the notorious former prime minister (
Taoiseach
). It is said that he used to whisk her off for weekends in Paris or the various country houses of his discreetly guffawing Hibernian friends. This was of course the same “Champagne Charlie” who is also alleged to have attempted to smuggle guns for the IRA and squelched every 1980s attempt at ending Ireland’s proscriptions upon contraception and divorce, while lecturing the Republic about the sanctity of family values and churchly ways. At this moment, magisterial Charlie was now holed up on his Kerry island estate not twenty miles from where we sat, forever hounded by the press and the tribunals investigating the corruption that had so deeply infested the Irish politics of his era.

Our hostess, who has sipped from many a fluted glass with Ireland’s ruling class, clearly had her own knack for working the strings of leverage. About ninety seconds were allotted for my description of the would-be Cork magazine. “Magazine publishing is a brutal business,” she allowed. “I know what I’m talking about because I dragged eleven of them into success when everyone said no woman could do such a thing. What we are doing here in Ballinskelligs is not easy either, but if you have enough vision and energy and the goal is right, anything is possible. That is how we’re proceeding because our projects here have the potential to revive this entire part of Kerry.”

A young English woman offered us tea. I knew that Noelle had
recently created an artists’ retreat nearby called Cill Rialaig, along with some eccentric creation dubbed the Ballroom of Imagination and Desire. Alas, a squall of Kerry talk made it impossible to get a question in edgewise.

“More than a hundred artists and writers from around the world now come every year to live in our retreat and soak up inspiration from these mountains and seas. We ask for nothing in return, but some give us paintings because what they experience here is life- changing. We are also trying to create the most important public art museum outside Dublin, which could be a tourist magnet for this entire region. But does the Arts Council bother to even come and visit? Look, here’s their latest letter. I regret, blah, blah. Funding limitations, blah, blah. Can you believe this? If they just came to Cill Rialaig they would understand the meaning of renaissance. Shouldn’t anyone in the arts comprehend the meaning of renaissance? Once you stand by the cliffs there and soak it all up, you will see. Margaret Atwood will be here this summer.”

Whoa, girl. Noelle barely left breathing space between her words, with not a one said about the launching of a certain Cork magazine, the well-advertised reason for our tortuous three-hour drive. One couldn’t help thinking of the words famously uttered by New York City’s garrulous former mayor, Ed Koch: “So enough about me already. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”

We climbed into her golden Mercedes and sliced through the village and onto the winding lane that led to her artists’ retreat on the headland. “Look there,” she blurted as we passed a driveway crowned by five ten-foot-high standing stones. “John O’Connor lives down that drive, the man who created the magnificent golf course on the Old Head of Kinsale. He’s on our board of directors. Have you met him?”