Irish people aren't friendly after all, wrote Matt Gross recently in a New York Timestravel article. But is he right? During a trip around Ireland last week, ROSITA BOLANDput our céad míle fáilte to the test – with surprising results
IRELAND OF THE welcomes. That's what New York Timesjournalist Matt Gross came looking for when he spent a week in Ireland recently, driving round in a hire car by himself. He also came looking for music, scenery, culture, and new experiences. Those he got. He found astonishing views, empty rural roads, peace, music that excited him – a band called the Calvinists in Bantry's Schooner bar – quaint placenames, and ambitiously written menus that rarely delivered on taste.
What he did not find, as he wrote in the New York Timesrecently, was friendliness: people to chat with casually in bars and cafes, conversations that lasted longer than the time it took to place a food or drink order, or anyone who showed much interest in him as a tourist with an American accent at all, one way or the other.
“I carried myself in an open manner, I dressed not like a tourist, but like my regular New York self, which I hoped would peg me less as an outsider than as an unusual outsider, an object of curiosity. I wasn’t expecting a hero’s welcome, just a little interest . . . Instead, I was the odd foreigner nobody spoke to . . . As I drank yet another rapturously smooth Guinness, it seemed impossible to chat up anyone, so tightly knit were these groups of cool friends. I felt lonely and desperate and I knew everybody could sense it . . .
“Often I wondered whether I’d been misled about Ireland. This was, I’d gleaned from books and movies, a nation of loquacious gabbers, silver-tongued schmoozers, ostentatiously oratorical pub-dwellers, but were they as mythical – and dismissibly stereotypical – as leprechauns?”
I am frequently on the road throughout the country, whether for work, research, or visiting people. When I read Gross’s story, I thought about my own travelling experiences. Three days before, I had been covering a story all day in Connemara and had not had time to eat. I ran into Steam Coffee House in Clifden and ordered a take-out salad. The dilemma was how to eat it – the cafe had run out of plastic cutlery. They cheerfully gave me a proper fork, waving off offers to return it later (which I did). It was a small detail, but it made a difference to my day.
I frequently eat alone on the road, but that’s often by choice: after a day working, I just want to read, unwind, and talk to nobody. Unlike Gross, I’m not on holidays in Ireland. But I guess the real difference in our experiences is perhaps that if I do want to talk to strangers, I never have a problem striking up a conversation anywhere. Maybe it’s shared points of reference. At the end of the day working in Claddahgduff and Clifden, I wound up staying up until 2am in the Station House Hotel, talking to people I’d hadn’t know before that afternoon. It was one of the best and most memorable nights I’ve had all year.
A few days after I read Matt Gross's story online, I was driving from Dublin to Cahersiveen in Co Kerry. Going through Farahy, a scattering of houses and a church at a crossroads in Co Cork, I spotted a sign pointing to the site of Bowen's Court, the now-ruined home of writer Elizabeth Bowen. Several times previously, I'd passed this sign and never stopped, but always intended to. The Last Septemberis my favourite novel of hers. I was making good time. It was daylight. I diverted.
The sign directed me through open white gates into a field with a narrow track for a road. I followed the unpaved potholed path, first with curiosity and then with rising concern. My axel hit a stone hard and then another. There was nowhere to turn, and no ruined house in sight. Either side of the track lay recently ploughed muddy fields.
I panicked. Instead of remaining calm like a sensible person and slowly reversing back the way I had come, I drove into the muddy field and tried to turn around. Very quickly, the car got totally stuck.
Did I feel stupid? I felt extremely, extravagantly stupid. I cursed and gnashed my teeth and smote my brow and then set off, ankle-deep in sticky mud, in pouring rain, to look for help.
I did not doubt for one nanosecond that someone would help me. I assumed without even thinking about it that I would find help. I needed someone to push my car out of the mud, ergo I was utterly confident I would find that help, in the form of a person or persons. Why? Because we’re like that. We’re famously friendly to strangers, let alone our own.
First I knocked on nearby doors, but there was nobody home. Then I figured my strategy would be to hail a jeep or four-wheel-drive, preferably with more than one person in it, so that their vehicle wouldn’t get stuck while going back into the field to help rescue my car. I chose a safe place in the road with good sightlines. Several four-wheel-drive vehicles passed. None stopped.
MANY YEARS AGO, I spent three months hitch-hiking around the coast of Ireland, and wrote a book about that experience, Sea Legs. I was very successful at making cars stop. Or perhaps people were more used to giving lifts in those days when far fewer people had cars. Rarely did I spent so long waiting at the side of the road for a vehicle to stop as I did last week in Farahy. Was it because I was muddy? Visibly wet? An unpredictable freak in 2010 to be hailing a car at all? Or was it because people were deliberately choosing to ignore me, and my signal that tried to flag their vehicle down?
Eventually, a jeep pulled over. There were two occupants, a youngish couple. I explained my situation, and gestured to my car, clearly visible in the adjoining field. Could they help? The woman in the passenger seat looked at me once silently, and then straight ahead at the road. The man – in an Irish accent – asked if I had a phone. I said I did, while wondering foolishly why he would want to know that.
“Why don’t you call the guards then?” he suggested tartly, rolled up the window, and drove off.
Call the guards? Call the guards? I was deep in rural Ireland, far from a shop or pub, let alone a Garda station. Why on earth would I even consider calling guards? It had never occurred to me. I had assumed passers-by would help me, in a informal code of decent behaviour: I did not consider my car getting stuck in a field was a matter for officialdom.
What would Matt Gross have made of this situation, I found myself wondering? Would he have automatically looked for help from passers-by as I did, seeking to tap into that famous Irish Welcome, or would he have simply called his car rental insurance number right off? At the side of the road that afternoon, I suddenly felt mortified and embarrassed nobody was helping me: mortified by my assumption of friendliness and goodwill from Irish strangers that I had always instinctively counted on before. It was a horrible feeling.
There was one house on whose door I had not knocked. Arthur Hennessy, retired for seven years, answered it. He and his wife Brenda insisted on driving their non four-wheel-drive car back into the field. Brenda and I pushed while Arthur drove my car out. In the process, they were both covered in mud. Afterwards, Brenda insisted I come into their house and have tea, while Arthur washed my car and fussed over my muddy boots.
I am immensely grateful to Arthur and Brenda Hennessy of Farahy, Kildorrery, Co Cork. Not only because they literally got me out of a hole, but because they restored my so-recently broken faith in something I had previously always taken for granted – the kindness and approachability of Irish strangers.
But like Matt Gross, the first-time American tourist from New York who found us failing in our welcome lately, I won’t be taking our Irish hospitality for granted again.
Read Matt Gross’s article in full at url.ie/829f
