April 2008 Archives

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 25, 2008; A01

CONNOLLY, Ireland -- For generations, Carney's, the only pub in this tiny village in western Ireland, had been the place to strike up a romance, celebrate a birth or mourn a death -- or just sip a pint of Guinness among friends near a warm fire on a damp day.

So when Carney's shut down last year after more than a century in business, Teresa Tuttle, 62, took it hard. "Where can we go after a funeral? After work? Where would we all meet?" she recalled thinking, shaking her head in her kitchen, not far from the pub.

The "closed" sign abruptly posted on Carney's door -- and on the doors of 1,000 rural Irish pubs in the past three years -- was another sign of the profound lifestyle changes that have accompanied the country's dizzying rise to affluence.

"It was like a sudden death in the family," said Anthony Scanlan, 51, a farmer who lives near Carney's. "Everything has changed in Ireland. It's as fast as New York around here."

As recently as the 1980s, young people had to leave Ireland to find work and millionaires were as rare as hen's teeth, as the Irish say. But by 2005, according to the Bank of Ireland, the country of 4 million people had 30,000 residents worth more than a million euros, or about $1.5 million. A year later, the number of millionaires had jumped another 10 percent.

Ireland's per-capita income is now among the highest in the world, surpassing those in the United States, Sweden and Japan, according to the World Bank.

Wealth has given the Irish more options and less time -- a bad combination for the local pub. More people are spending sunny weekends in Spain rather than evenings of "craic," as good times and conversation are known, down at the pub.

Fewer people are farming the valuable rolling green hills around Carney's, about 50 miles south of Galway, and more are commuting long distances to better-paying jobs. And all over the country, when the weary commuters return home, many now prefer to stay in their comfortable homes with a glass of chardonnay in front of their flat-screen TVs.

The Vintners' Federation of Ireland, which represents rural pubs, said the number of pubs outside Dublin has dropped from 6,000 to 5,000 in the past three years. Some estimates suggest the number may soon dwindle to 3,500.

Smoking bans in pubs and stricter drunken-driving laws have also played a role in the decline, said Michael O'Keefe, a spokesman for the Vintners group. He said some pub owners are serving lattes along with beer and whiskey in an attempt to cater to changing tastes. "Twenty years ago, if you asked a barman for a cappuccino, he would have looked at you as if you had two heads," O'Keefe said.

Some shrug off the closures, saying Ireland had too many pubs anyway. Many say they are delighted there are more fine restaurants and upscale coffee shops. But others, particularly older people, lament the decline of a touchstone, a place that linked neighbors, a seat near the fire where their fathers and grandfathers chatted before them.

"There is a certain sense of loss, of the coziness and companionship of the pub life," said Patricia O'Hara, a sociologist and policy manager with the Western Development Commission, which promotes economic and social development in western Ireland. She said some older people feel isolated and alienated in a faster-paced Ireland, where young people's lives seem to revolve around cellphones and social networking Internet sites such as Facebook.

"Be absolutely assured that people don't want to return to the days of poverty," O'Hara said. But, she added, "there is a questioning how much we are losing as result of prosperity . . . a nostalgia for simpler times when people had more time for each other."

Connolly sits at a bend in the road in the middle of County Clare, a little cluster of buildings set around a towering gray stone Catholic church. For generations, village life has revolved around the church, the pub and a small post office that collected mail, cashed checks and dished out news.

But now all three of those institutions are under pressure.

Regular church attendance in this overwhelmingly Catholic country has fallen from 90 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent today.

Ireland had nearly 1,900 post offices a decade ago, compared with 1,255 now. People use bigger urban post offices, ATMs and direct deposit, and fewer families are handing down the job of running the local post office.

"You don't want to see things closing, you want to see them opening," said Pauline Connellan, the postmistress in Connolly for 34 years. She said she is not sure what will become of her job when she retires -- or of many other traditions in this era of "rush, rush, rush."

To Eamon Ó Cuív, the minister in charge of rural affairs and a grandson of Eamon de Valera, one of the founding figures of the Irish Republic, those traditions include the art of conversation that thrived in pubs. But he said: "What are we to do? We can't make going to the pub compulsory."

Still, Ó Cuív said, "Change doesn't mean the death knell for a culture. . . . It will take a lot longer than 20 years to change the basic nature of the Irish people."

The Irish novelist Maeve Binchy said she believed there was "a danger that Ireland might lose its relaxed, easygoing, peaceful lifestyle," given all the changes. "But it's only a danger, not a fact," she said in an e-mail. "I may be Pollyanna, but I think our brush with prosperity made us better rather than destroying us."

Terry Kennedy, 37, a bricklayer, was working one June day when his cellphone rang with the news about the "closed" sign on Carney's. "I had to sit down for an hour," he said.

After Carney's shut, Kennedy said, he sometimes drove to the pub in the next village, but it wasn't the same. At his own pub, he either knew everyone in the place, or soon did: "It's small here, so the seven or eight of us at the bar can all be in the same conversation."

Older people who didn't drive had nowhere to go. Many stayed home. Some called taxi driver Garry Boon, 64, to take them out and about to meet people. "It cut the heart out of the village when it closed," Boon said of the Connolly pub.

Then in November, Liam Moloney, a villager who had moved to London and runs a pub and a construction company there, bought Carney's, fixed it up and reopened it -- a rare example of a shuttered rural pub getting a second life.

"I'm not going to make any money to write home about," Moloney, 33, said from London. "But it was my local pub."

Now Carney's has a fresh coat of white paint and a giant new TV to show sports matches. It opens only in the evenings, but the weekly Tuesday night card game is back.

"Having lost it once, we are trying to keep it," Kennedy said one recent evening, pulling out the euro equivalent of $5.40 for a pint of Guinness.

It was a special night: John and Teresa Tuttle were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Soon, two dozen people piled into the two-room pub, and a trio playing guitar, double bass and accordion filled the place with traditional music.

As the clapping began, John Tuttle, 82, sat smiling in his wheelchair and tapping his foot to an Irish reel. In the 1960s, when he dated Teresa, they had come here.

"If this pub weren't here, we wouldn't have a party," said their daughter Emer Tuttle. "All these people are country people and wouldn't leave the village. That is why these pubs are so important."

The day after the party, which lasted until 3 a.m., Teresa Tuttle sat in her kitchen looking out the window. In the near distance, over the green fields, she could see giant wind turbines, a new feature in an old landscape.

"I loved every bit of last night," she said, looking at flowers, candleholders and her other gifts.

She said she had marked First Communions, birthdays and funerals at Carney's and felt lucky that she had her meeting place back.

"Without it," she said, "the likes of us would have nowhere to go."

	Where Irish guides are smiling: middle, expert walker Michael Gibbons; left, pupils at a small island schoolhouse; right, coastal rock of ages (Bobby Fisher)

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Frontiers: Traveling Ireland
Fresh Eire
The past is present on Ireland's windswept west coast

By John Fox

"Now we won't give in to the temptation of a path!" says my Irish guide, Michael Gibbons, as he steps defiantly off the road and plunges up to his ankles into a spongy green bog. An archaeologist by trade and self-described "expert walker and great talker" by disposition, the 45-year-old Gibbons is far more inclined to follow the ruins of a 4,000-year-old wall or a good storyline than he is a decent road or trail.

I obediently follow Michael, bracing for the inevitable squish of cold bog in my already damp boots. This is the third

Mixed Greens

From chic clubbing in Dublin to cycling the ring of Kerry, Ireland's got a bit of everything. Take a look at five can't-miss travel ideas.

day of our five-day trek, and by this time I'm confident that Michael knows where he's going. This is his home turf, after all--he's walked every patch and puddle of this rocky, soggy, wild, and ancient 800 square miles of western Ireland, known as Connemara, a region of County Galway that falls right between the rugged Atlantic coast and Lough Corrib, the country's second-largest lake.

As the son of immigrants who left Ireland's County Leitrim, about 80 miles northeast of Connemara, some 50 years ago to make a life in America, I'd followed the recent rise of the "New Ireland" of high-tech office parks, hip clubs, and haute cuisine with mixed feelings. Having inherited (along with a taste for good whiskey) an unabashedly romantic and wistful attachment to "the old country," I had come with Michael on this 50-mile trek from Ireland's outer islands to the Connemara mainland with a clear mission in mind: to make sure that my Emerald Isle of donkey carts and whitewashed thatch cottages, of turf fires and the fairy tales told around them, hadn't entirely disappeared.

From left: Catholicism imbues a home; Aran Woolens for sale at the Inis Meain Knittin Company; ruins of a monastary on Inishbofin; (Bobby Fisher)

Our quest began on the remote isle of Inishmaan, a lonely six-square-mile nub of limestone inhabited by fewer than 200 souls. Tiny Inishmaan is in the center of the Aran Islands, a windswept mini-archipelago that the contemporary poet Seamus Heaney once called "the three stepping stones out of Europe." A century or so earlier, the Irish poet and playwright J. M. Synge found his own literary inspiration here among the islanders, whose simple life he described as "perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe."

At first glance, little appears to have changed on Inishmaan since Synge lived here. Our first day, we set off on a three-mile hike from the island's ferry pier through An Cora, the main village, and up to the ruins of Dún Fearbhaigh, the 3,000-year-old Iron Age fort that looms over the village. We wind our way up narrow cobbled paths through a maze of mortarless stone walls built and rebuilt by generations of islanders to shield their sheep and potatoes from unrelenting winds. We pass rows of overturned curraghs, boats that Aran fishermen have used for centuries to fish and trap lobsters. These days the lobsters are caught and flown straight to Paris's finest restaurants.

As we walk, I graze on ripe wild blackberries while attempting to make sense of signs that appear only in Gaelic, the ancient Celtic tongue that remains the lingua franca of Inishmaan and most of Connemara. (One faded pub sign reads is fearrde thú guinness--"Guinness is good for you.") Back in Synge's day, says Michael, "English was a language you'd only talk to a pig or a dog in." Given the way some of the locals eye us as they say hello, I suspect not much has changed.

Back in An Cora, we run into Tarlach de Blacam, a dapper ex-Dubliner in his mid-fifties who runs a shop selling the islands' famous fine knits. Tarlach came to Inishmaan more than 35 years ago to study Gaelic, fell in love with the place, and decided to stay forever. "Back then it was dark," he recalls fondly. "No electricity. Just the flickering of fires and candles." Only toward the end of our conversation do we learn that his shop is just the showroom for a profitable export business, Inis Meáin Knitting Company (Inis Meáin being the Gaelic spelling for the island). "I'm off to New York tomorrow to meet with Saks Fifth Avenue," he adds casually as he shakes hands and rushes to catch the ferry.

Following a night of drinking and good craic (pronounced "crack" but translated as harmless Irish "fun") at Teach Ostan Inis Meáin, one of the island's two pubs, I go about repairing my liver the Irish way: with a binge breakfast of sausages, rashers (bacon), eggs, and black pudding, a congealed pig's-blood product cleverly disguised as another sausage. Afterwards, a ferry shuttles us back to the mainland--a few pounds heavier than when we arrived.

Three hours later we find ourselves climbing hills and sloshing through peat bogs near Maam Cross, a crossroads ten miles south of the coast. The area was made famous as the setting for the 1952 John Wayne classic The Quiet Man. The skeletal ruins of long-abandoned cottages and remnants of old potato furrows fill the landscape. "Believe it or not," says Michael, "this was once one of the most densely populated parts of Europe--before the famine hit," referring to the devastating potato blight that claimed more than half a million lives and sent boatloads of emigrants to America between 1845 and 1850.

Frontiers: Traveling Ireland
Fresh Eire (cont.)

	LOVELY LONELINESS: A fairy tree near Maam Cross; Michael Gibbons and his walking crew admire cliffs near Inishbofin (Bobby Fisher)

These days, points out Michael, it's mostly cities like Dublin that are booming, thanks to the "Celtic Tiger," the nickname given to Ireland's raging economy, which, since the early nineties, has ranked among the fastest-growing in Europe. With the help of expats moving in from the United States and England to fill high-tech jobs at places like Dell, Intel, and Microsoft, Ireland's population tops four million for the first time since 1872.

As we stumble up a green hillside between Maam Cross and the village of Recess, Michael grabs my shoulder. "Careful, now, of the fairy tree!" I wipe rain from my glasses and scan the dense mist, half expecting to see a Lucky Charms look-alike flitting about. Instead there's a single wind-pummeled tree sprouting through moss and rocks on an otherwise barren hillside. "Locals will tell you fairies live under trees like that," says Michael. "They'll never cut one down, for fear of retribution. In some cases they've even diverted highways around them." In a country that's hurtling into modernity, I find it comforting to think that the placement of high-speed motorways can still be dictated by concerns of fairy displacement.

After two days of bog-tromping through lashing rain, we drag ourselves, dripping and hungry, into the Lough Inagh Lodge Hotel, a sprawling 125-year-old Tudor-style mansion nestled next to the Twelve Bens and Maamturks Mountains, just 42 miles west of Galway, and surrounded by some of the best fly-fishing streams in all of Europe. The rosy-cheeked lodge owner, showing true Irish hospitality, stuffs our wet boots with newspaper, sets them by the fire, and leads us into an oak-paneled pub decorated with a taxidermy zoo. "Slainte!" he says, offering up the traditional Gaelic toast along with a frothy pint of Guinness and a lunch of native smoked salmon on brown bread and a crabmeat-and-avocado salad.

A van whisks us from lunch westward to the port town of Cleggan, 30 minutes away, where we switch to a ferry and chug 40 minutes over gut-churning swells to arrive on Inishbofin, the "Island of the White Cow." We head off to catch the sunset over the Atlantic, walking a hillside through what Michael calls a "relic landscape." Three-thousand-year-old walls--half-submerged in fields of clover--lead to the doorsteps of what he identifies as the remains of ancient homes. "Welcome to your Bronze Age B&B!" he announces as we cross the lichen-covered threshold.

As we leave Connemara the next day and drive the 80 miles back to Shannon Airport, sheep meadows are replaced by Dunnes department stores and a billboard touts Guinness, with its 198 calories, as the hip, low-calorie beer of choice for the young, waistline-conscious Irish.

In my five days in Ireland, I never spotted a single donkey cart, and the only thatch cottages I encountered were on the verge of becoming archaeological. But what I found instead was a thriving, vital Ireland where ancient ways have found modern expression, where fairies are still a force to be reckoned with, and where the Guinness is just as good for you as it ever was.

Frontiers: Traveling Ireland
Fresh Eire (cont.)
Access and Resources

	Map of Ireland by Evan Hecox

To bog-tromp and fairy-spot with a true master, contact Michael Gibbons at Walking Ireland, in Clifden, Connemara's largest town. Michael offers everything from half-day rambles to an epic ten-day circuit of Ireland's sacred mountains, with prices beginning at $27. You can count on wet boots, spectacular vistas, and good craic. 011-353-95-21492, www.walkingireland.com The best of old and new Ireland can be found under one splendid roof, at the Lough Inagh Lodge Hotel in Recess, where room and board for two begin at $268 per night, depending on the season. 011-353-95-34706, www.loughinaghlodgehotel.ie

March 3, 2008 Monday

The first electric bus on an offshore island will be launched on Inis Oirr today by Minister for the Gaeltacht Eamon O'Cuiv.The five-seater eco-vehicle for locals and tourists will save on normal running costs like fuel, tax and insurance while also reducing noise and CO2 emissions.

The batteries on the minibus will also be recharged using renewable energy from local wind turbines.

The Government provided 80% of the EUR 47,000 cost of the electric bus, which was manufactured by Dublin-based GMI Green Machines.

Sustainable Energy Ireland gave advice on the project and is studying the future potential of more such vehicles on other Aran Islands.

A Gaelic-speaking island, Inis Oirr has a population of 247 people.

Mr O Cuiv praised the co-operative spirit demonstrated by the local Comhar Caomhan co-op and other groups involved in the project.

He said: "One of the goals in the Programme for Government is the introduction of a specific scheme for offshore islands to incentivise and support renewable energy by island co-ops or other island-based organisations for community buildings and public lighting.

"This innovative project will provide a safe, regular transport service for the island community while utilising green energy."

The bus is wheelchair-accessible and the gear system has been adapted to navigate the hilly terrain on Inis Oirr.

A safety alarm has also been fitted to warn pedestrians when the minibus is reversing or approaching.

"The minibus is superbly adapted to its role as a passenger vehicle on the island, and carrying up to five passengers it will greatly benefit the island community," Mr O'Cuiv added.

"It is also a big step towards sustainability because it will lead to less dependency on fuel on the island."