Jaywalking with the Irish (20 page)

With another recently victimized neighbor and supporting phone calls from a third, we finally filed a formal complaint with the
gardaí
. Action must have been discreetly taken, because the pests once more crawled out of our lives – this time, we hoped, for good. Our burglars were reportedly also caught, so there was progress. But too often lately, Ireland, this country of the welcomes to which we had moved with such hope, had been breaking our hearts.

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We cinched our belts and resolved not to let such brushes with unpleasantness crush our dreams. The teenage miscreants were no more than that after all, and the burglars had been “sorted.” The street crime problem could be avoided by keeping out of town late at night and taking various other precautions. So we carried on.

Possibilities beckoned. I contacted the managing director of Ulster Television in Belfast, whose company had made £30 million in profits the year before and had just paid £6 million for a pair of Cork radio stations that had a fast-talking American DJ as their signature “fifty-second state” voice.

“Would you be interested in backing a brilliant new Cork magazine concept as well?” was the basic pitch to one John McCann.

It seemed like he might be, and we began having regular phone chats, conducted as easily as between old friends. No freelance writer in New York or London could ring up the head of a huge media empire without being frozen out by a phalanx of impenetrable secretaries. But this Irish magnate offered instant access.

“Have they caught the hoodlums who broke into your house yet?” the personable McCann would begin our conversations. “Are your wife and kids sleeping okay?”

We had never even met. But that didn’t stop him from being welcoming and decent, and plans were made for a formal presentation of the magazine’s prospectus, business plan, and design prototypes – the whole pack of cards. Ireland of the welcomes was back.

Jamie, meanwhile, was making more tangible progress, meeting with the movers and shakers of Cork society and garnering more work than she could handle. She felt like she was connecting
with the hum of local cultural and commercial life. And she loved it.

Easter approached and the countryside, even the neglected garden beside our house, rioted with fresh growth. The easy saunter and ebullient busker music returned to downtown Cork’s streets. Neighbors emerged from their hibernations and invited us in for the cups of coffee and tea that, in Ireland, typically take an hour to finish.

Finally, we came to the twenty-four hours of national atonement known as Good Friday. This was the one day, besides Christmas, that the entire country and every one of its eight thousand pubs (Scotland and Wales have only six thousand combined) shuts down in a national rite of penance. The night before, I passed an off-licence and witnessed a line of supplicants stretching clear out the door and onto the sidewalk. Stocking up on the Scrumpy Jack with a vengeance, no doubt.

The soulful morning was itself so beautiful that I joined Seamus Wilkinson for a drive to West Cork. His new Mercedes was chugging beside the Bandon River, by now undoubtedly streaked with returning salmon, when Seamus mused, “Isn’t the story of Jesus amazing? To think the life of one individual could have such a vast influence that 2000 years later every single pub would be shut down in his honor for an entire day?”

“An interesting point,” I said, never having imagined the impact of Christianity in exactly the same terms.

“Of course, you could get a pint if you really wanted one.”

“Really?”

“Yes, if you are an official traveler holding an official ticket, you could get one at the railway station. I’ve known fellas who’ve bought a round-trip ticket for ten miles or so, just to get a Good Friday pint.”

And glory to Christ, I could imagine them all praying silently as they hoisted frothy glasses to their lips.

The next day, about eighteen children combed our garden for hidden Easter eggs and jelly beans in a ritual Jamie transferred from across the seas. Easter Sunday broke bright, with heavenly singing from the choir at the exquisitely renovated St. Mary’s of
the Dominicans, whose doors we were darkening with increasing, if spotty, frequency.

Jamie produced another one of her feasts, and in the evening we invited a few of our closest friends over for a drink. Ten people in all piled into our kitchen, and even Paddy and Anne Wilkinson, who had been visiting their cousins, paid us a surprise visit. Once again, it felt like we had found a place of embracing belonging, where laughter and wild stories were tossed around like bouquets. Eventually, the evening wound down, and only Shaun Higgins was left at the kitchen table. It was time for a “drop,” which in Ireland means whiskey. The inspired Shaun, who is an operatic-quality tenor, burst into a wrenching old ballad known as “Maggie.”

“I wandered today to the hill, Maggie; To watch the scene below; The creek and the old rusty mill, Maggie; Where we sat in the long, long ago,” he began, eyes rapt, hands outstretched to take in my presence and the stars outside, the entire mad Celtic universe with the risen Christ somewhere at the top bestowing a glorious night on just the two of us now. Ireland was speaking and Shaun was its oracle, illuminating with each rising octave why we had left our enviably secure former lives and stepped through the looking glass into a richer, if more unpredictable, life.

I wanted my far-off mother to share this moment, to just possibly understand our past yearnings and present lives. So I dialed Connecticut, heard her voice quake hello, and, without saying a word, softly placed the receiver before Shaun’s impassioned singing – thinking my dear mom, so Irish to her soul, so Cork in her conjoined Kirby-Deasy blood, would experience a revelation from her ancestral land. I blinked away tears, thinking how moved she would be.

“And now we are aged and gray, Maggie; The trials of life nearly done.”

Unable to carry off the ruse any longer, I grabbed the receiver. “Isn’t Ireland beautiful?” I exclaimed.

The telephone was stone dead. Repeated calls back produced only busy signals. On the final try, my mother answered.

“Wasn’t that amazing?” I asked.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“Your son. Remember, the one in Ireland? Did you hear that singing?”

“Oh dear me. I thought it was a crank call. So I hung up and took the phone off the hook.”

Ah well, yet another experience never predicted in the Guidebook to Loopy Midlife Migrations. But of course surprises had become our daily staple by now.

One of the biggest worries any married man can have – and especially a somewhat exiled one – is that his wife will suddenly walk off in the arms of an unsuspected rival. As Easter approached Jamie began to do this every day with a man who gave new meaning to the word “distinguished” in that he looked hundreds of years old, what with his foot-long beard spilling down into his wizard’s sackcloth topped by a necklace of crystals. Worse, he spoke in nothing but riddles, being a professional impersonator of Gandalf from
The Hobbit
. The wife’s new freelance assignment was to usher this druid to media appearances while promoting the upcoming Tolkien dramatization at the Cork Opera House. The two were a swell pair.

One night I proudly watched as Jamie prepared to address a group of teachers who might help coax more school kids into the theater. She had lobbied to make this kind of work her permanent responsibility. And lo, her wish came true. “We’ve just got a substantial new grant and it would be wonderful if you could work here permanently,” whispered one of the Opera House’s administrators, minutes before the reception began.

With that, the gate Jamie had been waiting for swung open. After the usual Irish series of follow-up and “what did we say before?” meetings, she was asked to create a new education outreach program. She had netted a dream.

A conversation with her new boss later in the evening revealed that this relationship came with its own circle, once I told him some personal history. “You were a friend of Bun Wilkinson? Extraordinary. I spent two months helping him with that cottage in Dingle later that same winter!”

April sped along, and we resumed our weekend expeditions to places like Courtmacsherry, for walks by the sea, and ruined four-hundred-year-old Kanturk castle in North Cork, whose towering walls we adopted as a home-run fence for our family baseball games. Meanwhile, I sallied off to research and write about more lifeboat excursions, meeting up with new crews in County Kerry, on both the island of Valentia and at Fenit on the end of a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic just north of Tralee. Further compelling tales were revealed and fresh excitement came with more sea voyages, one with a helicopter roaring twenty feet overhead and winching volunteers off the deck in a mock rehearsal of the life-and-death retrievals that so commonly occur far out in the Atlantic. Valentia, between Ballinskelligs and Dingle, provided the European landing point for the first transatlantic cable, laid in 1866, and was also littered with five-thousand-year-old remnants of the earliest Celtic civilization to inhabit Ireland. A fantasy “work” destination, in other words. So I was reeling in some dreams myself, being paid to travel and write about the country I’d loved for so long.

The lifeboat crew in Fenit even took Harris on board and, to his thrill, let him handle the controls as we headed far out to sea. The magic of Kerry’s surrounding headlands and mountains breathed over us as he steered forward, and the scene felt like a lifelong memory in the making. Despite assertions otherwise by W.B. Yeats, romantic Ireland was not yet dead and gone. No, it lived on in my family.

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Some of the most delightful rites of the Irish spring come in the form of all-amateur hurling matches between rival counties. Played with slender sticks with heads flanged like tomahawks, hurling began as a kind of semicontrolled warfare between rival clans, just as did the North American Indian game of lacrosse. The Irish being a fierce lot, they used skulls as balls in the early days, which helped inspire epic poems regarding the more memorable contests. Eventually, a hard leather-wrapped ball (called a
sliotar
) began to be whacked instead, with about a hundred or so Gaels on each side trying to belt the thing across bogs toward the homeland of the other bunch. Damage was inevitably done to certain pates in the course of the melee, but rowdy celebrations afterward helped dull the pain.

The cricket-playing British didn’t like hurling’s inherent wildness, so they banned the playing of this glorious sport, just as they had banned Catholicism, the speaking of the Irish language, and the presence of the shoeless natives in their walled towns after dark. The wily Irish responded by moving the game to the hinterlands, finally organizing the mayhem in the late nineteenth century under a national body called the Gaelic Athletic Association, or GAA, whose local clubs became breeding grounds for a variety of insurrectionary activities against the Crown.

Knowing such things, I jumped at the opportunity to attend a game between Cork and Tipperary when John Burke, the gravel-voiced eccentric and resident sculptor of the Hi-B, invited me to join him. The fact that Burkie’s father was a notorious IRA man in Tipp added a certain aura of authenticity, because a proper hurling match has intensely nationalistic undertones to this day. No Irish native can ever forget the fact that in 1921 the Brits, knowing
exactly what the GAA (often called the “gah”) represented, drove an armored vehicle into the middle of a Tipperary-Dublin hurling match in Ireland’s national stadium of Croke Park. Without warning, they raked the horrified crowd with bullets, killing eighteen innocent fans and maiming four times as many. This infamous “Bloody Sunday” payback was provoked by the fact that Michael Collins had orchestrated a killing spree against a dozen British intelligence agents the night before.

Today’s pre-game warm-up, in contrast, featured a more amicable chat over pints in a little downtown bar named Corrigan’s, which for some reason boasts side-by-side photographs of Small Dennis beside Michael Jackson, perhaps indicating a future cultural exchange project.

“Like I keep telling you, Ireland is not half as strange as your country,” Burkie wheezed. “I mean your place is so big, like. I went to Las Vegas one time with my girlfriend, Frances, and we did feck all on the slot machines and thought we were hurting bad. Then this Texan in cowboy boots came up and I told him I’d just lost eighty dollars. He says, ‘Well, I just lost eighty thousand.’ Your man lights his cigar and laughs, ‘It’s Vegas.’”

The hurling match began to seem like a doubtful destination. “So we went off to Phoenix the next night because Frances knew somebody in this rich suburb there. Every tree was bursting with oranges. So I said, ‘Stop the car, Frances, I’m going to pick some oranges.’ ‘Hee, hee,’ said she. But I climbed this tree and was shaking the branches and there were oranges falling everywhere, when suddenly a cop car appears.

“Here I am like some capuchin monkey rooting around in the branches when the cops draw their guns and shout, ‘What are you doing up there?’ I say, ‘I’m Irish. I just wanted to get an orange.’ The one says, ‘Do you have alcohol taken, sir?’ I said, ‘Look idjeet, I’m pissed as a parrot. Why else would I be in a tree?’ and they just started laughing. Why, they even escorted us home.”

Cork’s hurling stadium proved to be conveniently located at the end of a narrow dead-end roadway with parking facilities for about two hundred of the ten thousand or more cars that attend every match. My sculptor tour guide, dressed in an absurdly heavy
dark overcoat on a glorious April Sunday, solved that problem, in the way any anarchic Irish person might, by tossing aside plastic police no-parking pylons so we could nose into an illegal spot close by the gate.

“You’re in Ireland now, boy!” said he.

The vast crowd at the ticket windows irritated Burkie, so he affected an old man’s limp to cut ahead. Following sheepishly, I imagined the scene inside would be one of sheer loutishness, full of the kind of excess that ruins so many American athletic spectacles and hooligan-ridden British soccer games. Wrong.

The only misbehavior I witnessed was exhibited by Burkie. “Follow me,” he barked as we pressed in invalid fashion ahead of hundreds of less preposterous fans.

Inside, we beheld a huge field bronzed in sun. No one therein was drinking, because the only beer taps in the place were situated in a remote bar that required circumventing the entire stadium in a twenty-minute stroll with a twenty-minute queue at the end, and because this is not the tradition when watching hallowed GAA games. In a U.S. arena of equivalent size, there would be spigots every two hundred feet and menacing clusters of obscene chanters emerging by the time the game had barely begun.

As the fifteen contestants on either side trotted out in their bright jerseys and dark shorts, I asked Burkie about the meaning of the park’s peculiar name – Pairc Ui Caoimh. “Nobody bothers to think about that, for Christ’s sake,” he wheezed. “They’re all named after some fecking bishop or IRA man.”

Pairs of men in long white butchers’ coats assembled at the sides of the goalposts at either end of the field. Their job was to decide whether the
sliotar
had been whacked cleanly between the uprights for one point or whizzed between the roughly ten-foot-high by twenty-foot-long rectangle below for three. A small window opened in the distant scoreboard at one end of the stadium and another white-coated man, evidently the scorekeeper, leaned his bald head forward, took in the sun, and either toted the point or unloaded some pork chops. The crowd rose for the national anthem, a whistle was blown, and without further fanfare there commenced a nonstop stampeding and whaling of hurley sticks
at a hot potato never allowed to sit still for two seconds. The players picked the bouncing demon up with their hands, lobbed it to tennis-serve level, and slammed it on a high windhover arc that flew like a gravity-defying baseball home run hundreds of feet up and down the field. As the
sliotar
descended, three, four, and five would leap to stupendous heights for another whack, sometimes spinning backward and driving it at impossible angles through the goalposts eyed by the imitation butchers. At each score, the little bald man in the middle of the scoreboard would open his window, confirm the point with his fellow off-duty butchers below, and chalk up the fresh tote.

It looked like bedlam to me, a magnificent display of amateur athleticism with the ball being kicked, lobbed, whacked, pursued, retrieved, cradled, and raced forward on the end of stick – then, without any apparent pause for aim, launched in another gorgeous arc toward the rival team’s goal. The players wore no protective padding, and only a scattering had helmets, yet somehow they escaped maiming as rivals’ sticks crashed down on every side, like blows from the swords of murderous samurai. Players scored, collided, crumpled, and suffered god-awful wallops, but never exhibited the attention-seeking histrionics of jubilation and pain so repulsive and ubiquitous in European soccer or American football. The action was breathless – a physical equivalent to Irish talking.

“This is fantastic, like ice hockey on grass,” I said.

“It’s a low-rent ballet today,” Burkie cackled. “They should be wearing pouffy white dresses.”

For seventy minutes the hurlers raced and whacked without cease (other than a half-time break that featured a bagpipe performance of “The Rose of Tralee”), and the score flipped and flopped before Tipperary staged a final victorious rally. The action was stupendous.

“You better like it,” Burkie said, “because hurling is part of Ireland’s soul.”

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:

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.