I was in Cork last
weekend for the first time, attending a conference on medieval things. I lived
in Ireland for most of 2003 and 2004, so it’s always nice to go back,
especially to a part of the country I’ve not visited before.
Most of what I knew about
Cork came from the excellent Ken Loach movie The Wind That Shakes The Barley,
which is set during the Irish War of Independence, so my knowledge was a bit
out of date.
Another cheerful Ken Loach film
Anyway, conferences
rarely leave much time for sightseeing, but as I walked through the city I was
glad to see that my ethnic group was represented with its own ‘Sasanach’
market.
We also had a conference
excursion to the Iveragh peninsula in County Kerry. It has some stunning
coastal scenery and lots of quiet, slightly shabby villages full of the sort of
family-run shops that I suppose were found everywhere once upon a time, but now
exist only in these out-of-the-way corners of western Europe. In Cahersiveen we
drove past one little shop which had two windows: the first was filled with
toys and games for children, the second with funeral wreaths and decorated
plaques for the dead. There’s something reassuring about a local shop which
caters to your needs from cradle to grave.
But then Kerry has always
been behind the times even by Irish standards. Our tour guide told us the story
of the Fenian uprising of February 1867, when pockets of resistance fighters
all over Ireland were supposed to rise up against the British in a coordinated
rebellion.
The February rebellion
was called off, but unfortunately the news didn’t reached Kerry in time. The small
band of Cahersiveen rebels rose up according to plan, killed a few British police,
and began to march to link up with their comrades in the east. Only then did
they find out that they were completely alone.
That must have been
awkward. It sounds rather like turning up to someone’s house in elaborate fancy
dress, only to discover that the party has been cancelled and nobody told you.
And then you get arrested and transported to Australia for life.
The British built this
massive barracks to subdue the restless people of Cahersiveen. All 800 of them.
After this, the most
important thing to happen in Kerry took place in 2001, when the public toilets
in the coastal village of Portmagee came runner-up in the all-Ireland Best
Public Toilets competition, as a weather-beaten sign proudly commemorates.
Obviously I went into the toilets, literally ready to wee myself in excitement.
It was dark and dingy.
There were no seats on the toilets. There was no soap in the soap dispenser,
and the taps hardly worked. I walked back out into the cold Atlantic wind,
taking care not to slip on the sad little puddles of water which lay across the
tiled floor.
Standards had clearly
dropped since 2001. Maybe, I thought, the disappointment of only coming
runner-up had been too much. First the failed uprising of 1867, and now this.
How much tragedy could one county endure?
There is nothing lush or
bucolic about County Kerry; it’s a tough landscape of mountains and craggy
coasts that lie naked to the battering western ocean. The soil isn’t good for
much except scattered grazing and the most meagre cereal cultivation. If the
ground isn’t rocky, it’s boggy.
Not that this matters,
because this is the sort of place that takes pride in its history of adversity
and struggle. Its inhospitable climate is what attracted some of the earliest
Christian monks in Europe to build hermitages on tiny coastal islands, places
at the edge of the known world, suited only to gannets and crabs. The tougher
it was to survive, the better.
Those monks were crazy.
Nowadays people are still attracted to Kerry’s stark beauty, but, being less
crazy, they build modern houses with central heating and insulation and French
windows looking out over the sea.
