Not All Happy Talk in Blarney
Perhaps fitting for a place with its name, Blarney — that icon of Ireland to foreign eyes — is often not what it seems, and is as clouded with ill winds in this troubled tourist season as any place in this rapidly changing land.
Forget for a moment Blarney’s gab stone and schlock. With its magnificent castle, welcoming spirit and broad public green, the place has its genuine appeal – which Blarney, being Blarney, of course markets to death.
Missing Tourists
On a brilliantly sunny 4th of July, the village glowed with a parade of vintage Corvette Stingrays, and throngs of children cavorting and adults sunbathing before a bandstand where local musicians strummed away. A far field hosted a rock-em/sock-em American football game – dubbed “the Blarney Bowl” – between Cork and Dublin teams. Coors Beer was flowing from a nearby trailer, American flags everywhere.
The ambience seemed unselfconscious. But no – this was Blarney, one of Ireland’s innermost engines of make-believe, the place where the pedal is always to the medal in defining what sells. This village has been rocked like every other by the downturn, and the good people of Blarney were trying to milk America’s Independence Day for a buck.
Olive O’Donovan, who runs Olive’s Craft Shop just off the square, explained why, “The Americans are the only visitors to Ireland who matter because they care and they spend. But they have stopped coming altogether. Now we only have French and Australians who won’t take their hands out of their pockets.”
Blarney Castle
Olive was not exactly right. Near the castle I met a few Americans alright. One was Evin O’Keefe, a web-designer, photographer, and blogger of (among other things) her last two years in Cork City – “Forty Shades of Life”. But neither she nor her husband Conor had bothered venturing five miles up the road to these castle grounds before.
Nobody I knew in Cork ever came here – the Blarney reputation locally is just too kitsch. “So why are you here?” I asked. “What is Blarney?”
“Well, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said as we walked along manicured parklands to the magnificent keep. “Connor and I both kissed the Blarney Stone as children and are considering a re-inoculation,” laughed Evin. “But maybe we were wrong about Blarney, maybe lots of people in Cork have it wrong about Blarney. It’s pretty nice.”
Near the castle, I found a young New York couple – Jason Cane and Elisa Thompson – who had just snogged the stone.
“Why?” I asked.
“Peer pressure,” rejoined Elisa. “All our friends said we had to do it or they wouldn’t talk to us when we came back. But we heard it might be unhygienic – they say on the web that people piss on it — and Jason being a medical student we brought alcohol wipes. Anyway, our tour operators said this was a must-see.”
Turmoil in the Village
The truth about Blarney is that this village that seeks to put on a happy face every day is as stung with turmoil as any in Ireland.
More eye-opening were conversations with the coach drivers who pile in to the car park of the Blarney Woollen Mills – the Number One destination in the village with all its lovely jumpers, crisp suits, and Guinness-themed underwear. If you want to find out about how Ireland is perceived today, and how many people care to buy the Brand Ireland idea, talk to the bus drivers fresh in to Blarney from Dublin, London, Paris, Slovenia and Spain.
“Why here? Why don’t you ever stop in Cork City?” I asked.
Kilkenny-born Matt Rafter , who drives out of London with a big loop through the Lake District and Scotland for the 120- bus J.J. Kavanaugh chain under the name Insight Vacations and keeps a lucky hurling stick by his seat, offered a partial answer. “Almost every traveller we have says they cannot go to Ireland without seeing Blarney. We have to stop here.
“But I’ve lost six weeks driving already this summer, we’re knocking off entire tours. Nobody’s travelling, no Americans anyway, and we have had to trim out some seats so that our coaches look more full.”
I asked a Bus Eireann day-trip driver from Cork City the same question. “I’ve never seen anything like it. If we didn’t have the cruise liner business from Cobh, it would be dead, dead, dead,” he replied. “All kinds of tours to the Ring of Kerry have been cancelled because they can’t get enough people in the coaches to make it pay.”
Why don’t you also bring your people to Cork City, I asked Matt Rafter, who offers a free kiss of his own lips to the ladies to prepare them for their encounters with the stone.
“You can’t park anywhere near it and a lot of our customers are old and won’t walk far. They make us drivers pay to park and it comes out of our own pockets.”
“What is Ireland? How Blarney should we go?” is the question everybody in the business is asking now.
But you won’t find an answer in this iconic village. “It’s the worst season I’ve ever experienced in twenty two years – it’s shocking,” said Olive O’Donovan, standing beside a man who was re-painting the nearest Welcome to Blarney sign with a Flann O’Brien pace that suggested he did this every week.
“Watch those coaches arrive here,” gesticulated Celine Lyall, owner of the Kopi Cafe. “They whip right into the Woollen Mills as if we didn’t exist. There are two Blarneys and 90 percent of the people on these coaches will never see the real Irish one. They see the Woollen Mills and get back on a coach without knowing what this village is about.”
Celine said that business has dropped so radically that she has turned off her ice machine to save on electricity and is putting candles at the tables to keep off the lights. “It’s tragic. We’re doing festivals, farmers’ markets — everything we can think of. But nothing seems to work.”
A middle-aged Australian woman with purple-dyed hair walked by, holding a giant stuffed leprechaun. “This is Finnegan,” she chortled. “He’s been with us everywhere we go in Ireland.”
Ha, ha. If she only knew the truth about the country she was seeing now.
Over by the Woollen Mills, diddly-eye music was blasting out of loud speakers as a gaggle of elderly American spiritual music singers were heading back to their coach clutching bags full of knitted jumpers and leprechaun trinkets. In Blarney, it boggles the mind what you can buy along those lines – leprechaun-themed hats, socks, ties, fridge magnets, pencil cases, pot of gold penny banks, “Leprechauns Make Me Do It” t-shirts, and on and on.
These were the Coble Singers out of Nashville with members from many other states. They were on their ninth European tour and had just sung in St. Finbarr’s in Cork and St. Patrick’s in Dublin.
“Do you like Blarney?” I asked choir-member Mary Anne Goodrum, standing beside the group’s founder Bert Coble, a kindly old southern gentleman pushing a walker for support.
“We love it, we love everything about Ireland and we try to stop here on every tour,” said Mary Anne. “There’s great stuff in that shop and this is such a lovely village. We’ll be back again.”
And there it all was – an iconic Irish village surrounded by oceans of good will but struggling to survive.
