The Road to McCarthy (5 page)

As a consequence of the alleged fires, floods and explosions, MacCarthy was duly stripped of his title—in effect, they said, because he wasn’t who he claimed to be. In reply the ex-Mór wrote that the chief herald, “a mere civil servant of a republic,” had no “right to alter the successional laws of Gaelic Ireland.” Each side accused the other of selling titles to gullible Americans—which, like many people, I’d always assumed to be a cornerstone of the Irish economy and therefore to be encouraged—and, in a welter of claim and counterclaim, MacCarthy announced he was abdicating, withdrawing from public life, and going to ground in Tangier, where he had been living on and off for twelve years with his associate, Andrew, the count of Clandermond.

“I shall not comment again on this affair. I shall not answer any correspondence, nor stoop to defend myself, or any member of my family, from any further defamatory attacks by self-interested trouble-makers, self-acclaimed experts, scandalmongers or title hunters.”

By now I had realized that it needed an experienced investigative journalist with a precise and analytical mind to crack this peculiar case and establish the facts once and for all. That ruled me out, then. In any case I felt no urge to prove anything. Most Irish people I’ve spoken to regard these titles, and the anachronistic world of Gaelic chivalry, genealogical purity and vicious back-biting that surrounds them, as a bit of a game. They may be of
some importance to the tourist industry, they tell you, though not so important as genuine aristocracy like U2, Daniel O’Donnell and Fungi the Dolphin. Rather than caring who was right and who was wrong, I found myself intrigued by what it all said about contemporary Ireland. A Dublin academic offered me his take on the affair: “In England you have a class system, and everyone knows how it works. In America they have no class system, and everyone knows how it works. And in Ireland, we have a class system, and no one knows how it works.”

There was also a surreal and peculiarly Irish dimension to the whole business, placing it firmly in the grand tradition of Flann O’Brien, Sam Beckett and Spike Milligan. In 1923 the Public Records Office in Dublin was blown up by the IRA and all records destroyed, so that, when push comes to shove, hardly anybody in the country can prove they are who they say they are.

Yet I remained eager to meet the man at the center of the controversy. I didn’t want to cross-examine him, but I was intrigued to know what kind of guy might be claiming, rightly or wrongly, to be my chief. Who are my clan anyway? Senator Joe, the witch-hunter? Mary, the novelist? John, the ex-Beirut hostage? Perhaps. Someone cornered me in Cork airport this year, and said “Tell me, Mr. McCarthy—do you still see a lot of that Brian Keenan?”

I read learned tomes on clan history and discovered all manner of obscure information, most of which is far too boring to pass on; though I was pleased to discover that a McCarthy is reputed to have invented whiskey, and that in remotest Alaska there is a town called McCarthy, population seventeen. One day, I thought, I’ll go there. Maybe I’ll drink some whiskey when I arrive. And that was about it. I had reluctantly decided to leave the MacCarthy affair to more accomplished investigators when I got a phone call from a friend of a friend. Terence MacCarthy had passed his title—the one that the Irish government had withdrawn—to his younger brother Conor, who lives in Belfast.

And would I like to go over to meet him?

Though it’s not the most direct route, I decided to travel to Northern Ireland via Cork, where I had a visit to the unemployment office.

Another thing I found
difficult to understand as a kid, I thought, as the plane crossed the Welsh coast and headed out over the Irish Sea, was that lots of people were still living in Ireland, even though so many had gone away. It was always the place we went to, but it was better known as a place that people went from. Growing up midway between Liverpool and Manchester there seemed to be more Irish about the place than there were in Cork itself. Everyone I knew seemed to have a parent, or a funny auld drunken granddad, or an auntie with a mustache who was always saying the rosary, someone at any rate to tie them into an awareness of an Irish past and a consequent shared cultural identity. Even though I had a flat Lancashire accent and was immersed in English pop music and politics and sports and literature, part of me was always aware of coming from, if no longer belonging to, another tribe. When England played Ireland at football or rugby it was impossible to know whom to support, because either way you’d feel like a traitor. Should you cheer for the land of your birth, your accent and your dad, against the poor downtrodden colonized persecuted underdogs, while your mammy fought back the tears on the other side of the room? Or did you go for the romance of oppression, the pride of a displaced nation in exile, and your cousin singing “Kevin Barry” at a family wedding, and turn your back on the country that had made you what you were, given you education and prosperity and friendships, Shakespeare, the Small Faces and The Who? These were impossible choices.

Cork has the second-largest natural harbor in the world, a land-enclosed deepwater haven entered from the Atlantic by a single mile-wide channel. The port of Cobh sits on the Great Island, facing the harbor entrance, row upon row of rather grand nineteenth-century houses terraced dramatically up the hillside. Many are newly painted in vivid colors, but otherwise the twentieth century didn’t make much impact on the look of the place, and the twenty-first hasn’t yet had time to.

At the center of the town towards the top of the hill looms the gray granite bulk of St. Colman’s Cathedral with its 300-foot spire and forty-nine bells, which makes you wonder why they didn’t go for the full half-century.

Its scale is massively at odds with the proportions of the rest of the town, as if a life-size building has been constructed next to one of those miniature model villages they build in places where there’s nothing else for tourists to do, so they go and have their photo taken standing next to houses that only come up to their knees. I once went to a park in China where they have miniature versions of everywhere else in China, to save you the bother of going. You can cross the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors off your list on the same afternoon. You can see the logic. It frees up all that traveling time for other things, which makes your life seem longer and more action-packed than it really is.

The cathedral is so huge that on a clear day they can probably see it from Ellis Island in New York, but the heavy-handed symbolism of its dominant position is showing signs of wearing thin; as I arrived the town was bristling with placards proclaiming no change to cobh cathedral. Perhaps they were planning to add a plastic conservatory or double garage, or paint it red, yellow and purple, like the houses along the main street. Discreet enquiries in a waterfront pub, however, revealed that the slogans of protest represented an unprecedented show of opposition to the church’s plans to relocate the Italian marble altar rails and create a more appropriately modern open-plan worship space. The word on the streets, or at least in the bar, or at least from the only other guy in there, was that although the protestors have public opinion on their side, they face a tough fight. The devout afternoon drinker told me of the awe in which he held the diocesan authorities.

“Ya don’t feck with those bastards,” he said, backlit for a moment by a vivid beam of sunshine through the pub’s stained-glass window—the Almighty’s searchlight perhaps, marking him out for the wrath of the bishop and the certainty of eternal damnation.

Back out in the crisp fresh air, and ever mindful of the fact that the humble potato is the only vegetable to contain all the nutrients needed for survival, provided you can force enough of them down, I bought a bag of chips to play yang to the drink’s yin. I found a seat in the sun near the renovated bandstand from which I could gaze out towards the prison on Spike Island and beyond it, through the break in the headlands, to the open waters of the
Atlantic. For many people the view back through this harbor entrance would have been their last glimpse of home. For more than a century Cobh was the great port of Irish emigration. In the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s 3.7 million people left Ireland, the vast majority of them from here.

My uncle sailed from Cobh to Boston. Nothing special about that. Every family in the country must have had someone leave from here. The town was famous for its American wakes, all-night vigils of celebration and mourning for those about to leave, and who in all probability would never be seen again. Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but I’ve always felt that the weight of numbers who passed through here, and the volume of tears of goodbye that were shed, have left an indelible mark on the soul of the place. And that’s before you even think of the
Titanic
. I was starting to get gloomy. Even the chips were beginning to depress me. I dumped them in an ornate British Empire rubbish bin, where they attracted the immediate attention of one of those fearless ostrich-size seagulls that have become alarmingly commonplace in recent years, and will one day inherit the earth.

The town was known as the Cove of Cork until 1849, when Queen Victoria, no doubt in a magnanimous gesture of famine solidarity, paid a visit. She painted some watercolors, and also made an entry in her diary: “the day was gray and excessively muggy, which is the nature of the Irish climate.” In the wake of this definitive meteorological assessment, the name of the town was changed to Queenstown in her honor. It reverted to Cove, this time with the Irish spelling of Cobh, after home rule in 1921.

I’d made the detour
to Cobh to catch up on one of my favorite stories. I first heard it from an alcoholically-enhanced fiddle player at a late-night session in a West Cork bar. Even by the infinitely flexible standards of truthfulness that apply on such occasions, it was clearly a preposterous yarn.

“So this fella’s out of work and signing on, the roof leaks and he’s bringing up three kids on his own. Anyway, doesn’t he go and win a million on the Lotto? So how do you think he spends it?”

I don’t know, I thought. I can’t imagine. I don’t even believe the first part of the story.

“He only goes out and buys the feckin’ unemployment office, that’s all. Then triples its rent. What a man, eh? What a star!”

Ireland has few urban myths, due to a shortage of urbs, but plenty of tall stories. This, it turned out, wasn’t one of them. I visited Cobh a few years ago and was able to confirm that, on October 22, 1995, unemployed single parent Vince Keaney did indeed win a million and buy the local unemployment office. It’s a deeply satisfying story, with a powerful sense of poetic justice that gives it the quality of a contemporary myth or fable. But Mr. Keaney didn’t just buy the place for the
craic
or the revenge, though I’m sure those elements both played a part. A more pragmatic force was also at work. He was aware that in a previous life the unemployment office in question—situated on a decaying wharf in the center of town—had housed the White Star Shipping Line, and that it was through these offices, and from this wharf, on April 11, 1912, that the final 123 passengers embarked on the
Titanic
.

Vince had a plan, which he explained to me when I tracked him down shortly after his win. He was going to evict the unemployment bastards, buy off the handful of fishermen who still operated from the near-derelict sheds, and invest his fortune in a
Titanic
bar and restaurant. The man’s a loon, I thought, as he showed me the original designs for the ship’s tiles, railings and staircases, a charming and engaging loon who’s going to lose the lot for believing his own legend. In 1999 I wrote that “disaster is widely predicted once again.”

I heard no more of Vince and his plan to tip a boatload of money into the sea until a little while ago, when a letter arrived telling me I was no threat to Nostradamus, because the
Titanic
bar was up and running. Best of all, didn’t they have a survivor of the original disaster—an elderly lady who was a tiny baby when the ship struck the iceberg—coming to open the place? This sounded in such appalling taste that I felt I really had to go and see for myself. I also owed Mr. Keaney an apology for doubting his ability to pull off the kind of hare-brained scheme that most of us would dream up at two o’clock in the morning, write down on a scrap of paper, and then be unable
to read the following day. Drunken notes to yourself explore the outer limits of the human psyche, and can only be understood when read in the same state of inebriation as when they were written. I can only presume that Vince woke up a couple of days after his win, found a stained beer mat on which he’d written “BUY UNEMPLOYMENT FECK FISHERMEN OFF BOOK LIFEBOAT BABY” and could actually understand what it meant.

Along the shore ahead of me next to the post office I could see a handsome, newly painted, yellow-and-white building where the scabby old unemployment office used to be. Titanic Queenstown, said the sign, over a flag of the White Star Shipping Line. Directly across the street was a shop called “English.” Perhaps it used to be called “Irish” but was renamed when Victoria visited.