In a year spent travelling around Ireland by car, by bicycle and on foot, Brian Lalor's avowed intent was to encounter something of the new Ireland, the one with the more optimistic spirit, which he dates loosely from the election of President Robinson in 1991.
There is not a lot of optimism in the resulting book (its title taken from a mock-glorious Myles na gCopaleen sketch), but there is much insight. It is impassioned, pugnacious, thought-provoking, and sometimes arrogant. Though the author - a travel writer, printmaker and woodcut artist - grew up in north Co Cork, there is little indulgence for classic Irish foibles and failings, all the things we generally love ourselves for as a nation.
As a result of this refreshingly uncompromising attitude, Lalor, an excellent writer but a plain speaker, regularly finds himself in verbal stand-offs, sometimes verging on more physical encounters. He is not a man to suffer fools gladly and in terms of "getting on" with the fellow-Irish he meets on his travels it probably doesn't help that he is a modest drinker (taking a dim view of over-indulgence), a self-confessed atheist and a follower neither of soccer nor the GAA. What kind of an Irishman is this?
A West Brit is the entirely inaccurate answer formulated in the minds of many he meets in the South. And he is generally unwelcome in Northern Ireland because he tacitly refuses to help people identify him as a Taig or a Prod (he is well aware that admitting to atheism will not improve his status).
Northern Ireland itself and its cultural condition depress him deeply. He sees it as full of collective religious obsessions and is glad to leave: "A society so wedded to the language of symbols has little interest in abstract thought."
Southern Ireland is not necessarily an improvement: ". . . in Dublin you merely exchange one style of bigotry for another. The underlying prevalence of sectarianism is hard to avoid in any part of Ireland: in the south it is just less overt."
St Patrick's Day parade, the borderlands, Derry ("as a suburb of Beirut"), a Dublin Bloomsday, Galway, Cork, Antrim, Armagh, Cumberland Street market, Limerick, Kerry, a party in Galway, a bicycle trip in Donegal, Dalkey Island, Cill Rialaig, Carlow, Clonmel, Carrick-on-Suir, all come in for clinical cultural dissection.
Lalor is excellent on local archaeology, searching out hidden antiquities, calling up ghostly and entrancing images of the past. Deeply conscious of what has been lost in Irish towns through historical depredations and economic disasters, he seems happier in rural half-light (or the light of other days), where modern ugliness is shrouded. And he writes lyrically when his rage subsides, communicating his passion for secret woods and hidden valleys, sighing mystical thorn trees, ancient monastic sites and holy wells.
Regarding the modern passion for "tidying" the countryside, he derides the attitude that the wild anarchy of the Irish landscape must at all costs be kept at bay, since in his opinion it is the wildness - "the fuchsia drunk on air, the thorn trees crazed with delight" - which most distinguishes Ireland from other countries. He is not a man who makes things easy for himself in his travels, and regularly ends up staying in the most grotesque B&Bs, about which he is unfailingly dismissive. In Antrim he stays (but why?) in a decaying hotel: "Conversations there are unpromising: this is international commercial traveller country, employing dull people, patronised by the same." Guests somewhere else are "the standard complement of retired people on a golfing holiday, their conversation appropriately witless."
The text is illustrated by Lalor's sixteen woodcuts and by Allegra Duvica Lalor's colour photographs, the most striking of which, a shot of the punters as Danoli approaches the first fence at a Fairyhouse race meeting, adorns the dustjacket of this handsome book.
Brendan Glacken is an Irish Times staff journalist
