ON FOOT OF Thursday’s diary hailing Chief O’Neill for the success of his crusade to save Irish traditional music, I received a somewhat sobering e-mail from the Beara peninsula. Its sender is the splendidly named Henry van Raat, a long-time resident of these shores who appears to have succumbed to that well-known immigrant condition of caring more about the culture than we do.
His news is not all bad, but in any case I’ll let him tell it himself: “Reading today’s contribution about Chief O’Neill, I was reminded how things have changed so much even in the last 30 years. I came here from England – a kind of reverse immigrant, in reduced circumstances, which amounted to £40 in my pocket and an eight-year-old son, and it’s proper to say that without the friendliness and generosity of the people here in west Cork I don’t know what might have happened.
“As it was, they looked after us; nevertheless, arriving at Killmackillogue, becoming, by default almost, a shrimp-fisherman, frequenting Teddy Sullivan’s Pier House bar – the size of a shoebox, and with a light on the cowshed wall that you lined up with the pierhead light to come in safe from sea at night – was like walking into a Flann O’Brien novel.
“That was in the 1980s; they say there was a depression then, but I never saw it. Such things are a question of degree. After a couple of years I moved the few miles to Allihies, where there were five pubs in the single street serving a village population of (excluding children) 25 or so. (Of course there were many more in the hinterland.)
“But my point is that there was never a night when there wasn’t music or dancing or singing or story-telling or all four together in one of those pubs; they served as social centres that happened, coincidentally, to serve drink. [Now] all that has gone; three pubs are left and no itinerant musicians arrive from nowhere as they used to, no one sings spontaneously; television rules. Not that many people watch it; just that the blare of it is intimidating. We need a Chief O’Neill.
“Oh, I’m not complaining . . . I still love to live here, and if the Celtic Tiger, the fairy gold, passed Beara by, so does what one understands from the newspapers to be a total financial disaster. But I wish the music hadn’t stopped.”
That’s what Henry writes. And there are, as I say, mixed messages in it. Sad as it is that the musical pubs of Beara have fallen silent, it is also reassuring to hear that the banking crash, like the boom that preceded it, is still only a rumour there. Maybe those nervous traders we’re always hearing about should be sent to Allihies every now and again for compulsory de-stressing; then they wouldn’t be so damned volatile.
But it’s still sad about the TV-ruled pubs. The question is, what would a modern-day Chief O’Neill do about the problem? As head of the Chicago police, the original one arrested (excuse the pun) the decline of a music he loved by collecting 3,500 tunes and putting them in books, for later recycling. Short of collecting a similar number of TVs and putting them in skips, for something similar, it’s hard to see how you could reverse the silencing of live pub music.
TVs apart, the actual closure of so many bars in rural Ireland is a problem for session musicians. To this end, I was vaguely encouraged by what appeared to be a new trend towards opening unlicensed community shebeens, like the one in Donegal that a judge ruled legal because no money was changing hands. But I see that, in the most recent example, the bar fittings include a lap-dancing pole, and I’m not sure that’s the sort of dancing to encourage fiddlers and uilleann-pipe players.
We can only hope that, like the markets, the playing of music in pubs is a cyclical thing and will rise again in response to falling economic fortunes. So many old Irish songs and tunes are about hard times, they should be in their element now. In any case, I choose to accentuate the positive in Henry’s e-mail, which is its philosophical tenor. While the Greeks are losing their heads at one end of Europe, the Stoic school of philosophy seems to be alive and well at the other: holding up a beacon – like the light on O’Sullivan’s cowshed wall – to guide fisherman and others home through troubled waters.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, and by pure coincidence, another letter arrived here recently – also from the far southwest, albeit the next peninsula up from Beara – on the subject of actual lighthouses. The writer was Ken Roddy, Skellig boatman, whose father Joe, grandfather Patrick and an uncle were all lighthousemen, on Skellig Michael and elsewhere. Now Ken is researching them for a family project, and he hopes readers can help.
“As custodians of the island heritage for 160 years, the lighthouse keepers’ insights and experiences are an important part of the history of Skellig Michael,” he writes, inviting copies of documents, photos, or anything else relating to the Roddys and their involvement with the famous rock. All correspondence will be acknowledged and returned and should be addressed to Ken Roddy, Skellig boatman, Oghermong, Cahirciveen Co. Kerry. Or to ken@skelligstrips.com His phone number, should anyone need to talk to him is: 066-9474268.