There are many reasons why I like going to Ireland but one of them is that I
don't have to constantly spell my surname. “Name?” the woman at the check-in
desk says. I tell her and I'm taking a breath, ready to begin the familiar
litany “O - apostrophe - F”, when I hear her clattering it into her
computer, no questions asked.
By the time we land in Galway it's late but we strike out, undeterred, into
the dark, heading for the wilds of Connemara. As the road skirts the
National Park, I press my face close to the car window and it's just
possible to make out the black, looming shapes of the Twelve Bens mountains.
I haven't been to this part of Ireland for almost 30 years. My family and I
used to come here every summer, making the pilgrimage back to the land of
our births, staying in tin-roofed cottages with no running water.
The bedding was often filthy, the kitchens non-existent - but there were views
of coral strands, we could run from the door along a bog road to the sea and
sometimes donkeys carrying turf in baskets would stop and hang their heads
over the garden walls.
My son turns 5 this year. He has a Gaelic middle name, Hibernian blue eyes and
an occasionally tiresome penchant for the Pogues. I decide it's high time he
went to Ireland.
But when we arrive at the Renvyle House Hotel, I realise that his experience
of Connemara is going to be light years away from mine. After some confusion
about room numbers - Room 77 is positioned between Room 16 and Room 17,
which my husband says is like a bad joke about Ireland - we locate our room.
Or rooms.
We have a suite with a turf fire glowing in the grate, a view of the sea and a
marble-lined bathroom with a spa bath. We've hardly time to put down our
suitcases before Polish waiters are knocking at the door, bearing fishcakes,
grilled bream, molten chocolate bakes.
The next morning we wander around the gardens. Renvyle was the country seat of
Oliver St John Gogarty, poet, aviator, friend of James Joyce. Gogarty bought
Renvyle in 1917, “out of the proceeds of my teetotalism” and as you walk
about the beach, along the banks of the lake, you can give thanks for his
abstinence.
Unfortunately, his support for the Irish Free State Senate would cost him his
beloved house. Renvyle was burnt to the ground in 1924; Gogarty, not one to
be cowed, rebuilt it in 1930.
But, try as you might, you can't spend a week in a spa bath, so I tear myself
away from Renvyle in search of the Connemara I remember. At first, there's
no trace of it. Every second car on the road is one of those monstrous 4x4s.
The high street of Clifden is full of “lifestyle boutiques” and oyster bars
with clientele who are discussing hotels in Milan. And everywhere you look
is the architectural scourge of post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland: the bungalow.
If this word sums up an image of a modest, one-storey dwelling, forget it.
These are a new, genetically modified superbreed that have more in common
with the Dallas homestead. Vast, sprawling places with carports, Doric
columns, gravelled driveways, faux-Georgian PVC windows, manicured lawns and
strict fences.
They all seem to be painted an assertive shade of ochre or apricot, the least
camouflaging colour possible in a landscape made up of greens, blues and
browns. And they all seem empty, with that pristine, unusued appearance of
the second home. The saddest thing of all is that the old houses are falling
into neglect: for every ten new Southforks is a deserted farmhouse with the
roof caving in.
But the old Ireland does still exist. In between the bungalows are drystone
walled fields with cows chewing cud and donkeys tethered to a stake. There
are still old blokes with woolly hats and a sheepdog chuntering along in a
tractor. The odd currach waits, upturned, on the beach, weighted down with
stones.
You can still find those shops that are also pubs that are also petrol
stations, with a couple of pumps out on the pavement. Every now and then, we
flash past a rackety, whitewashed, iron-roofed shack and I sit up to
exclaim, “That's the kind of place we used to stay in!”
And the seascape is gloriously, peculiarly the same. If you keep your back to
the tartrazine-tastic bungalows, you could just about convince yourself it's
still 1978. Turquoise seas, ragged headlands, white sandy bays, roadside
shrines, drowned river valleys, fields with cut turf stacked high.
I have a clear memory of one place we stayed in, just south of Ballyconneely.
My mother washed nappies in the lough beside the house and, for want of a
cot, my sister slept in a drawer. I remember being wildly jealous of this
unusual privilege. Every morning an old woman would come and wade out to a
small island in the lake, where she kept a brood of hens, safe from foxes.
She would wade back, the eggs cradled in her skirts.
I go in search of this house because it represents one of my earliest memories
and because I want to know if it's still there. But in among the new housing
of Ballyconneely Bay, the smart new roads, the bristling signposts
advertising hotels and restaurants, I lose my bearings. The house with the
lough and the hens must be hiding here somewhere, behind a battalion of
bungalows perhaps, but it refuses to be found.
Defeated, I repair to Mannin Bay, the sweeping coral beach where I used to
play with my sisters. The sand, a jumble of finely sifted white and purple
coral, is so instantly familiar that it gives me a feeling like vertigo in
reverse. It is at this micro level that I seem to remember Connemara best -
the rocks, the stones, the wavelets that criss-cross over each other on the
silver strand, the thick swags of bladderwrack that pop underfoot.
The next day, we drive out to Omey Island which is, strictly speaking, only an
island at high tide; when the water is low, you can walk or drive out from
the village of Claddaghduff. It is still an unaccountable thrill, driving a
car across an immense sandy causeway like this. I remember this clearly and,
judging from my son's expression of amazement, it's something he'll remember
too. You can stop halfway across and run about on perfect white sand that,
in a few hours, will be under the sea.
The island itself is a low-lying, peaty place with rolling hills and a
population of 20. At its centre is a lough with herons dipping their beaks,
surrounded by sand dunes riddled with rabbit holes.
I watch my son as he picks through a bank of shells, as he wades through a
stream, as he repeatedly leaps off a sandy ledge and rolls, laughing, down a
dune. I hope that he will retain this about Connemara - a dune, a causeway,
a lough with herons - and that if he comes back in adulthood it will still
be here. I think it will be. No matter how many bungalows they build, some
things don't change at all.
Need to know
Renvyle House Hotel (00 353 95 43511, www.renvyle.com)
offers B&B in June from about £68pp.
Getting there Aer Arann (0870 8767676, www.aerarann.ie)
flies to Galway from Luton, Edinburgh, Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester and
Newcastle from £64 return.
Further information Tourism Ireland (0800 0397000, www.discoverireland.com)
I found this article offensive and verging on racist.
Tin roofed shacks , dirty bedlinnen , washing nappies in loughs , certainly not the Ireland I lived in in 1978.
As for the bungalows , to my knowledge most date from the 1970,s and most are family homes.
All in all a sorry , dissapointing read
D. Kiely, Zaanstad, The Netherlands
Why is the Rip-off Republic so ridiculously expensive, even without the poor pound/euro exchange rate? France, Spain and Italy all offer better value for money acccommodation, better public transport and better weather.
Paul, Coventry,
Tin-roofed shacks in the 1970s? The only use for structures like that in the West of Ireland at that time was to house cattle.
Unless of course Maggie O'Farrell's relatives were living in a time warp of unusually dire poverty... or were of a bovine nature...!
MB, Edinburgh,