Magic Leaves Ireland By Moonlight
The crash of the Celtic Tiger has resulted in many distressing stories, with some of the misery to a not insignificant minority being deserved. But when the heartbreak gets very local and personal and vivid it becomes more wrenching.
Out in Ballyduff just now — that parallel Waterford universe of an Ireland of surpassing beauty with older values intact celebrated in Ireland Unhinged – the ache of the collapsed national dream has come to hurt through the vividness of the collapse of one particular couple’s vibrant hopes, a collapse so disheartening that a charmed couple and child disappeared in the night.
Let’s call them F. and S., let’s call the two-year-old daughter Mags, their fresh bundle when papoosed into the middle of a new dream of Ireland. Fionna was a winsome, dark-haired Irish lass of irrepressible elan who went off to Amerikay when young and showed such exquisite charm in everything that she did and cared for all and sundry that came before her that before long she ended up as the front-of-the-house greeter in one of the most exclusive, i.e. expensive country clubs in the world, because no one, but no one, could set a warmer tone of welcome to all her came her way. She was an Irish princess, and a princess because she had no vanity, just that laugh, those cheeks, that love, love, love of life. (Which not one person in a certain other island can reproduce.
In the back of this lobster and filtet mignon cooking kitchen for the richest and paunchiest Daddy Warbucks toiled a handsome French chef who could produce the cordon blue without a thought, but kept inventing finer new dishes meant for people who could slow down into the enjoyment of the great small things of this life. Wouldn’t ya know, Fionna and Stefan fell in love, and the French are particularly vulnerable to the vivacity of an Irish colleen as beautiful and free spirited as Fionna.
So Stef the Chef became hooked on Fionna’s magical tales of an Ireland — a Tir na Nog — that had become bursting with untold opportunities as the Celtic Tiger grew so fulsome. And they agreed to depart the land of golden golf clubs for the land of golden geese, Fionna’s homeland of Ireland, the only place she could be truly happy for them both and the children they might rear.
Being people epitomizing the joy of life, the drive of young hope, they scoured the new Ireland for some exquisite expression of heritage that could thrive with new energy in her Fionna’s homeland. And just off the magical and sedative strength aromatic Blackwater River under the lee of the Knockmealdown Mountains, on a sideroad beyond sleepy Ballyduff and before castlelatted Lismore, they found the Glencairn Inn. The place had a tiny bar, cosy dining rooms and sitting rooms, nooks and nooks, and nooks, fluffy bedrooms upstairs — it was a dream personified. Giant hearths, wood and peat fires, huge kitchen space for an expert from France. Flowers everywhere, patios, views of the mountains, the dreamy, dreamy mountains you see in forgotten Waterford. And behind you a thousand acres with nothing but nuns in them.
And Ireland in the early years of the last decade had become more devoted to the cults of angels than it has ever been in 1400 years past. But God delivered Ireland’s newest angels in the form of fat little bankers, the cherubin of pink noses and pram linen complexion as they arose every next day to flutter more of the infinitely available new Irish money around to those who gamboled their way out of the dewey morn around the time other arrivestes to Ireland were introducing the idea of people actually paying to have their cars washed…
End Part One, to be continued…
