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By Root 444 0

me in the west from his job as a chaplain in a Cambridge college. We’d landed in Westport, County Mayo’s sweetest honeypot, full of folksy young Europeans twiddling their tin whistles in pubs that jumped with music. This was pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, even pre-Eurovision and Riverdance, but there was definitely a sense that the country was swelling with pride and a new confidence, for both traditionalists and liberals. The previous summer, in the World Cup that saw England tiptoe into the semi-finals before the inevitable penalty ejection by Germany (actually, West Germany: it really has been that long), Ireland, under the sainted tutelage of Jackie Charlton and a crack squad of genealogists, had made it into the quarters. ‘That did it,’ a man over breakfast in a Galway B&B had said to me a year afterwards. ‘That made us think that, finally, we were as good as anyone else.’ The same year had seen the surprise election of liberal lawyer Mary Robinson as President of the Republic. Mayo’s own Mrs Robinson was proving a catalyst for a long-awaited social revolution, and Ireland was on the cusp of becoming the coolest place in Europe.

To my friend, the Reverend, it was still all a bit of a shock. On the train to Westport, his eyes had nearly leapt from their sockets at the sight of people fingering their rosary beads as they quietly murmured Hail Marys – ‘Good God, it’s medieval,’ he whispered to me. A ferociously bright, angular man, he had no soft edges or small talk. Going into a Westport pub, he pushed me in front of him, hissing, ‘You go first – you seem to know how to talk to the indig pop.’ ‘To the what?’ I replied. ‘The indig pop – you know, the indigenous population. You talk to them.’ I flew through the door on the end of a bony shove. On the occasions that he did chip in to a pub chat, it was mainly to deliver a dry monologue against the patriarchy of Popery or the fetishising of saints. It didn’t always create quite the mood I was hoping for.

From Westport, we hired bikes and pedalled over to Ballintober. In the churchyard, biblical tableaux had been recently built with an impressive literalness: there is a suburban rockery garden to represent Gethsemane; the house of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, contained a sewing machine and a dresser piled high with tea crockery; an empty cave – with signs that read ‘He Is Not Here’ and ‘He Is Risen’ – demonstrated the Resurrection. The Reverend could barely contain his disdain. ‘It’s all just tasteless mumbo-jumbo,’ he grumbled. When we reached a modern stone cromlech annotated with a sign stating that this represented the Assumption, he exploded. ‘Exactly!’ he hissed. ‘The Assumption! That’s all it is – one big bloody assumption!’

Less than a week later, and with the Rev safely back in his more familiar assumptions of Cambridge liberation theology, I returned to Ballintober, on a coach tour organised as part of the George Moore Summer School. Moore (1852–1933) was a precocious and contrary scion of Mayo Anglo-Irish gentry. He’d escaped his native land at the first opportunity and headed to sample the absinthe and hookers of Paris, while churning out the occasional book of withering memoir and some provocative new realist novels. News reached his incredulous ears that things were stirring back in the old country. A literary revival, spearheaded by the likes of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, was pumping intellectual fibre into the fight for Irish independence. Moore swept imperiously back to Ireland, installed himself in Dublin and hurled himself into the thick of the action. This had been the period that I’d been studying particularly keenly, and I was thrilled to see that my time in Mayo coincided with the summer school.

The coach trip, from the car park at Claremorris train station, was the first event of the weekend. I arrived early and was welcomed like a long-lost friend, none more so than by an unshaven Dublin academic, who lurched on to the bus, spotted me and plumped noisily down by my side. Despite being hung-over from the welcome session the previous night,