McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Page B

tell their wives they were on the train?
    Anyway, Dominic turns out to be about fifty yards away, in the car park of a supermarket in Dunmanway. I’ve had to drive back there to find a phone, on account of not having a mobile. Though a tad hoarse, Dom is in good shape for a man who stayed up till dawn, then slept on some rubble. Merry has stayed on with the other kids at Danny’s for the daytime session, so Dom and I pop in for a pint with the wedding guests by way of a loosener, then set off for Wild Mountain.
    The travellers started arriving here in the eighties. At first there was an outcry, fuelled by the local press; but since then things have quietened down. As you approach the hillside, a few unusual structures, some thatched, some tarpaulined, and a couple of mobile homes, are visible. An old converted ambulance is parked off-road, looking as though it may once have been used to sell silly hats and tofu at Glastonbury. But there’s no shanty-town squalor, or industrial-sized marijuana plantations guarded by junkies with machetes. If you were a vindictive small-town moralist looking for something to deplore, you’d be struggling; but then the sight of an overgrown and decaying cement farmhouse, its windows falling, or already fallen, out, would give some grounds for optimism.
    We park in the lane and walk through the gap where the gate used to be, into a jungle of giant fuchsia and super-nettles. No weed has been cut, no half-hearted paintbrush wielded for twenty years or more. The back of the house, facing south, is in brilliant sunshine. Two ginger cats are asleep among the cans. Sitting in the doorway on a wooden chair, staring at the floor, is a man of about fifty.
    He’s wearing a soiled white shirt with a blue and yellow check, under a green cardie buttoned all the way up, under a battered sports jacket. Gumboots, worn over dark grey trousers that might have been another colour when they started out, suggest an authentic bachelor. His face is full and round, and his brown hair, though matted, is thick and luxurious, with a hairline almost down to his eyebrows, like a badly fitted wig. It can’t be though, because he’s too drunk to put one on.
    ‘Peter, this is Stephen, landlord of the mountain.’
    He looks up and smiles. Dominic passes him a can of strong Dutch lager from a carrier bag, and cracks one for himself. I decline, hoping not to appear antisocial, though it doesn’t seem that etiquette will be a problem. Stephen’s thick long hair gives him the look of an older Oscar Wilde, but with dandruff. He’s fuddled but functioning, his engaging wry smile acknowledging that, despite his semi-coherence, he’s fully aware of his semi-coherence.
    I sit down next to the cats on the overgrown concrete path.
    ‘Cats are looking well, Stephen,’ says Dominic.
    ‘Yerra…mmm…ngg…kittens…blerrh, just yet.’
    ‘How many kittens?’
    ‘Ah sure, don’t know, haven’t looked yet. A few, by the sound of it.’
    He gestures to a cupboard door under the stairs behind him. I want to go and see what else is in there, behind the blistered wainscoting and rotten doors, or up the shattered staircase, but I fear it will be just too terrible. There’s a powerful stench, as if something’s died in his house, or trousers. He offers me a ‘Major’ brand cigarette, and smiles and says it’s nice to have visitors. I’m moved by his pitiful situation. The family farm has been sacrificed to the bottle.
    On the way over Dominic told me how Stephen had owned much of the mountain, and the land around it. Fifteen years ago he started renting plots to the new English arrivals; then, to raise cash, he started selling the land. And so it’s gone on, hand to mouth, to pub, to mouth again, renting and selling to keep himself afloat. Suddenly Stephen starts complaining to us that people haven’t been paying their rent. Dom gently points out that perhaps they have paid, but he hasn’t remembered.
    ‘Ah sure, I