McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

Today in his honour someone has left six daffodils tied with green ribbon, ten American cents, and a magnetic glow-in-the-dark dashboard Virgin Mary. On 21 December the sun sets in alignment with the altar and the two portal stones, in a tiny cleft in the hills to the south-west, through which you can see the Atlantic. You don’t get that at the average shopping mall.
    Sixty or seventy yards away, to the south-west, next to the foundations of some sort of stone hut or shelter, is a sunken pool. For all we know, it could have been some kind of neolithic ceremonial sauna; but it is believed to be a fulacht fiadh , or ancient cooking place. Stones were heated in a nearby fire, then plunged into the shallow water to cook deer and vegetables. Experiments suggest that seventy gallons could be boiled in this way in eighteen minutes, and that water could be kept hot for three hours, which explains why Irish vegetables have never been served al dente .
    I walk up a short path to the north, and realise the stones are on a raised natural platform, almost like a stage. Beyond them, where the audience should be, thirty or forty fields roll away to the sea, half a mile distant, and visible in three separate places through dips in the hills. The only sound is a donkey braying, and the chug of a tractor in a clifftop field—the same guy, on the same tractor, as last time I was here, I imagine.
    As evening approaches I drive down the hill and around the perimeter of the glorious natural harbour at Glandore, before hitting the main road at Leap (pronounced Lepp) and continuing west into Skibbereen. The town’s enjoyed a fame of sorts because of the song, ‘The Reasons I Left Auld Skibbereen’, and historically there have been many. The potato famine wreaked a dreadful havoc here; and between 1911 and 1961 more than half the population of the area emigrated because of failing crops and lack of employment. Skib today has a no-nonsense bustle to it, caught between the old Ireland and the new, cosmopolitan, moneyed West Cork, as personified by local residents Jeremy Irons and David Puttnam.
    A decade ago I came here for an uproarious family wedding. The reception in the West Cork Hotel was a classic of the genre, and would have been dismissed as over the top had it been accurately portrayed on screen. A hundred and twenty of us sat down for a formal meal at two in the afternoon. Suddenly, the wine waiter was at my elbow, offering a choice of three bottles, with a polite enquiry I never expect to hear anywhere again in my life: ‘Red, white, or whiskey, sorr?’
    When the band started playing at five o’clock there was none of the reticence and bar-hanging that characterise such events in England. Everybody in the room charged at the dance floor and made flamboyant whoopee non-stop until midnight, at which point the newly-weds were hoist skywards on the arms of their friends, laid horizontal in the air, and flown, shrieking, around the room. The crowd engineered elaborate and erotic airborne collisions between bride and groom, pounding them together till they were intertwined like two lusty cherubs on a Vatican chapel ceiling. Afterwards, we went back to the farm and drank whiskey—I suppose the red and the white must have run out—and played Richard Clayderman tapes, for complex reasons that elude me now, until dawn.
    All of which means I feel very at home in Skibbereen, as indeed I should, walking past Patrick McCarthy, Solicitor; Charles McCarthy, Estate Agent; P. J. McCarthy, Insurance Broker; and so many others as to make me feel comfortably run-of-the-mill. The pattern is broken by the ever-expanding Hourihan dynasty: Hourihan’s Bar, next door to Hourihan’s Fast Food, adjacent to the newly opened Hourihan’s Launderette. My favourite is Trendy Hair Fashions, a source of continuing joy over the years. This time, its window display consists of an advert for a trip to Lourdes. Come to Lourdes and have your hair cured.
    I’m staying