Ireland: drinking

In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .

At the end of my last letter I left you with a question, do the Irish drink? Offhand this seems as sensible as asking, "Do the French walk around wearing stupid berets and carrying baguettes under their arms?" Hello. Some things are self-evident. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Irish are coolie monsters of the first order. And yet I spent over a month in this country before seeing any evidence of this apparently uncontestable fact, and even then the evidence was indirect. Let me explain how I finally deduced that yes, indeed, the Irish do drink.

Think about how the average working day is structured. Most of us get up well before 8 and are in our offices by 9, leaving for home between 4 and 5. On the weekends we may sleep in a bit, but if you’re like me you’re just as likely to get up early on a bright Saturday morning so that you can do a bit of exercise, start on some big household chores, or nip off to the bakery to grab something nice for the family breakfast. In the evenings we kick back.

So the day is divided into morning, afternoon, and evening, with the productive hours being in the first two of those divisions.

Simple, right? The way things should be.

Not in Ireland. I noticed this on the second or third day we were here. I got up early and went for a walk. Even though it was a sparkling morning and a holiday, there was no one in sight. Not a soul. No joggers, no early shoppers, no cars, nothing. It was eerie. I felt like I had accidentally entered a Stephen King novel or a sci-fi movie about the last man on earth. Around noon I drove to the nearest supermarket just to see if there were, in fact, human beings in Ireland. It was open, but just barely. There were no customers and only a bare-bones staff. Odd. By four o’clock the same store was rocking and the streets were filled with people and cars. The rush continued, indeed increased, until well into the evening.

Okay, now let’s throw in another oddity. Most restaurants here advertise an all-day breakfast. Now you can find that in Canada too, but here it is the norm. And the Irish breakfast is something to see: a greasy fried egg, served with thick greasy bacon, several greasy sausages, greasy beans, greasy toast, greasy potatoes, and a side helping of grease. How anyone can even look at this meal is beyond me, but here you see people scarfing this artery-clogging menu all day long and they are especially eager, it seems, to order it some time after noon and to accompany it with a dozen cigarettes.

Put the two things together, the odd activity hours and the breakfast, and you come to a fact that has to be acknowledged if you are to understand Ireland: the working day is built around the hangover. Every morning of the week the majority of Irish people are hungover. And when you’re hungover, what do you want to do? Sleep in, and then suffer in silence until you have enough energy to eat a really greasy breakfast so you can feel human enough to go out drinking again and secure another hangover.

A further piece of inductive evidence that allowed me to conclude that the Irish drink is young men’s fashion. Irish men between the ages of 18 and 25 find it dashing to wear a black eye at least once a month. Bank tellers, postal workers, butchers, and yoga instructors all sport a shiner every couple of weeks. They purchase these snappy accessories from their drunken friends in bars. No one mentions them; no one notices them except to admire them: "Hey, Liam, nice eye there lad. Wish I had one."

Now, casually giving someone a black eye might be considered a form of human vandalism. And, as you will recall from an earlier letter, the Irish do love their vandalism. If Ireland ever hosts the summer Olympics it will, no doubt, be a demonstration sport. But my diligent research has determined that the Irish do not go out and break things every day. No. They get drunk every evening and then break things. Indeed all Irish crime, as far as I can tell, is attributable to drunkenness. The local community paper contains a page of "Court notices," criminal cases that are being tried that week. In last week’s issue there were six cases. In five of them the defendants were described as "very drunk" at the time the crime was committed. And what were those crimes? In one case, a "very drunk" man was chasing some youth around Galway’s central square while swinging a shovel and screaming that he was going to cut off their heads. In another case a group of "very drunk" lads decided, in the middle of their drinking, that they missed their buddies who had been arrested the night before for (can you believe it?) public drunkenness. So these yobos stumbled down to the police department and demanded to see their friends. When the police refused to cooperative, the lads broke a window in the police station. Presto! They got to see their friends. And in one other case, a "very drunk" man was kicked out of an Irish house party for being too drunk (!!) so he went into the driveway and head-butted a van.

Not only is all crime Ireland attributable to drink, so is all illness and injury. A few weeks ago Max, our youngest, was complaining of stomach problems. It turns out he was horrendously constipated. How could that happen with the healthful Irish diet? Maybe he got a bad cream-eggs-n-chips combo. Anyway, we were so worried we took him to the hospital. An interesting experience. At 11pm on a Wednesday, every person checking into the emergency ward and every person waiting for someone who had checked in was massively drunk. I’m not talking a little buzzed, here: I mean polluted. Tanked. Stinko. The staff were, not surprisingly, pretty unsympathetic: "Here comes another drunk who fell down some stairs; here’s a drunk who set fire to his pants; here’s a guy who stared a fight with a post box and lost. Let’s have some tea."

The combination of hangovers, drinking, and drunken barbarity means that the Irish day can be divided into three sections. What we would call morning and early afternoon is simply hangover time. During this period people move as little as possible. Clerks in stores are surly or asleep.. The streets are near empty. From about 4 in the afternoon until around 11pm is happy hour. This is the time when people have started to drink and are, therefore, no longer hungover, or are eager to start drinking and are therefore experiencing a burst of energy. At four o’clock the streets are filled with people rushing to get drinks or complete some chore so they can get to their drinks. The pubs start to fill up and will reach maximum capacity around 11pm. Eyes sparkle, conversation flows faster than Guinness, musicians begin to play, cigarettes are inhaled, and life is good. Now, after 11 is the hour of the louts. At this point the lads who have drunk too much begin to a) vandalize things b) injure themselves and go the hospital c) decorate their friends’ eyes d) swing shovels about and threaten to decapitate youths e) try to visit their friends at the police station f) head-butt vans.

To recap: Canadians have morning, afternoon, and evening. The Irish have hangover time, happy hour, and the hour of the louts.

My theory helps explain the apparent lethargy and inefficiency one sees in day-to-day Irish life. Let me give you an example. One Monday Karen and I pulled into the parking lot at the university to be confronted with a burned-out car. Now I mean completely gutted: the windows had shattered out, the interior was charred, pieces of trim had melted. It must have been one hell of a hot fire in that little car. The wreck was neatly parked. So here we have this wreck sitting in the university parking lot, in front of the university’s most famous building, and does anyone notice it? Does anyone stop to look at it? No. They all walk by as if it wasn’t there. Okay. Maybe they’ve seen burned-out cars before, but surely this car belonged to someone. Shouldn’t the police be notified? Or the insurance company? At the very least wouldn’t the university want this eyesore off its property? Apparently not. It’s been there for three weeks and shows no signs of being disturbed, much less moved.

Similarly, a few days after we arrived in Ireland a stop light at a major intersection near Max’s school went out. A month later, has it been repaired? No sir, nor does there seem to be any rush to do so.

Also, near the house we’re in there is a construction site. They are supposed to be building a new road. This road is, as far as I can figure, about 20 feet long. Not a major project. Every morning people arrive at the site and a few desultory noises are heard, but the road is not getting an inch longer.

And finally, a water main has burst under a road beside the supermarket where we do most of our shopping. This is a busy road and the burst pipe has created all sorts of problems. There’s a big hole in the middle of one lane and water is gushing out all over the road at an impressive rate. Some A-Type personality has put a traffic cone beside the hole so motorists don’t drive into it, but has the pipe been fixed? No sir. It’s been flooding the street for a week now.

Why all this indolence? It’s obvious: because work hours coincide with hangover time. The university groundskeeper probably sees the burned-out car ever day and realizes he should do something about it, but Jaysus Mother and Joseph, doesn’t his head hurt? A few too many pints last night so can’t you let a man just suffer in peace? The car will no go anywhere. Leave it be till tomorrow.

By four o’clock, when he is just feeling human enough to make a phone call and get the car towed, it’s quitting time and the pubs are beckoning. The same goes for the guys who repair the stop lights and build the roads. They show up to work dutifully each morning, then stand around moaning and comparing headaches until quitting time. If you wanted to make this country work you would start the workday at 4 o’clock. Tell everyone they couldn’t leave for the pub until the job was done and you’d see the most productive workforce in Europe. The Germans wouldn’t know what hit them. The car would be gone by 4:10. The stoplights fixed by 4:15, the road finished before 5, and the pipe plugged before dark.

Okay, but what about those famous Irish pubs where all this drinking takes place? What are they really like? I’m going to let you in on a sad secret. We were here for over a month before we got to see the inside of an Irish pub. How can that be? Because we live in a suburb. This suburb is so bizarre that I will dedicate an entire letter to describing it later, but for now let me explain that there is nothing around this house except more suburb. No stores, no shops, no library, no post office, and certainly no pubs. Back home in West Vancouver there is a Legion Hall at the end of my street. In other words, at home I can walk a few feet to a bar. Here, in Ireland, home of institutionalized alcoholism, I need to take a bus to get a drink. Go figure.
Anyway, this past weekend we decided to do it. We rented the kids a video ("Here boys, it’s, uh, something with animals. Uh, Reservoir Dogs. I think it’s Disney…") and took a bus downtown. Saturday evening, happy hour, the city center was absolutely jumping. We bypassed the tourist trap pubs to hit the recommended Roisin Dubh.

Now let’s stop there for a minute. What the hell does Roisin Dubh mean? I’ve got no idea. It’s Irish, one of the most perplexing languages ever spoken by man. Figure, I’m no linguist, but in my lifetime I have studied some languages: I’ve had classes in Latin, French, German, and Japanese. I was raised by people who spoke Lithuanian, a close cousin of Sanskrit. I’ve been close with people who speak Italian, Greek, Portuguese, and Cantonese. So I can at least recognize most of the Indo-European, and some Oriental, languages and even, in a pinch, figure out a word or two of them from various cognates. But Irish? No goddam way. A bizarre, consonant-rich language with a lilting rhythm, it sounds like someone trying to sing while gagging and spitting. It sounds like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef choking to death on an artichoke heart. And in written form it is only slightly more decipherable than Arabic. To give you a small example, the first time I was in an Irish restaurant I went to the washroom. What I found was a door marked "Mna." Mna? Must mean Man, right? Some Irish guy, in a hangover, slapped the letters on the door in the wrong order. Why Man instead of Men? Well, maybe it’s a really small bathroom. Anyway, I swung open the door and faced a surprised Mrs. Mna. That’s right, mna means women, while fir (pronounced feer) means men. Could you have guessed that?

Anyway, Roisin Dubh is Irish for something, maybe "happy hour," or "hangover cure," or "black eyes guaranteed." Whatever, it’s a low, dark, wooden trimmed, eccentric space of nooks, shelves, semi-private rooms, cigarette smoke, and spilled drinks. The clientele is eclectic in age and style, though leaning towards the bohemian. Everyone is drinking Guinness, everyone is smoking, everyone is talking. God, can these people talk. They just open their mouths and go. It’s astounding. We claimed some stools and I went to the bar for pints. Now, we all know that Guinness is not unlike alcoholic porridge and that it takes a while to pour, but I didn’t realize how long until I saw a pro do it. He fills the pint glass to within an inch of the top, then puts it aside and goes about some other business. Fifteen minutes later the drink has settled enough that it can now be topped up and he finishes pouring. So getting a beer at an Irish bar is not a speedy process. Bring a book. But if the barkeep rushes it, and the head on the drink is not just right, the clientele will tear a strip off him and refuse to accept the drink. So precise is the art of putting Guinness into a glass that when we asked our neighbors for the name of a good pub or two, they would always follow their recommendations with the supreme compliment, "They pour a good pint." An odd concept for a Canadian to get his mind around. What would be a bad pint in Canada? Why are you pouring the damn thing anyway? Break the neck off the bottle and I’ll pour it straight down my throat while straining the broken glass through my teeth. I’m thirsty over here.

Now, we had come to the Roisin Dubh because it was famous for its traditional music. There was supposed to be a set at 6pm. But that’s 6pm Irish time, which means anytime between 4:30 and 8pm. We didn’t see any sort of musical activity until around 7 when it became apparent that a group of people who were sitting at one of the tables was the band. "Band" is perhaps not the right term because the musical organization is much more informal than that word implies. It was a, uh, free-form collective. As far as I can figure out, musicians promise to show up at the table sometime between 4:30 and 8 (that is, 6) on a given day. When enough have wandered in, they will begin to pull out their instruments and play a tune or two. As the evening progresses, more musicians will wander in and join the table until quitting time. So, depending on when you show up at the pub, you might see a duet or a small orchestra. The night we were there the band went from two to seven over a couple of hours.

Traditional Irish instruments include, as far as I can see, the mandolin, the banjo, and the bazouki. Huh? Why not castanets or alpen horns? Throw in an accordion and a fiddle and you’ve got all your basics covered. One musician will begin to pick out a melody on one of these traditional Irish instruments, then everyone will join in and they’ll play the thing for fifteen minutes. Then they’ll do it again with an identical sounding melody. "The Old Dun Cow" leads into "The Ballad of Tom O’Dougal" which leads into "The Mad Buck Goat." A song ends when one of the musicians gets too tired to play any more. And so it goes all night. It’s more than a bit repetitive. Bu that’s fine for the drunks that are trying to focus their eyes on the action. Irish-traditional-music-enthusiast drunks are a sentimental lot. Play the same melody a dozen times in a row and each time they’ll nod in recognition ("Ah, that’s ‘Lead Me No More to Tubber, For My Heart Has Fled to Gort’"), their eyes will swell with tears, and they’ll be sniffling wrecks when the tune finally ends. Start the exact same song again ("Ah, that’s ‘I Lost My Side Mirror in Ballinasloe’") and fresh tears will leak into Guinness foam.

Karen and I felt a bit out of place. But then a young man came up and started talking to me. Turns out he was one of my students. A minute later a colleague and his wife walked in. Ten minutes later we were deep into our third Guinness, blabbing like Irishmen with our friends, and begging the band to play "A Breakfast of Grease by the Cliffs of Moher."

It was a great night.

By the way, this question of the flexibility of Irish time applies only to human beings. Irish dogs are very punctual. I discovered this by first noticing all the small dogs that were walking around the cities and suburbs. Short-legged mutts, all well fed and usually collared, walk purposely all over the place in Ireland without a master in sight. People ignore these dogs as they go about their business and the dogs return the favor. If you do pay attention to an individual dog, it inevitably turns out to be submissive and friendly, but once you’re finished patting it, the dog will hop up and continue on its way, usually walking a bit faster for having wasted those precious seconds with you. Now, I figured this was my imagination. Dogs don’t have appointments. I was wrong. Figure, there’s one of these small dogs who hangs out just inside the university cafeteria. He lies on the entrance mat, or walks slowly between the tables, totally ignored by the students and staff. He’s there every day except Mondays. And, I noticed after a week or so, he’s never there before 11. Obviously he shows up just as the lunch hour is beginning hoping to cage a fry-n-cream-egg or two. But exactly how punctual Mr. Mutt is became apparent when I left his building yesterday morning. I walked out the doors at two minutes to 11. There, just rounding the corner of the library, came the dog at a measured pace. I stopped and watched him. He made his way between the lounging, smoking, cell-phone nattering students, a four-legged bundle of serious purpose, and went down the stairs to the cafeteria just as the clock struck 11.
If that dog ran this country, things would get done.

But perhaps not all the problems of Ireland can be attributed to the Irish fondness for drink. There is another reason that things don’t get done here: the Irish don’t complain. We were told that by our neighbors. See, we were over having a drink with the people on the other half of our duplex. Nice folk. We asked them about the barking dog. Immediately behind their walled-in yard is the walled-in yard of the people from one street down. These people have a psychotic German shepherd that they turn out into their completely cemented backyard to bark all day long, every day until about 11pm. Every goddam day. Everyone in the estate knows and hates this dog. Everyone in the estate has lost sleep, or has had a child lose sleep, because of this dog. The people who have the other side of the duplex with the dog owners have a baby that has probably never slept. So we asked our neighbors about it. "Hey," I asked innocently, "Has anyone ever asked the dog owners to silence their mutt?" After a moment of shocked silence our neighbors said, "Oh no, no, no, no, no. Couldn’t do that. No no no. We Irish aren’t complainers." Okay. "How long has this dog been barking," I asked. "Oh, about five years," was the answer.

Hello? If this was Canada, after the first week we would be over there politely pointing out that the dog was keeping our children awake. After the second week, we’d be back having a less polite discussion. End of week three, the police are called. End of week four, these inconsiderate yahoos find Fido has somehow lost his head. Here, five years without anyone saying a word. The people who share the duplex with the dog owners have put their house up for sale rather than complain. No joke. They haven’t had any offers.

So perhaps traffic lights don’t get fixed and water mains are allowed to gush onto road because, well, no one has thought it polite to mention these minor inconveniences to the municipality.

Mum: Dear, the potato waffles have caught on fire and it’s spread to the curry beans. I’m afraid the kitchen is all aflame.
Da: Oh my. Well, perhaps we better call the fire department.
Mum: Oh no no no no. We can’t be phoning them every time our house burns down, now can we? They’ll think we’re a bunch of whiners. Next thing you’ll want to call the police when people break into the house and beat us. Or the ambulance when you have a heart attack. What will the neighbors think? The fire will burn itself out when it runs out of fuel. It’s not a big house.
Da: You’re probably right. There’s no water anyway with the water main burst.
Mum: Now don’t start moaning about that again.

In the next installment: I meet the President of Ireland.