The Road to McCarthy (32 page)

As afternoon turns to evening I realize how much I’ve been missing the simple pleasures of conversation during my solitary wonderings. “Tasmania is the diamond pendant around the neck of Australia,” a woman in a velvet skirt tells me. “After all, it’s shaped like a heart.”

“Bush walkers have accidents, go missing, they die. Everybody knows that. But the reason they’re never found”—the man beside her takes a swig of Guinness, narrows his eyes, but keeps them fixed on mine—“is the devils. A Tasmanian devil will consume everything. Grind bone till there’s nothing left.”

As evening turns to night, a bunch of us end up in an Indian restaurant. We’ve ordered the food when the man next to me starts telling me how he feels about Tasmania, and everyone else goes quiet.

“I love this island. I was born here and could never wish to live anywhere else. You must remember, though, that this is the arsehole of the universe. There is no reason for our being here, and this can make us a little pensive and withdrawn. The population of Australia is increasing, but Tasmania’s is in constant decline.” He takes a pause. “Ours is a disappearing voice.”

And then everyone starts talking at once.

The clock’s still slow
at Hobart airport as I hand back the keys to the woman at the car rental desk. “There was just one little problem,” I
say. “I don’t know if they might be able to sort it out when they’re servicing it. And maybe send it on to me. You see, I had this Hank Williams CD ….”

Two hours later
as we’re crossing the southern coast of Australia I’m still cringing with embarrassment at the conversation, especially once the mechanic showed up and joined in. Here’s a tip. If you ever happen to insert a CD deep into the body of a rental car by mistake, don’t bother telling them about it when you take it back. Go out and buy another CD instead. So I have a couple of drinks to help me forget, and then they bring the meal, and some wine, then there’s a movie, and then I fall asleep. And when I wake up five hours later I look out of the window, and we’re still flying over Australia.

I came in
from Dublin airport this afternoon in a taxi. We were stuck in traffic so the driver turned on the radio. “Let’s hear what Bin Laden’s been up to today,” he said, but all we got was an account of a traffic incident somewhere in the center of the city. A reporter was out on the street getting eyewitness statements from market traders and passers-by. It seems someone had driven a car through a pedestrianized street at sixty miles an hour, sending shoppers and stallholders diving for their lives and injuring more than a dozen people. Amazingly, there were no fatalities. What was it like? enquired the reporter of a woman who ran a flower stall. There was a brief pause as she considered her reply.

“ ’Twas like Hillstreetfuckinblues.”

I’m in Dublin for the Ireland v. England Rugby International on Saturday. I’ve come because I don’t know whom to support, and I’m hoping being there may help me find out. At the moment I’m only short of two things to make sure it’s a great weekend: somewhere to stay, and a ticket for the match. I’ve contacted all the people I can think of who might be able to help
on either score: hotel agencies, ticket bureaus, tourist boards, publishers, actors I have met in Rocky Sullivan’s, an old primary school friend with contacts, journalists, scalpers, policemen, a well-known brewery and a priest. So far, nothing. It’s not been made any easier by the fact I don’t own a cell phone and haven’t got a hotel room where people can leave messages, such as where I can find a hotel room.

I was mooching around in a bookshop earlier, looking in tourist guides and noting down the phone numbers of vegetarian B&Bs and Buddhist hostels that might not already have been booked out by fans over for the match, when an elderly lady came in, collared the woman who was restocking the Irish history section and said, “Excuse me.”

“Can I help you?”

“Do ye have a flask?”

“A flask?”

“A small flask, for a child to take to school?”

“It’s …. er …. it’s a bookshop.”

“I know. Just one. For a small girl.”

“No. I’m afraid we don’t.”

“All right so. Will I try across the street?”

“It’s a shoe shop.”

“I know. God bless now.”

As she went I exchanged a sympathetic smile with the bookseller, who smiled back and then disappeared before I could enquire about the availability of the bed linen and garden furniture. I decided to take a look at the history section, in case it could help me decide where my allegiance should lie this weekend.
To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland
by Sean O’Callaghan was the first title to catch my eye. It sounded like it might come in handy. I paid and went off to look for a phone box so I could call Shambala, “a multidenominational guest house and healing center for group and individual retreats,” and see if I could persuade them to let me have a room. I’d just have to hide the Jameson’s and go somewhere else for breakfast. As I left the shop I saw Flask Lady coming out of a computer shop across the street.

It turned out to be no go at Shambala, where they could only offer me a
room from Sunday, the day after the match, which was presumably when the rugby fans would be checking out, having unbalanced everybody’s chakras, disturbed their auras and reduced the meditation room to alcohol-impregnated stripped pine matchwood. But then a final despairing call to Tourist Information miraculously came up trumps. The last available hotel room in Dublin was mine, close to Merrion Square, not far from Stephen’s Green, and just a short walk from the stadium at Lansdowne Road.

I was delighted to find a row of elegant Georgian townhouses, tastefully converted and painted inside in rich terracottas and blues. Period oil paintings hung on the walls, and there was an award-winning restaurant. Unfortunately my room was only seven feet long and there wasn’t enough space to put a suitcase on the floor and open it. It was probably used normally for storing stationery and bottles of shampoo, but I wasn’t about to complain, as I only planned to use it for sleeping. I suppose there might be a problem if I tripped and fell when I opened the door, because I might hit the far wall with my forehead and get wedged. They’d left a form to fill in for room service breakfast, which seemed a bit optimistic, as they’d never get a tray through the door with me in there at the same time, especially if I was in a coma at an angle of forty-five degrees.

And now it’s bedtime. To negotiate the narrow corridor that leads from bed to bathroom requires the skill of a tightrope walker. I focus until I feel centered and in the zone, but still manage to break the wall light with my shoulder.

The room has a plastic skylight at the far end—well, seven feet from the door, which is as far as you can get—through which they probably used to dump the fuel in the days when it was still a coal hole. I’m woken in the night by rain pelting against it, and am immediately overwhelmed by claustrophobia as I lie there in the darkness. There seems barely enough air to breathe. But what if it gets worse? What if the ceiling and walls start pressing down on me? I saw it happen once in
Flash Gordon
when I was a kid. I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep now. I may as well turn on the light and read. Maybe have a look at that Barbados book I bought today. I grope round in the darkness until I find the bedside switch for the other light, the one I haven’t broken. I flick it on, and the light bulb pops.

The next morning
after breakfast I find an envelope waiting for me at reception. It’s from the brewery and contains a compliment slip and a ticket for the game. I now have a room in a hotel and a seat for the match, both of them approximately the same size. The pressure’s off and the day is my own. I think I’ll spend it reading. First I’ll go for a walk, though, because I could really do with the exercise. If I stride out I could be in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel in less than ten minutes. It’ll make an excellent reading room.

Sean O’Callaghan died
in August 2000 at the age of eighty-two, just as
To Hell or Barbados
—his fifteenth book—was going to press. It’s a terrible shame, because the tale he has to tell is astonishing, especially if, like me, you went to school in England. Most of us growing up in half-Irish families picked up a rudimentary grasp of Irish history, but as I discovered in Tasmania, the greater part remained undiscovered. I suspect O’Callaghan’s story might also be news to many native-born Irish, not to mention a few people in Bridgetown.

In the wake of the execution of Charles I in 1649 Oliver Cromwell feared revolution, and possibly invasion, from Ireland, which he perceived as a hotbed of support for the royalist cause. The history of our islands echoes with such ironies and contradictions. Oliver’s army, 20,000 strong, crossed the Irish Sea and laid waste the countryside, carrying out a series of brutal massacres with the aim of terrorizing Ireland into submission. Drogheda, in 1649, remains the most notorious. Cromwell gave orders that no man, woman or child be spared, and the slaughter went on for four days. “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches,” wrote Cromwell as he surveyed the carnage. A grotesquely Pythonesque detail comes in the account of the death of Sir Arthur Aston, a Catholic from Cheshire who was officer in command of the Drogheda defenses, and was believed by Cromwell’s men to be concealing gold inside his wooden leg. When the leg turned out to be empty, they beat him to death with it.

English propaganda at the time depicts the Irish as, in O’Callaghan’s words, “a lower race …. a subhuman species.” He quotes a Puritan pamphlet describing them as “the very offal of men, dregs of mankind, the bots that crawl on the beast’s tail…. cursed be he that maketh not his sword drunk with Irish blood.” In the wake of Cromwell’s victory, the Protector famously ordered that Irish Catholics be banished “to hell or Connaught.” As well as authorizing the execution of 200 Irish chiefs at Kilkenny, the wittily titled Act of Good Affection of 1652 decreed that all lands in Ulster, Munster and Leinster be forfeit and reserved for the British; the Irish were to be removed to the barren lands of Connaught in the west, except for those parts of Galway and Clare where the land was good, which were handed over to Cromwell’s soldiers. Many British troops didn’t want the land they had been gifted, and sold or gambled it away, which is how many huge estates were assembled.

By 1654 three-quarters of the population had been moved to one-quarter of the land. Those who refused to go were subject to execution or transportation. Guerrilla fighters who took to the forests and mountains were known as Tories. Private bounty hunters, and organized hunts with dogs, pursued those who did not comply. The population declined from just over 1½ million to barely 1 million. These events have been part of the historical record in Ireland for generations, but they come as a hell of a bloody shock if you grew up studying English history. It’s also a dreadful wrench trying to come to terms with them if, like me, you’re half and half. Reading about them is also rather an extreme preparation for a sporting contest between the two nations, and despite the early hour I think I may need another drink. It’s strange reading this kind of stuff while the people all around me are discussing whether the Irish will “massacre the English defense” tomorrow.

It’s during the next pint that O’Callaghan drops his bombshell. In the wake of the Cromwellian conquest, he alleges, 50,000 Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to work in the plantations of the West Indies. Some went as indentured servants, able eventually to earn their freedom; but the majority, according to O’Callaghan’s researches, were sold as slaves. “Fifty thousand or sixty thousand was a drop in the ocean compared
to the eleven million African slaves,” he writes, “but a slave is a slave, no matter what the color of the skin.”

Some were prisoners of war, though more were the families and dependants of those killed during the Cromwellian campaign. Others were simply rounded up from the countryside, kidnapped and loaded onto the same Bristol- and London-based slave ships used previously to remove Africans from their homelands. As well as labor for the tobacco and sugar plantations, young women were also much in demand because the planters, according to Cromwell’s son Henry, “had only Negresses and Maroon women to solace them.” The going rate paid to those who could deliver a young woman was four pounds ten shillings, no questions asked, for kidnapping and transportation from the Cork ports of Cobh, Bantry, Youghal and Kinsale.

The English language was even adapted to describe their fate, as a letter-writer in 1655 makes clear: “A terrible Protector this …. very apt ’to Barbadoes’ an unruly man …. so that we have made an active verb of it: ‘Barbadoes You.’”

But Barbados was not the only destination for those exiled by Cromwell.

Others ended up in Montserrat.

Match day dawns
sunny and bright.

The morning papers are full of speculation about the game. All reach the same conclusion, namely that Ireland are going to have the living daylights kicked out of them by a flamboyant, well-drilled, highly professional England side. This comes close to taking all the fun out of the occasion. I was rather enjoying the moral and genetic dilemma of trying to choose between the two nations. Whoever I picked, it was going to feel like I was betraying half of my family to the secret police, which was giving the situation a certain frisson. Now it looks like being business as usual: bully-boy England to trample plucky downtrodden paddies into the auld sod in a reenactment of the historical events of the last 900 years. Looks like the decision’s already been made for me then. C’mon Ireland! I have to say,
though, it doesn’t feel quite right. Why couldn’t the two of them just join forces for the afternoon and play against Wales?