Sunny economic predictions not in the quiver, but what a run it has been through these holidays. With extraordinarily mild weather there has been an extraordinary lift in the national spirits, at least through the prism of Ireland Unhinged.  In the Cork Arms the other night and a man named The Bird singing opera heft ridiculous ballads and dancing through that ionosphere, sometimes starting or finishing lying down with flowers in his lips, flowers to the ladies, flowers of speech, as all besuits an Irishman saying — FUCK THIS RECESSION, we are going to have fun.

Was in the Bellview Tavern later where 8 or 9 men and ladies singing solo before 100 one after another, and enough to rock the soul — and the realization THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH to glean such joy. Such Irish joy. Meanwhile, two members of self-same angelic St. Luke’s Choir, many of whom belong in gaol, are fighting over nonsense at the fringe festival. That choir is a Christian act from a heathen Anth that sings incredibly challenging carols, and not just for reprobates, with astonishing passion and precision on Cork street corners while others shake buckets to raise thousands for the terminally ill.

They are in a modern sense Catholic.

Out in Ballyduff, the newest incarnation of the Wren Boys — the wild urchin tradition of hoarse singing on St. Stephen’s Day — were straw suited and Haight Asbury coated to belt out songs with huge heart and rattle for bowls of money gifts for a different venue of the dying.

Has Ireland lost its soul? That was the question the marketeers put on the jacket of Ireland Unhinged.  I don’t think so.

There is a coalescensce in progress and readers of this thing may help me define whatever that means.

God Bless, and Happy New Year to all…

The murals about death and sacrifice and mayhem rivet the soul and the setting beside the mighty and broad River Foyle can be awe inspiring. And in Creggan– former No Go Zone for the Brit army – I became an overnight fan of an unabashably pro IRA bar, mainly because of the depths of passion and pain therein… The Telstar.

The Telstar is unique.  The lower half of its entrance door is steel cladded to prevent kicking in by a long list of guess who’s — the British Army, their friends in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Proddy thugs from the UVF, and the biggest group of them all in Derry … THE UNKNOWN THIRSTS (TUTS).

In the Telstar, your soul may cry out as you examine the walls full of tributes and posters concerning young men who snuffed out their own lives through starvation to protest against the jackboot of subjegation they saw. And a haunting photographic mural of massed street protestors after the latest atrocity also sombers the mood.

But when you drink up here above formerly bombed out Derry in the Fort Apache of the Telstar, you begin to understand that your new IRA friends are stranger than you thought. A fact first to be reported here is that the closer in affection the mostly former IRA fellows draw to you, the more times they will order you a free “shot” of Sambucca. If they then begun to truly admire you for a moment longer, you will receive next a “shot” of Tia Maria.

You could say this is Quare but so is Ian Painsley.

Also unreported here to fore is the particularly sensitivity  Derry people have about both their feet and their heads. They take care of the former appendages by never walking. In Derry you can walk down any major thoroughfare  at night and find it as eerily empty as if it had been closed for a Holywood set. Is this a vestige of fear from the past?

But I am a scientist myself. I am what you call an epistemoligist.

I noticed that the place is pre-hat. I mean to say that if you go there wearing a hat crowds will part in awe at the sight of a man wearing a hat, because there seems to be a tacit agreement across both sides of the “Peace Bridge” that no one, no man that means, should ever appear with a provocative hat.

People just do not wear hats, much less swell cowboy style hats like mine. Must be in the Peace Agreement. But wear a good one and people will never stop talking to you because they too still want to be free and in some ways are the friendliest people I have ever seen, especially over a tri-some of Sambuccas.

Mr. McNamara is something of an Irish folk hero in the mind fecker mode, having run up 3.5 million in property speculation debt, yet having the temerity to drive a cement mixer into the gates of Leinster House, the seat of goverment in Dublin, bearing the gauidly red painted words, “TOXIC BANK ANGLO.”

His own filing system is peculiar. A week ago the Mayo County Council sent McNamara  a letter of injunction to cease all further work on his Achill Henge but he received it while driving his tractor and continued to erect six more slabs of his mega megalith. Therefore, he has argued in court, the injunction got lost behind the gear shift and, since he was unable to read it, he was within his rights to continue work on the monstronsity and should not be spending the weekend in jail as the court ordered.

The council was adamant that there was something wrong with Stonehenge suddenly reappearing in Mayo, its solicistor saying, “We still do not know what it is.”

Mr. McNamara’s solicistor, Declan Keane, has not yet invoked the precedent of the Perpetual Irish Oddness Clause, successfully used regarding the Tipperary County Council’s recent go-ahead for a full size replica of the White House to be erected soon under the lee of the Galtee Mountains, and beside the hallowed Rock of Cashel.

Meanwhile, the government notes considerable further progress in conforming with European Union standards of accountability and sound planning.

It is noted that a government in panic about 3.6 billion euros it thinks it doesn’t have, but does, then skives every taxpayer in a land of 4 million or so for 900 euros more in taxes, or reduced pensions, or benefits, oh who cares. It’s just Ireland.

But some writers to the Irish Times today 3 November had this to say:

Sir — I anxiously await the appointment of a Minister of State to the newly formed Lost and Found Section of the Department of Finace, Helen Noonan.

Sir — Coming as it does on the day after Halloween, is the Government debt revelation that it got wrong by 3.6 billion euros a trick or a treat? Chris Goggins.

Sir — To have lost one billion might be forgiven as unfortunate, to have lost well over two starts to look like more than carelessness, Andrew Rous.

Even the ballots on the last election were indecipherable. Came somebody please explain the Unhingedness?

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…

There is a vixen in my life and she skulks into my garden to eat apples now every day. Do foxes eat apples? I wondered too. But through sheer epistimology I can now swear that they do, and that they are mine. The golden apples of the sun, of the moon.

Strangely, magpies alight with no fear nearly at the nose of this stalker built to maim. They know they are quicker than the fox. They want my apples, too.

Then this almighty racket has started breaking out every dusk and here I am again thinking — can Ireland possibly get any weirder? The answer is “Oh yes we can. Infinitely.”

The sound is of an insolent car horn honking over and over again by the dreamy peace of my river, the Blackwater to the beyond.

At first, I thought it was of a wedding celebration, noisy youths in a procession of joy. But not so.  I looked around in consternation and found the truth. The farmer across the river, across the bucolic timeless Irish vista in the green valley under the hills has apparently become impatient with the last vestiges of the old ways — such as relate to Thomas Hardy visions and maybe even human decency.

How far can the Irish go in losing their soul?

Don’t ask.

Instead listen to my neighbour in this oasis of beauty driving his big mother of an SUV around at dusk across his fields, madly honking his horn at each cow to herd them to some other field, honking over and over again like a celebrant of Puerto Rican Day parades in the ghettoes of New York,  spewing petrol and dissonance and perhaps listening to absolute crap from the car radio.

Of all the things I have seen, never have I seen this. So sad.

My fox runs away, magic is gone … Ireland is losing its soul.

The poor salmon, keepers of divine knowledge, in my river.

Delphi and Waters Out of Time…

Then it was to the Delphi Lodge across the bay in Mayo, a Georgian house salmon fishing retreat in its own secret valley, a place where at certain moments salmon leap at every turn of the eye.  But they are sometimes difficult fellows at least when they see my fly. Yet off I went on the wild higher lake of Du Lach with a forensic psychologist and a shrewd ghillie in a boat and a succession of wild sea trout. Never the dreamed of great fish but exhiliration and renewal come at you steadily in this sanctuary of a place from way back in time.

At night all gather for drinks, canapes and tale trading in the drawing room of the big house, then retire to a giant communal table to talk of that what got away — or in some cases exploded on to hooks — and lives past in present from Paris to New York, Dublin and Barcelona and New York.  A unique place is Delphi, whose original owner Peter Mantle (after the Marquise of Sligo) has a similar operation in the Bahamas now.

The charming Michael Wade runs Delphi now without missing a beat. This is a world class getaway, and there are one-lane roads in the highlands around it that will make you stop everything to become a painter or photographer on the spot.

In such regions Ireland is not unhinged at all.

Give this author some credit for discretion for not attempting to make hay of the fact found that two of J.P Donleavy.’s children long raised by him were actually sired by 2 different Guinneae still big-time in the stud. Horsebreeders.

Some of the more poignant chapters in Ireland Unhinged deal with my visiting Donleavy at his hauntingly lonely Levington Park estate outside Mullingar. One could almost hear the ghosts of his maddest characters banging around down gloomy halls — like the bizarre butler Crooks, and the triumphantly bonkers Major McFugger, and Clementine of The Glands (latter two from The Onion Eaters, perhaps his finest book). The great writer was so owlish and lost in time, but gentlemany, that he touched me.

Yet he spoke so obliquely that certain phrases caught my ear, such as “There once were a lot of children around this house, not all of them mine, since there were various women here.” What on earth did that mean, I wondered.

Investigating in detail, I found out the truth, but ultimately decided publishing it would be too scurrilous. For all those interested in a lenghty, personal, and ultimately deeply appreciative profile of  a great writer of Ireland — the last anywhere — maybe you will read my own book, here shamelessly plugged — IRELAND UNHINGED.

This madhouse of juvenalia when it comes to driving, along with some other things.

And Rudy, black on white fluff, springer spaniel of exquisite nature, was lain out in our hallway overnight, then taken to Ballyduff.

On a golden afternoon by the river I helped my sons dig deep. There were no taps to be played, but there were tears from my sons.

 Goodbye Rudy.

And I know tomorrow I will see countless drivers tail-gating at incredible speed, and passing around blind bends like children with toys to advanced for them. Its the native style — indulge yourself, indulge, indulge.

Some people might find this ghoulish, but the bogs of Ireland preserve human remains longer than almost any medium, save perhaps glacial ice. Out of Irish bogs you normally get bits of bodies, just the odd femur or tibia.

But this gal was in good shape from the waist down,  since the tanins of near eternity kept her flesh amazingly preserved. The odd thing is that what may have been the usual Druid suspects wrapped her head and torso in a leatherycloak to preserve them for all time, but then these parts did not have protective tanning action in that region. So they fell off and disintegrated.

Even in an age of  cynicism, Ireland remains a land of   mystery. To go to the various national museums of ancient relics here will wallop you back in time.

But there are more intimate ways to probe Ireland’s depths everywhere. And unlike over-regulated places elsewhere, you can start by just talking to the local eccentric who may know more about a certain field, one certain field on planet earth, than any geologist, historologist or the rest will ever show you. You don’t even have to buy him a pint. Those step and fetch it days in Ireland are mostly gone.

But maybe you should show genuine interest to what the man who craves the verities of the next field might have to say. So maybe you should buy him a pint.

A few years ago I befriended a man named Seamus K. in Waterford who digs in very private bogs. Very, very private bogs, I might say if I felt like saying it, just to wind him up.  He would be an elf of 5 feet 10 and until recently he smiled too much.

Seamus likes nothing better of an evening than to muck about in bogs, because he is a kind of a finder, and a mystic, and a lovcr of ancient Ireland. And he found out the oldest technique in Ireland to find out the ancient history of Ireland — try anywhere and be patient. So he makes marvelous sculpture and furniture out of thousands year old tanin-preserved wood and bones and giant elk racks from the bogs — and to him, this history of our ur-European ages is everywhere.

We have had the ruin of a recent phase of Ireland, but mysteriousness… easy enough if you wish and do not pay for it. Just try a friend of the local bog and think…. where do I come from?