"Are you eating your own hand, Charlie?" "No shanks, I'm fine!"

The Irish habit of leaving Ireland when times get tough appears strange to this Englishman. Maybe the English stay in England because they love a grumble, while their Irish counterparts mutter only:
“Sure, I’d complain, but what’d be the point?”
Maybe it’s because the Irish are broadly welcomed anywhere in the world, while the English have to overcome post-colonial loathing in so many countries.
Then there’s the two things that Paddy loves best: the leaving of Ireland and the coming back to Ireland. Personally, apart from a couple of weeks’ hols abroad, I hate leaving ireland, but Galway City is another matter.
With Galway I suffer a similar paradoxical conundrum to Paddy’s. I have left it and returned to it three times, each stay being an absolute pleasure, until it becomes unbearable.
Now, as another Summer of festivals approaches, my mind wanders back to the Spring of 1994, the first time I left Galway City.
Truly, it was one of the happiest days of my life.
Two years before I had left England, and arrived at Galway after a few months spent wandering, wondering whether I might live in either Granada, Barcelona, Roscoff, Cork and Kinsale.
Sharing in a tiny house in Salthill, I had partied like a mad thing for two years, but not as madly as the 24-hour party people living next door. My nerves were shot to shit, my liver was the size of Cyprus, and I yearned for privacy and peace. Each weekend I’d hitch out to Connemara, and recharge my soul, gradually realising that what I really wanted was to live out there, alone.
Some things are just meant to be. Through a bizarre twist of fate I called a certain Pat from Ballyconneely on the phone about a house I’d heard he was renting and got through to a completely different Pat from Ballyconneely, who purely coincidentally just happened to have a house to rent, but hadn’t even advertised it yet.
Off the main road, by a lake, with nearby beaches on three sides. the tiny housesheen was perfect, and as I loaded my life’s belongings into my transit van, I was aware that this was indeed a seminal moment in my life: the end of a very long road which ran from the leaving of London 5 years previously, downsizing to Bradford, Galway and finally to the townland of Bunowen.
The sun shone as I drove out of the city, the silhouettes of my broom handle, upturned chairs and boxes of books appearing in my rear view mirror. I’d never had a house to myself before, and was amazed how easy it was to move my stuff into it. There were no parking problems; plenty of space, and unlike flats in the cities of my past, no flights of steps to struggle up and down up and down, with all my stuff.
Within an hour it was all in the house, and I was off to the pub to celebrate.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of grass being ripped from the ground by cows outside my bedroom window. I was in a state of bliss. After walking to the beach I started to prepare my first proper meal in my first solitary house. In honour of the occasion I was treating myself to a lamb shank, with roast spuds and crunchy green things.
As I took the meat out of the oven my stomach growled with hunger as my heart swelled with pride.
I was plain full of myself, so happy I could burst. I had done so well, to get away from all the madness of it all, to be alone at last, wanting nothing from nobody, anywhere, ever.
The sun shone in the blue sky. A hare sat on the gravel outside my house. A soft breeze whispered a scented zephyr through my open windows and the carving knife slid slowly but surely through the tender lamb, out the other side and right through my hand, at the base of my thumb and finger.
Instantly I knew it was a deep cut, and my body settled straight into shock.
Fuck fuck fucketty fuck. Not now please please not now. No no no.
Being a most basic beast, my main concern was for my dinner. All I had wanted was to sit and eat a fine meal in my fine house and feel fine.
My roast lamb was pink, but I was looking increasingly crimson. Having washed the wound and caught sight of something white that hopefully wasn’t bone, I considered asking for help.
Clearly I needed to go up to the farmhouse and ask them to take me to a hospital for stitches.
And then again, maybe if I did, I’d look like an idiot incapable of lasting 24 hours on his own without managing to dismember himself.
No. Nobody needed to know.
Screw it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Instead of being sensible, I wrapped my gaping bloodied wound in acres of toilet paper, and holding it high above my head in an effort to staunch the bleeding, I stubbornly proceeded to try to eat my dinner.
Clearly a knife and fork were out of the question, but who cared? I was all alone in the middle of nowhere, and still had four good fingers and one opposable thumb.
The veggies and spuds went down in three or four hand scoops, and as I lifted the shank to my mouth and started ripping into it like a cross between Fred Flintstone and Henry VIII, my young landlord just happened to put his head round the door to make sure his new tenant was settling in alright.
In place of the calm clean Englishman he had welcomed 24 hours previously, he was greeted by the site of an insane gravy-smeared carnivore, holding a blood-soaked arm high above his head, muttering through a lamby mouthful:
“Yesh yesh hime fine, danksh Pat! Good ash gold, shanks!”
Afterwards I wondered if he thought I had chopped off one hand to eat it with the other. Poor guy probably still has nightmares about that. Sorry Pat!
Having once again learned that pride comes before a fall, I proceeded to live a splendid life in that house.
But every two weeks I made an excited dash to Galway City, to see my mates, make sure I still had the power of speech and could behave like a human being in public.

Will Ireland survive the loss of the rural pub?

When I lived in Connemara, I used to frequent (the old) Keogh's pub in Ballyconneely.
I was green back then, and by that I don't mean pure unadulterated paddy: I mean that, as an Englishman new to an Irish village, I smiled a lot, kept my head down, myself to myself (with the notable exception of the local Chelsea posse) and pretty much did what I was told.
Soon I learned the hierarchy inherent in the place. Older people scored much respect, but if you managed to be old, cantankerous and loud, you stole the show.
"EeenglishmMAN! EeeeenglishmMAN!"
There I was, sitting at the bar, minding my own business, when a fella who fitted all the above criteria suddenly pointed his finger at me, and sat there yelling.
"EeeenglishMAN! You will be my TAXI!!! You will be my TAXI tonight! You will drive me HOME!"
Right then. So that's me driving him home then. Hmm, got that. Wonder when he's going to want to leave. Ah well. Better just wait... tum te tummm...
Over the following months, I got to know the older gentleman in question, alongside all his peers, a dark-clad club of septua- and octogenarians, who appeared to be in the pub all day every day.
To me they became the Manly Brethren of the Bar. I had no idea how they drank so much; where the money came from; when they ate, washed or saw daylight.
But I knew how himself was getting home. I was his taxi, and after an interminable wait on that first night, I quickly learned to suppress my humility and earn some respect by tapping him on the shoulder and informing him that his taxi was ready and it was now or never.
Every rural Irish pub had its Manly Brethren of the Bar, and now, as we know, they are gone, victims (depending on how you look at it) of either the smoking ban and the clampdown on drinking and driving, or of smoking and drinking and driving.
Whatever the reason, Ireland faces a real problem. A very Irish problem.
As an ancient nation and a young country, Ireland is born out of paradox, and presently faces a serious and essentially Irish dilemma:
Is it wrong to drink and drive? Yes.
Will the rural Irish pub survive in the wake of the smoking ban and the introduction of random breathalysing? No.
You really have to live in the country to fully understand the significance of the loss of a local pub. In a lonely geography, where depression and isolation stalk the cloud and rain, the rural pub has always been the sole source of social sanctuary.
Indeed, your colyoomist would have lost his sanity, gone doolally fifty times over in Co. Mayo, chewing the wall and up the ceiling, way beyond this twittery nutsoid state you endure each week, had I not been able to nip up Sweeney's, Golden's, Declan's, Lynn's, Gilvarry's, Danno's, McHale's.
Now only a few of those remain.
But even when the craic was mighty, when the bar was filled with friends and everyone was getting plastered into the bargain, I would suffer the slagging of my drinking buddies and drive home after a couple of pints.
Can't help it. Maybe it's just inbuilt if you're English. Believe me, I'm no goody-goody. There are rakes of laws I break every day, along with the rest of ye, but I just don't want to lose my licence. Or kill anyone.
Of course I knew I wasn't going to get stopped by the Gardai. The two availiable were patrolling an area the size of Texas, and they only set up checkpoints on Bank Holidays and Christmas. And even then it was always just over the bridge from my house, so I wasn't going to get nicked.
On a couple of occasions I stayed and got lathered, thinking I would risk it, only to find myself being driven to my door by the landlord of the pub.
He insisted drily that he was only investing in his future custom
I knew better. Vot a Mensch.
But what is to be done? The auld fellas and their forty pints of stout are gone from the daytime bar. People are buying beer in bulk down Lidl and Aldi, living it up in their living rooms and avoiding the taxi queue.
Out in the wilds, pubs are disappearing like melting snow, and nobody seems to be facing the problem head-on.
It seems to me there are only two routes available, and one target in mind.
There are millions of houses at the end of long bohreens, and if people are to leave their cars at home, they need to be picked up and dropped home by a network of small people carriers, MPV's and minibuses.
Either the government officially recognises the threat to rural communities, isolated households and local economies, and subsidises an extensive network of publicly-owned vehicles (somewhat unlikely, methinks), or the breweries themselves will have to supply the means with which to deliver their customers to the point of consumption, and perchance be offered excise relief as financial compensation.
Such a service could be useful to some people who should never be on the roads at all, sober or drunk. Include hundreds of suicidal cyclists who insist on being lightless and invisible at night, as well as the auld fella who drove a white Escort van all the way to the village at 4 mph.
I drove behind him going apoplectic. On the pavement in the village was an 80Something friend of mine who told me she hadn't had such a good laugh for ages.
"Whoooh-hooo-hooh! I was watching you stuck behind yer man. He's blind!"
"Bloody right!"
"No, I mean he is blind! Lost his sight altogether! Says he has driven that road all his life, knows it off by heart, so he does!"
According to the United Nations, the world's population is neatly cleft in two, between rural and urban dwellers. 3.2 billion of us live in rural areas; 3.2 billion in cities.
In Ireland it would be a cultural disaster and national disgrace if good people stayed silent while rural pubs became extinct.
Gandhi once said that the real India was 'in the villages'.
Well, the real Irish still live in the Townlands, but they are no longer in the pub.
cadley1@eircom.net
http://doubledoublevision.blogspot.com