MUCH as I sympathise with those cleaning workers at the Oxegen festival, people should not be too sniffy - for want of a better word - about using stables as temporary accommodation, writes Frank McNally.
Joseph and Mary may or may not have done so: the Bible only mentions a "manger". But whatever about being born in one, to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, spending a night there does not make you a horse.
As it happens, I spent the weekend in Miltown Malbay rather than Punchestown, catching the end of the Willie Clancy Summer School. And no, despite the usual difficulty of finding accommodation in the area, I did not stay in a stable. I did, however, note that on the campsites at Spanish Point, one of the more upmarket forms of accommodation this year was a horse-box.
Not a mere trailer, or anything so common. No, this was a fully integrated lorry unit, capable of transporting four or five thoroughbreds in complete comfort. Which it does for the rest of the year, apparently. But for this event it had been converted into living quarters for a family of seven. Those slumming it in tents nearby could only admire its swankiness.
All over Ireland these days, stables - albeit ones that the horses have vacated permanently - are being used to accommodate human guests. Every castle in the country has converted its former outhouses into hotel rooms; and not only hotel rooms. At the Irish Museum of Modern Art - housed in an old military hospital - the stables are now artists' studios.
The extent of the conversion is important, I suppose. But accompanying yesterday's cleaning-staff-in-stables story was a picture of the Oxegen campsite which suggested that, even with the horses still in situ, the stables would have been more hygienic.
Indeed, driving back from Clare on Monday, my family and I stopped for lunch at a roadside service station in the midlands. And I'm exaggerating only slightly when I say that conditions there were Augean. (We might note in passing, and in fairness to horse, that the notorious Augean stables in which Hercules served as a contract cleaner were used to house cattle).
This was not a greasy spoon café. On the contrary, it was part of post-tiger Ireland: a gleaming new premises with everything the traveller needed - shop, restaurant, showers, toilets and, to one side of the café, a bank of high stools with internet consoles. But the eating area looked like the Oxegen campsite. It was filthy. Every table was piled high with fast-food refuse. The bins were full. The floor hadn't seen a mop recently.
There being no staff to do it, apparently, I cleared a table myself. Even so, my 10-year-old daughter opted for one of the high stools - not because she wanted to use the internet, but because she wanted to sit as far away from the floor as possible.
The hygiene standards were maintained in the toilets. You didn't have to ask where these were; they were well signposted for anyone with a functioning nose. I paid them only a brief visit, before deciding I didn't need to go that badly.
The most charitable verdict was that the place was short-staffed. Maybe everybody was still at Oxegen. And clearly, customers deserved some of the blame for the state of it. The human race - or the bit of it that lives in Ireland anyway - can be slobs. In fact, the better class of horses might well object to sharing their accommodation with us.
YOU COULD write a book about the murky subject of traditional music session etiquette. I have touched on it here before. But I hear there was a tense situation in a Miltown Malbay pub at the weekend, when two accordion players attempted to join an established session composed of fiddles, flutes and concertinas.
In some circles, one accordion is regarded as unfortunate; two are considered unacceptably loud. So it was here. A (fully seated) stand-off ensued, in which the fiddlers and flute players started playing tunes that the new arrivals couldn't follow.
Like a host body rejecting a donor organ, the double accordion transplant was soon repulsed, although not without bad feeling. The invasion had wrecked the session's buzz (as they don't say in Clare). A conciliatory handshake by one of the retreating accordionists was refused.
These are minor dramas at the summer school. Indeed, the sessions themselves are only an offshoot - if an enjoyable one - from the classes that have been the backbone of the event for 36 years. Musicians and their teachers spill out of schoolrooms and halls after the official business of the day and then spill into pubs, where ensembles form, evolve, mutate, and occasionally fall out during the course of the evenings.
But not for the first time this year, I was struck by the shrinking number of pubs available to them. One of the event organisers expressed the problem in a theatrical metaphor. "The Ennis road is dark," he confirmed to me. It was a reference not to the state of the street lighting, but to the fact that the five or six small pubs that once lined that road out of Miltown are all now closed.
There aren't many stables in West Clare either, come to think of it. Which makes me wonder just where the session players will go if the day ever arrives when there's no room at the inn.