McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Page A

plus service, drinks, rice, vegetables and a pineapple fritter, and I could have taken a family of four to the Seychelles for Christmas and New Year and still had change for a curry.

    Eight miles north of Skibbereen is Drimoleague, the village where my mother grew up and where my grandfather laughed as I was chased by the pig. It’s only a short distance, but the countryside gets wilder as soon as you leave Skib. There’s a more rugged feel, compounded by the fact that Drimoleague is off the main tourist beat, and consequently devoid of any cosmopolitan fripperies. We’re beyond the noodle belt here. It’s only another ten miles to the wild mountainsides behind Dunmanway where the English travellers are camped.
    I’ve decided to drop in unannounced on my aunt, who still lives at the farm. As I approach up the tree-lined drive, I get that curious feeling of everything being the same as it always was, only smaller. From the pig’s gate to the back door is twenty yards, but at the time it seemed a mile and a half.
    As I knock at the back door—which I never remember being closed before—I have a heightened sense of anticipation; so it’s a pity my aunt’s gone to Dublin for the weekend. Of course, I only find that out later. For now, I hang about for five minutes waiting, trying to conjure up the spirit of those summers.
    My earliest memories of travelling to Ireland are of the Glengarriff , which sailed from Liverpool Pier Head to Cork. There haven’t always been drive-on car ferries with reclining pullman seats and discos and tax-free perfume. This was a cattle boat, with berths for thirty or forty passengers as a sideline. I remember my father taking me below decks to see the animals. They were in a sort of stable, with straw. No nasty crates in those days. It all seemed perfectly natural; it was hard to tell whether the cows were going on holiday, or whether they’d already been and were on their way home.
    We’d leave from Pier Head at night, in what now seems like a scene from a period movie playing inside my head: men in hats, fog, customs officers wielding pieces of chalk. The crossing would turn rough in the early hours of the morning, as we rounded the south-east comer of Ireland, and the swell of the Atlantic hit the Irish Sea. The seasickness was spectacular. Today’s ferries may be sleek and comfortable, but they deny young people the unforgettable experience of witnessing at first hand a cow throwing up. I suppose we can’t stand in the way of progress, but holiday travel’s a duller business without bovine projectile vomit.
    The poorly priests and nauseous nuns were good value, too. You didn’t usually see the clergy so vulnerable. But by mid-morning the puking would stop, as we entered the calmer waters at the mouth of the magnificent harbour at Cobh, known as Queenstown in the days of the British Empire. This was the last port of call of the Titanic ; it was also the major point of embarkation for the Irish emigrating to America, more than 3 million of whom left from there in the course of a century, my own uncle among them. The tears of their relatives have left an unmistakable air of melancholy about Cobh today, though it has its lighter side too. A couple of years ago, a local unemployed man won the Irish lottery. One of his first acts was to buy the premises occupied by the dole office, and double their rent. He’s planning a Titanic theme restaurant on the harbourfront. Disaster is widely predicted once again.
    From Cobh, the Glengarriff would head up the River Lee into Cork. I recall fields on either side, and people waving to us as we wiped the carrot from our chins. They always lay on a welcome, the Irish, but you can’t help noticing they don’t seem keen on waving a Union Jack. A lot of English people still can’t understand that.
    A while ago I found myself wondering whether I might have imagined the cattle boat and the nuns; but a few nights ago, in a pub on Winthrop Street in