French port opens its arms to our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to get back to Ireland, wirtes RUADHÁN MAC CORMAICin Cherbourg
THEY HAD come from all corners of Europe, and yesterday the huddled, haggard and pungent masses of exiled Irish kept sweeping into Cherbourg like refugees from the front.
In their makeshift camp in the ferry terminal, weary and drained and yet relieved to be staggering towards the finish line, they swapped their stories with conspiratorial relish.
The men wore last week’s clothes and three-day beards, turning their accounts into moral tales of terrible pain met with great fortitude, as if it were a remake of Cormac McCarthy’s ash-strewn The Road, only with less cannibalism and a bit more hope.
Meanwhile, the women rolled their eyes and got on with staring listlessly at the ground and counting the hours to the 9pm sailing.
And yet some of the stories were just too odd to have been made up. Tom Dunphy and his wife Caroline, from New Ross in Co Wexford, were in Torrevieja in Spain when the plume drifted south. They needed to get home to their two daughters, one of whom has a disability and was in respite care for the few days, and so they made some calls to a haulier they know from Wexford and ended up hitching a lift all the way on a South African’s cabbage lorry. They’ve forgotten what sleep feels like. “I never want to see Spain again,” Caroline sighs.
“On Tuesday, we were stuck on this farm in the middle of nowhere. It was just us and the cabbages.” The Dunphys’ trip cost them nothing but the drivers’ tip, but few were so lucky. To make their way from Berlin to Cherbourg, two Kilkenny couples – Ger and Monica Phelan and Noel and Geraldine Duffy – spent a few thousand euro on an apartment, a rental car, petrol, meals and hotel rooms somewhere they can’t quite remember. “I’m unemployed and I’m after putting €2,000 on my visa card, which I can ill-afford. It’s been a nightmare,” says Monica flatly.
“It was fun at the beginning, but we’re exhausted now.”
The abandoned rental cars filling the car park at the terminal – with plates from more than half a dozen countries – told of the improvisation that took so many travellers to northern France this week. For big groups, buses were the saviour. Three scientists from DCU found themselves stranded in the Swedish city of Gothenburg with five Junior Cert students after taking part in the EU Science Olympiad, so they stocked up on pillows and junk food and parted with €8,000 to commandeer a bus for the 28-hour, six-country journey to Normandy.
For Martina Leonard, a teacher from Dublin who had come overland from Budapest, the frustration had finally reached boiling point yesterday when faced with a surly staff member at the booking desk. “I don’t believe a word anybody behind any counter is telling me any more,” she said angrily. And don’t get her started on those free texts from O2.
“I know it’s a nice thing they’re trying to do, but after the fact we get a text message from O2 telling us that we have 100 free texts. You feel like saying, ‘thank you for your stupid bloody offer or whatever, but I don’t need it now‘. I can’t even imagine how much my phone bill is going to be.” But for all the misery and all the fatigue, the relief was written on people’s faces yesterday.
A group of nine mostly retired friends from Malahide in Dublin would probably have sat it out in Malaga were it not that one of them has a son getting married on Friday. So they hired a 22-seater bus (a bargain at €3,100) and headed north. They’re tired alright, says Tony Byrne, but it’s a small comfort to know they’re sitting on a story they’ll be telling for years. “And you know, we’ll exaggerate all of it.”