MARISEO'S HOUSE

Breaking down the Walls

2011-09-22T18:56:00.003+01:00

I have seen many walls in my time. Around houses and estates. Marking fields in the west of Ireland. And even under them in the excavations of the Ceidhe Fields.

I have walked along by the ruins of Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, built by the Romans to try and keep the Scots out of the furthest reach of their empire. I looked again recently at the remains of the Berlin Wall, now an artistically-graffited tourist attraction.

I have passed through the wall being built around Palestine areas in Israel. The builders a nation descended from survivors of their own walled ghettoes across Europe—and I wonder if they see the irony?

Walls protect us. They define where we are, and to some extent who we are. They provide us with boundaries. But they also divide.

The current lowering of what was, when I was growing up, the 'convent wall', brings that last into local focus. When the Cross & Passion sisters first came to Kilcullen they didn't have a wall. Indeed, they started with a small donated house. And they became quickly very much part of the community. They visited homes, provided practical and spiritual succour to those who needed it. They set up schools.

The wall came with the building of the actual convent school that was to become the second landmark building in Kilcullen. The church being the first. And that may have been the beginning of the divide.

When I was growing up, that wall was always in my view. Because I lived in the house across the road from it. I knew some of the nuns. All the village's children did, because they taught us boys up until second class, the girls all the way up to sixth. But we didn't know them outside of school, because they retreated behind that wall every afternoon.

There were others behind the wall. The girls who were boarded there. They came from all over the country, but we never got to know them either. No more than they got to know Kilcullen. Because that wall kept them in. Apart from the occasional walk out in crocodile when they paraded two by two, a nun at front and back. Many years before, an aunt of mine would also have been in that crocodile, and only got home at end of term—even though she only lived across the wall, where the Hideout is now.

Part of the mystique and mystery was lifted when the CPC became a day school, and eventually went co-educational. So some of my own children went behind the wall on a daily basis. But even in more recent years, when the sisters left, and part of the great building was acquired by KARE, the whole place gloomed behind the wall’s security.

Except that it wasn't really secure. Walking on the street outside one evening, two local people heard the sound of breaking glass. It turned out to be a couple of young lads smashing windows in the old convent.

This triggered the thought that opening up the place might be a better option. And in recent weeks, a project which has been six years in the planning is coming to pass. The wall has been lowered. A new decorative railing opens up the view of the parkland inside. A landmark building and its pleasant grounds are become part of the streetscape, no longer hiding like in a prison.

And the ghostly memories of a century of people and happenings behind the wall are freed to pass on their way.

Smells in a memory

2011-04-30T09:29:00.005+01:00

Isn't it funny how, more than five decades on, you can still 'smell' memories? The most recent for me was a mix of battery electrolyte and paraffin, a most distinctive odour.

The recollection was triggered when looking at the set of Kilcullen Drama Group's production of 'Dancing at Lughnasa'. There was a glass 'wet' battery hooked up to the radio which was a key prop to the plot. I remember similar batteries being charged on shelves in the back store of my grandfather's hardware shop, where the Eurospar is now.

The process, which involved the release of small quantities of hydrogen as the electrolyte bubbled gently under charge, provided a pungency to the other smell of the store, paraffin. Drums of the fuel were stored on the opposite side of the room, from which customers' containers were filled via taps on the lower bungs.

Safety regulations today would never allow that to happen. Hydrogen, paraffin, the possibility of sparking, what a lethal potential!

Those glass batteries were mostly for domestic use, probably made by Exide. That I remember them reflects the fact that the ESB national grid was still confined to towns in the early 50s. The ground-breaking Rural Electrification Scheme had only begun in 1946, and wouldn't complete its work of connecting 420,000 country households until 1979. And the paraffin was also symbiotic of the youthful stage of electrification, still used widely for heaters and for lamps.

Forward-looking, and wealthy, farmers had used similar battery systems in multiple cell racks since before the war, powered by their own small petrol engines to provide lighting throughout their farms. But the ones brought in to my grandfather every week or two for charging were invariably powering a radio set that was probably the only connection with the greater world for people living a couple of miles outside Kilcullen.

Our own radio at home was powered by the mains electricity. Actually, there were two in the house, one on a shelf in the small sitting room at the bottom of the stairs, which was used most of the time in winter because it was heated by an anthracite stove and was easy to stay warm in. The larger sitting room was used on Sundays and summer evenings, and it had a more salubrious radio built in to a corner cabinet where old 78 records could be stored for the gramophone. Among them, I remember, was a set of speeches by Winston Churchill.

Listening to radio was a family affair then, much as it later became for television. Programmes often acted as a timetabler for parts of the day. There was, for instance, a morning 15-minute 'soap' called 'Jaqueline' on Radio Eireann which, when it came on, meant I had just enough time to walk to school before classes started. And 'The Kennedys of Castleross' marked my return for lunch.

On Sunday evenings, Radio Luxembourg used to broadcast 'Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future', at a quarter to seven in the evening. It became a ritual that my mother would try and get me to leave before it ended to get to the Sunday evening Devotions. My case was always that, because there were advertisements at the end of the show, I could run to the church and be there on time. And mostly I was. People often comment that they always see me today walking fast around the town, and I do—and it's probably because I have always travelled fast on my two legs since having to get to Devotions on time.

The 'Din Joe's Take the Floor' and 'Living with Lynch' programmes on Radio Eireann had a particular interest for me because the presenters of both, Denis Fitzgibbon and Joe Lynch respectively, were regular visitors to our house as friends of my Mum and Dad. Later, in my own time at RTE through the 1980s, I would meet up with Joe fairly often, and rather less frequently in the years before his death. Always a man of great humour.

Sunday afternoons in winter were spent in the big sitting room listening to BBC programmes like 'Life with the Lyons' and 'The Navy Lark'. The BBC also contributed to my lifelong interest in space travel with 'Journey into Space', the exploits of astronaut (the word didn't exist then, though) Jet Morgan and his intrepid crew. At the end of the 1950s I was entertained for a brief couple of years by 'The Clitheroe Kid' getting up to adolescent tricks, mostly at the expense of his big sister Susan and her boyfriend Alfie.

The arrival of home-grown TV to Irish sitting rooms changed all that, of course. But I still have strong memories of how true even today is the answer to the old question, 'which is better, radio or television?'. Radio, of course—it has better pictures.

And I can still, in my mind, experience that heady mixture of bubbling batteries on charge and dripped from the tap paraffin. Condensed and refined in my memory, it probably smells even better now.

We need new butterflies

2010-12-04T21:14:00.006Z

Right, we've hit the iceberg, Maybe we'll soon stop taking water. Maybe we won't. But somewhere along the way - and I'll listen to arguments that while bailing out the boat is not necessarily the best time to restructure the crew - we're going to have to put in place some of the lessons we've learned from this fiasco.

I think the first one is how we govern, and are governed. Because one thing is sure, we haven't been doing either very well.

I'm not advocating going radical, like a socialist or communist state. That system has been proved wanting too. Besides, having a democracy does mean at least that we do have the power to change things.

But here are a couple of ideas for the mob who will succeed the one that brought us to this particular shipwreck. An apt metaphor, actually, because the Titanic was built on this island, and just as it was billed as 'unsinkable', our Celtic Tiger was hailed as 'unstoppable'. Both were hostages to hubris.

Enda Kenny is promising a leaner crew to take the ship of state through the current shark-infested and stormy waters. A cut in the number of TDs by 30, the elimination of the Seanad. I don't think that's enough, but I acknowledge that there are constitutional issues to be sorted. And I have concerns about the Seanad plan.

But let's suggest a target. One to be achieved within, say, two years of the next Government taking up office.

First, by all means slim down the Dail. But with rather more radical surgery. Do we need more than two TDs per constituency? I don't believe so. Especially if they actually are required to work in the Dail for a full five days every week. Which they can do if they aren't allowed this business of going to the local funerals and dealing with potholes. They are the jobs for their councillor colleagues.

And why shouldn't we elect the councillors on the same day as the TDs? It would save the state money on extra elections, as well as clearing the way politically for a full term instead of the halfway business which disrupts the focus of Government in the middle of more important national work.

Maybe everybody on the voting paper could be in the running for TD, but those who don't reach the first or second slot then become councillors for the duration? Then they could be doing the funerals and potholes and planning and the work of overseeing local authority decisions. And if a vacancy occurs during the life of the Dail, the replacement could be selected from the relevant panel of councillors, of the same party as the vacancy. No need for by-elections, no unnecessary shifts in the balance of power.

Now, the Seanad. I don't believe it should be abolished. We need a second house of parliament, but one with teeth, to keep the Dail guys honest. The Seanad could be half the number of TDs, and each member should be elected also by the public. But they shouldn't be sponsored by a political party. And perhaps candidates should be required to have a qualification, either a decade in a profession or business or with a university degree.

So now we have, say, 86 TDs and 43 senators. All full-time people at the job they are elected to. What about remuneration?

Not to put a tooth in it, our current elected representatives are grossly overpaid. Not one of them is worth a hundred grand and expenses, plus the level of pension they get. That figure was snuck up on us during the three FF-led Governments. Thing is, none of the other parties batted an eye at it either.

So it probably isn't surprising that the opposition prospectuses, nor the Four Year Plan, don't mention a significant cut in pay for elected national representatives. Turkeys and Christmas come to mind.

But, at least for the duration of this new 'Emergency', let them all live on closer to what the rest of us have to do. It would concentrate minds enormously. Say, €60,000 a year, which is about twice the median family income. Plus vouched expenses only and limited to what any of the rest of us can claim when filling out our own tax returns. And no extra remuneration for being a minister, or taoiseach. The honour of serving should be enough. No ministerial cars either. Using public transport or their private cars and bicycles would also concentrate minds on how we all have to cope. Ryanair and Aer Lingus would benefit from the Brussels travel business once the Government jets are disposed of. And it is a given that there are no 'signing in' payments or the like. The rate for the job is the rate for the job.

But such small remuneration wouldn't attract the best of the best, I hear you cry. We'd be paying peanuts and electing monkeys. Well, we've been paying golden coconuts and getting very little in return so far. Can't get any worse.

Besides, smaller political salaries would more likely attract those who actually have a wish to do the national community some service. It used to be like that, but in the last couple of decades, politics has gone from public service to self service. It has become a lucrative living, with a clearly defined career path. The system has gerrymandered itself to cater for this. And we have seen the results.

My final element is designed to deal with the problem of 'in too long'. Clearly, a full working life in government is simply not good either for the electorate or for the elected. The first gets deteriorating value and diminishing innovation, the second get lazy and comfortable. So there should be a fixed limit of service, say two terms of four years each. This would also head off the ones interested only in a financially rich political career.

But what would they do after the eight years? Well, they could return to their former jobs, which would by law have been held open for them, complete with any seniority and pension rights. Or they could move on to new employment. Having served at national representative level would make them seriously attractive candidates to work with many firms. Though there would have to be some mechanism to make it impossible for them to lobby politically.

Oh, and trade union bosses, who seem to be currently paid at rates similar to our ministers, would also be restricted to the political wage limits. Ditto for the judiciary, and public servants right up to departmental secretary and ambassador level. and of course the heads of the banks which we now, as a nation, own.

None of the foregoing would save enormous money in terms of national finances. But the general shift would bring 'them' and 'us' closer. And perhaps we'd respect each other more.

As for the rest of us, whatever our employment we should also work to the same general guidelines. The rate for the job, no 'perk' payments, vouched genuine expenses, and a wish to work not just for ourselves, but for helping to get our country and our people out of the hole which we have all helped to dig. For businesses, excess profits could be highly taxed unless used in an employee profit-sharing scheme.

That's my, admittedly simplistic, look at how we might do things. It isn't perfect. A lot of it mightn't be doable very quickly. But the ship is holed badly, and any different ideas are a place to travel from. Hopefully to somewhere better than we are.

All your ideas are welcome. Especially the ones that disagree.

(The title of this piece is from an article I wrote in The Bridge in the 80s about Kilcullen's future. Some of you might remember it. It turned out to be more controversial than I expected.)

On my bike

2010-10-31T10:06:00.003Z

Back on two wheels, self powered. And though I've found it is true that you never forget how, the whole bicycle thing has changed substantially.

It has been a good few years now since I last rode a bike. And many more years before that since I bought one. So there are a lot of new things to get my head around.

Like helmets. Like 21 gears. Like front fork suspension. And a pump with a built-in pressure gauge, no less.

And then there are the old reliables that you get to remember very quick. Such as not looking at an upcoming pothole, or you'll ride right into it (and there are an awful lot of potholes not to look at just now!). And tuning the ears for sounds from behind, especially when it isn't as easy to turn and look back as it was when on my first 'proper' bike 55 years ago, riding into school in Newbridge, to the 'Brothers'.

That one was a Raleigh Sports, straight handlebars, lightweight plastic mudguards, and a Dynohub lighting system (which never gave as much light as the 'bottle' dynamos that all my pals had). The frame was red, the mudguards and handgrips white. It was stylish and strong and served me well once I was able to ride up Kinneagh Hill without stopping.

(Later I could do that with no hands; in fact all of us doing that school ride could go no hands all the way to Newbridge, but that's not a story for today's safety-conscious. Besides, there wasn't nearly as much traffic.)

My new bike is a Carrera Crossfire, supplied by Halfords in Naas and very efficiently sized, built and outfitted by Ruth, in charge of the bicycle department. While I was aware of the difference between road and mountain bikes, I had to learn about 'hybrid', in the Crossfire's case a bike which is mainly road but is designed to travel also on some medium-rough tracks.

Right, getting back on a bike in the headlong rush to winter isn't necessarily the best time. But I'm out there several times a week at the moment, and we'll see how things go. Whatever, it's nice to be able to travel a bit further around the area than I do walking, and it's fun (and a little bit hairy) sorting out the safer routes again. And renewing acquaintance with long forgotten muscles is interesting.

This is primarily an exercise in some mild exercise itself, as well as taking things a bit more slowly than my normal four wheels and an engine mode of transport. How far it develops, and how far I'll get to travel, remains to be seen.

The Bonomini of Florence

2010-10-24T23:08:00.003+01:00

The beans tumble to the table with a soft chatter.

The twelve men silently count them according to their two colours.

"Eight black." It is traditional that the most senior articulates the result. "The case is agreed."

Another week's work almost finished, the Bonomini of Florence gather the sheets of paper with each of the supplications they have decided on. There are two piles. A black bean is placed on the larger set, the successful ones.

"Now," the elder says. "Do we need the candle?"

A colleague opens a folder. He takes out a pen, makes some calculations in the margins around the typed set of figures. He raises his head. "We do."

The elder goes to a cupboard. He takes out a silver candlestick, and a new candle, along with a box of matches. At one of the room's windows, where blobs and stains show this has been done before, he sets the candle carefully, scratches a match. A baby flame gutters in a slight breeze which has found its way through the old casement. It struggles momentarily, then finds a secure hold on the wick.

The elder returns to the table. He leaves the matches beside the two piles, looks at his watch, then at the others. "Until next week?" he asks softly.

They nod assent.

The six assistants in the office of the Bonomini will deal with the details. As they, and the predecessor members of the Congregazione dei Buonomini di San Martino, have done since 1441. Helping the poor, especially the middle class made poor originally by the taxation regime which Cosimo Medici used to cripple his enemies. And their equivalents today made poor by the latest financial collapse. Those who dare not, or are ashamed to, plead in public for help.

The Bonomini were established by a Dominican friar, Antonio Pierozzi, later St Anthony of Florence. 'Twelve Good Men' were chosen, two from each of Florence's administrative districts, to be the 'protectors of the shame-faced poor'. Their job, to collect from everyone who could afford to give, and to use the money to find and assist in secret those who needed it.

At the time they were publicly known, wearing distinctive red hats, although their work was carried out discreetly.

The Bonomini still meet every Friday. But their identities are not known to anyone except each other. When one dies, or becomes incapacitated, a replacement is quietly invited to join them.

Their help is still given in secret, to those who ask by putting their supplications in a small letterbox in an unassuming tiny chapel on the little Piazza San Martino. People who wish to help can also leave their offerings there, supplementing donations provided to the Twelve Good Men through bequests and other means.

When funds are low, they still do as their predecessors did over five and a half centuries. They put a candle in the window of their office. Word gets around and the people of Florence, even in difficult times, help out. It is a tribute to the respect in which the Bonomini are held that they don't have to light the candle very often.

In the little chapel a series of murals depicts the work of the Bonomini down the centuries. On the altar a wooden bust of of the little friar who began it all smiles gently forever.

The journalism of fear and loathing

2010-08-15T10:09:00.002+01:00

This is one of those times when I feel uncomfortable about being a journalist. Or, more specifically, about the kind of journalism which has become the most recent filler of column inches and their equivalent on electronic media over the past days and weeks.

This whole Larry Murphy thing has become a frenzy which feels not far off what happens when a piece of meat is thrown into a river inhabited by piranha fish. The water's relative calm is transformed into a roiling mass of ravening teeth, the owners of each set trying madly to get a share of the bloody action.

While it lasts, the area becomes a scary and dangerous place for anyone in a vulnerable position. As soon as the meat is consumed, all goes quiet and the shoal moves on in the hunt for another frantic meal. Leaving behind, amongst other things, fear and loathing.

The media organs which have been whipping up fear and loathing prior to and after the release of Murphy from jail have their job to do: sell papers, build radio listenership and TV viewing figures. And also, of course, to report the news.

Murphy's release is absolutely news. So too are public meetings at which people close to where Murphy came from express their concerns about his possible return. As also are the the tales about the stalking of the homes of his family, both close and more distant. Equally newsworthy are the publicly-uttered beliefs that the man who has served a jail term for rape and attempted murder may have been responsible for other crimes. And the stories that women in south Kildare and neighbouring Wicklow townlands and towns won't go out walking on their own any more, for fear of what a released Murphy might do, are the stuff of many words of reportage.

But it is probably correct to say that most of those stories are the result of a deliberate campaign by some media outlets to notch up substantially the fear factor. And doing so often on the basis of little or no evidence. The manufacturing of a world of 'might', 'could', and 'may' simply to build a campfire into a forest fire. The use of headline epithets like 'The Beast of Baltinglass' to further turn up the temperature on the afraid.

The story of Murphy's brother's house is a simple, but apt example. Because he has been building it for the last seven years, for his own family as and when he could afford work on it, was enough 'evidence' to allow one newspaper claim it was being built for the rapist's return. A photograph of the house was published without the brother even being asked about the matter.

That up to 60 members of my Fourth Estate camped outside Arbour Hill Prison, some of them up to two days before the scheduled release of Murphy, makes more of a celebrity of the man than anything else. That they then careened in convoy after his taxi, and have since been staking out various places he might or might not be, is downright predatory.

I hold no brief for the man. As far as I'm concerned, he should have been kept locked up until he was in his coffin for what he did and what he was foiled by fortune in what he was subsequently attempting to do. But the Garda are 'managing' his life now, and I'm of the opinion that it can be left to them. They are very aware of whatever potential he has for further nefarious deeds.

Eventually, and we can be sure it will be soon, the pack will move on to the next 'kill'. Leaving behind communities, families, and individuals who have been scared beyond sense; disturbed into unreason by hype, suspicion-mongering and innuendo; smeared with unevidenced allegations, and then discarded like yesterday's newspaper.

Good journalism is a very necessary thing. Especially in these times when the forces of big business and government conspire so often to exploit the rest of us. Without strong investigative journalism, many of the injustices which have been, and are still being perpetrated, by such entities would not have been brought to public scrutiny. Equally, thoughtful and thorough examination of wrongdoing by criminals, by good journalists, is a service to all of us.

But there are elements in today's journalism which are far too often themselves the perpetrators of injustice, for the sake of their own greed. They do shabby work. After more than three decades working as a journalist in my own small way, that's what makes me uncomfortable. They undermine a craft in which I and many of my colleagues strive to do our best. They dilute the credibility of what we do.

Worst of all, they are the equivalent of drug dealers feeding our basest instincts, and each time we accept the latest half-baked factoid or downright lie as 'true because it was in the newspaper', it makes us that little bit less able to think for ourselves.

That's the really scary part.

The Tailor Boylan, and a ghostly lady

2010-05-29T10:30:00.003+01:00

So who was the ghostly 'lady in white' in Kilcullen who so scared young Rose Anne Union at the end of the 19th century that she ran into a nearby cottage in fear, and was told she hadn't been the first to see her?

Rose Anne, who was then somewhere between ten and twelve, had been sent to the shops in Kilcullen for a message for her grandfather, James Boylan. We can presume from the story that it was probably dusk of a winter teatime, because a girl so young wouldn't have been out any later. She saw the strange woman in a blacksmith's workshop as she was on her way back.

The neighbour she ran to said the woman had once been the wife of a blacksmith, and had worked there with him, and that her vision was often seen in the workshop after she died.

It may be that little Rose Anne had heard the story since she had come to live in Kilcullen from the Dublin home of her own parents, Rose Boylan and Abraham Union. And perhaps she simply saw a real woman in the workshop, and a trick of the light had made her seem ghostly. None of which, of course, we will ever know for sure.

The anecdote came up recently when Rose Anne's daughter, Joan Smith, came to Kilcullen to find her great-grandfather's grave, and to renew some memories of when she herself previously visited Kilcullen. Now a sprightly 88-year-old, she was in the company of her nephew Dr Maurice Gleeson, and his father, also Maurice.

Her story of the 'ghost' and where the event had happened struck a chord with this writer. The house where I grew up, Moyola, is on the site of a blacksmith's shop, operated by Patrick Dowling. And a row of cottages ran from there up to where is now the Garda Barracks.

Further, although there is now no local indication of where James Boylan and his wife Catherine Farrell lived and raised their six children, Dr Maurice Gleeson has established from an issue of Griffith's Valuations that it was likely in the area of Kilcullen close to what I know to have been Dowling's forge.

In addition, Joan Smith had been told by her mother that James Boylan was looked after in his home by the Passionist nuns, in his latter years when he was bedridden. This suggests that he lived fairly close to the convent, opposite Moyola, formerly Dowling's.

So there's some evidence that suggests the 'ghost' may well have been in Dowling's shop, on the site of the house where I grew up. Very intriguing.

But back to facts. James Boylan, whose parents were John and Mary, was born in Kilcullen in 1801, and died there in 1897. During his working life he plied a trade as a tailor, and his customers included officers stationed in the Curragh Camp and the members of the Kildare Hunt. He was assisted eventually by his son, also James, and between them they had a very good reputation. When a new Master of the 'Killing Kildares' wanted to move the business to another tailor, he was told in no uncertain terms by his members that it wasn't on.

"They told him nobody could do the work 'like Mr Boylan'," Joan Smith recalled what her mother Rose Anne had told her.

James Boylan the younger didn't marry, and he didn't live much beyond his father's death, passing on in 1902. His brother John and three sisters, Marie Bridget, Ann and Mary, were perhaps no longer around when their father was old. If they were, Rose Anne hadn't mentioned them to Joan. Certainly, by the time of the census of 1911, no trace of the Boylan family was left in Kilcullen.

The elder James Boylan had during his life been noted in a number of documents of his time. In the 'Nation' newspaper of September 23, 1843, he was a signatory to the calling of a meeting of protest at Mullaghmast, on the matter of repealing the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. Other Kilcullen men who signed that call were Daniel Brennan, Patrick Burke, Peter Berney, John Butterfield and P Brennan.

In the 'Freeman's Journal' of December 18, 1869, James is noted in a record of a Parish of Kilcullen & Gormanstown collection as having given 2s/6d towards a total fund of £7.

In the Slater's Directories of 1881 and 1894, James Boylan is listed as a tailor in Kilcullen, though it isn't clear whether the latter entry relates to the younger James. Other tailors in town in 1894 were James Kelly and Henry Hannersley. Patrick Dowling, blacksmith, is also listed in the 1894 edition.

In addition to the Unions, the Boylan family extended through marriage to include Careys and Martins, and eventually Harts (Joan's father was a Hart) and Gleesons. There is also an American branch, from a brother of James Boylan Snr, William, who emigrated and according to family lore served in the US Navy. His son JJ became a barrister. Maurice Gleeson Snr has been researching the family connections for many years, while Dr Maurice has only taken it up relatively recently. Both admit it is an activity that becomes addictive.

During her recent visit, Joan Smith recalled coming to Kilcullen with her mother in the late 30s and calling to see a Mr Berney who was ill. "We went into the house off the Main Street to a room where he was in bed, and my mother had a long talk with him."

An Ellen Berney, who died of influenza in 1918 at the age of 37, is buried in a Union family grave in Glasnevin Cemetery. It's not known if her husband was related to the Kilcullen family of the same name.

Rose Anne may also have known my grandfather, James J Byrne Snr, during her time in Kilcullen. Maurice Gleeson Snr remembers bringing her into The Hideout during the early 60s, while driving up from his home in Tramore, and she apparently had a long chat with my late dad, Jim Byrne Jnr.

Joan Smith was also very interested in seeing the former Cross & Passion Convent. "It seems that my great-grandfather had been generous to the nuns and they were very fond of him. On the day he died, he asked for his razor and shaved himself, and I think he knew he was dying. He passed on with the nuns by his bedside."

The grave where James Boylan is buried is in New Abbey Cemetery, in a walled enclosure just inside the main gate. Pleased at having located it, Joan and the Maurices were surprised to find the plot is also the resting places of several members of the Martin family. The inscription on the Boylan headstone notes that it was erected by James the son in memory of his father and his mother, and also of his nephews and nieces Patrick and Annie Carey and Annie Union. There's no notation of James the son being buried there.

An older gravestone between that of the Boylans and the Martins required rubbings to be taken to work out whose it was. And the result is something of another small mystery, because it was erected by one William Waters of Kilcullen in memory of his wife Mary, who died in 1836 aged 42. Maurice Gleeson hasn't yet been able to find a family connection with the Boylans, through there is a possibility that Mary Waters might have been a sister of James Snr. But that's a matter of speculation.

Their day in Kilcullen was very enjoyable, and Joan Smith was delighted to have found her great-grandfather's resting place. The family were very impressed with the way New Abbey Cemetery has been maintained, and will be making a donation towards its continuing upkeep.

But there's still the unresolved matter of the ghostly lady ...

Remembering Kilcullen's Great War dead

2010-05-29T10:27:00.002+01:00

There is a set of men to whom, as far as I know, there is no memorial in Kilcullen. And perhaps it is time there was.

Back in 2007 I wrote a piece in the Diary about Pte Patrick O'Toole, killed at Gallipoli in the First World War. He was the son of Patrick and Bridget O'Toole, of Yellowbog Common, and an antecedent of Ray Donoghue, formerly of Kilcullen Drama Group and still doing duty from time to time as barman in Fallons.

I have since found references to no less than 28 other Kilcullen men who died in that same war. Three of them were also killed in the same Dardanelles which claimed Patrick O'Toole's young life, most died in France, and one perished in East Africa.

They were officially aged between 20 and 36, most were private soldiers, with seven NCOs and just one commissioned officer in the list. The bulk of them are recorded as having been with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, three each with the Irish Guards and Royal Irish Regiment, and one each with the Royal Garrison Artillery, Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Engineers and Connaught Rangers.

I have managed to establish where some of their families lived, and I surmise some others, but would be very grateful for any more definite information.

The first family I'm clear on is the Cookes of Sunnyhill. Former 65th Foot member and army pensioner William Cooke and his wife Annie lost their son William at the age of 30 in the Dardanelles in 1915, and their son John, also at the age of 30 in France in 1917. John was decorated with the 1914 Star, while William won the Medal of St George 2nd Class and a Distinguished Conduct Medal. The Cookes were left with two younger sons Robert and Patrick, and a daughter Bridget.

Gunner Joseph James, from Gilltown, died in East Africa in 1917. A man of that name lived in Grangemore in 1911, on his own, and may have joined up somewhat late in life. If so, he'd have been 38 when he was killed.

The aforementioned Patrick O'Toole's mother was already dead in 1911, but he left his father Patrick and his younger sister Ellen behind when he went off to a war from which he wouldn't return.

Edward Wolfred of Milemill was a Post Boy in 1911 and was 22 when he was killed in the Dardanelles in 1916. He left behind his mother Mary Anne, and sisters Rose, Maggie and Bridget.

A Christopher Grimes who was killed in France in 1916 at the age of 30 might have been related to the Grimes families of Yellowbog Common, because that seems to have been the only location of any Grimes in the Kilcullen area at the time.

I have a suspicion that a John Kavanagh killed in France in 1916 may have been the son of John and Bridget Kavanagh in Kilcullen Town. If so, his siblings would have been Bridget, Edward, Margaret, Mary, Michael, Annie, Jane and Thomas. A Joseph Nugent who lived with the family was perhaps Bridget's brother?

A Charles Doyle killed in France in 1915 at the age of 25 may have been related to the Doyles of Yellowbog Common, because there was an elder Charles Doyle living there. But the Doyle name was very common around Kilcullen and he may well have been related to any of them. A Joseph Doyle was also killed in France, in 1917 at the age of 20.

Kiernan Lyons was killed in France in 1915. The only Lyons family in the area at the time was in Halverstown, so perhaps there's a link there?

A Joseph O'Neill killed in France in 1914 might have been one of the O'Neills of the Toberogan area.

The remaining names may also jog some family folklores. James Brady, Peter Burke, Patrick Cahill, J Conway, Sergeant Doran, J Dowling, Thomas Hayden, TC Jones-Nowlan, John Kearney, Frank Kelly, Edward Kinehan, Thomas Neill, Edward George Noble, Edward Nolan, W Peaston, Robert and Michael Walker, and Patrick White.

These were the ones who didn't come home. But even from such a horrific conflict, it was the case that some did. Any stories about them would also be useful.

Parallels in hubris

2010-02-21T11:29:00.004Z

A couple of things happened this week in cities nearly two thousand kilometres apart. But they were uncannilly parallel to each other.

One was the meeting of Ireland's bishops with the Pope, the leader of a worldwide church. The other was the happenings in Dail Eireann, the gathering place of the leaders of our country.

In both places, the people concerned didn't seem to be aware that they were heading the way of the dinosaurs. And extinction might happen more quickly than anyone could believe.

The performances of both sets of 'leaders', and performance was what they were at, for themselves probably provided cocoons from the real world. Albeit briefly. The cocoons are about to burst. And they're never going to become butterflies.

Butterflies are beautiful. Bishops kissing the Pope's ring, all in their peacock regalia, against the background of an institutionalised and worldwide abuse system, are not. Nor are our national politicians in the full flight of their own imagined impregnability.

For both species, the end of their tenure as guardians of our morals has already happened. They just haven't realised it yet.

And maybe we haven't either. But we're close.

The thing to remember is that both church prelates and our own TDs share a common DNA. They want to control, manipulate, and dominate.

And just to be absolutely fair, the same thing applies to most religions and political systems. The Catholic Church (as opposed to Christianity, which is a personal belief in Christ), the extremes of Islam, the mongerel Voodoo and even the setup practiced by the local witch doctor, are all top-down rulemakers. Equally, whether politicians dress up their calling in democracy, communism, or dictatorships benign or otherwise, they are about creating hierarchies, the top levels of which control those below.

And they all in the end make themselves unsustainable. Eventually arrogance becomes the underpinning element of such groups, no matter how altruistic might have been the aims of the founding fathers. The hubris eats away at morality, both for the organisations concerned and the individuals at those organisations' dominant levels.

It did for Alexander the Great and his Macedonian empire. It wiped out the Mayans when they also got too big for their place and time. The Roman Empire too succumbed to its belief in its invincibility along with the inevitable dissolution that comes from being too well fed at the top.

There are more modern parallels, such as Hitler, Ceaucescou, and the fall of the Soviet Union. Monarchies, too, have collapsed against the anger of the masses, as in France, and against militant religionists, as in Iran.

Back on our own island, with the stripping of the Celtic Tiger's striped finery, we see our political 'servant masters' as having bloated their bank accounts and banjaxed the country, without showing a scintilla of remorse or accepting even a minor blemish of blame. The images of Willie O'Dea and his sniggering cohorts on the Fianna Fail front bench arrogantly holding a morally corrupt line, helped by the small phalanx of self-serving Greens, will remain vividly in memory until the next time we get to a ballot box. As will the realisation that public opinion can actually force change even in the most arrogant.

It is lucky for them that we still use the ballot box here, rather than pitchforks and guillotines. But it is not something that I would put my neck on remaining the case.

The next wave of politicians we elect to serve us will have to be very mindful of the optics of their positions, especially in terms of the exaggerated payments they receive for their work. If Fine Gael wins the next election, the promises of reform will need to be speedily carried out, because the electorate now is not in a mood to be laissez-faire. The tumbrils are on standby.

Back to the Catholic Church. Despite many uprisings over its two thousand years of history, it has been an extraordinarily successful political entity. Of course, it promises something not even Fianna Fail would dream of doing. Eternal life. Which it may or may not be able to deliver on, and on which the jury is still out. But it is a suggestion that draws on the deepest hope of mankind, that there is something more.

However, the same hubris which has brought down so many other organisations, civilisations and empires in whatever time our kind has been on the planet, has tainted badly those who manage the Catholic Church. Globally and locally. And how they are reacting is so like what Fianna Fail and its chums have been doing in their own little empire.

For both, the exploited are at the gates. But can they see it, even yet?

(Of course, none of the foregoing should be taken as a reflection on the many good people, priests, sisters and devout lay people in religion, nor those who work in political ways truly for the betterment of their fellow people. It's the institutions that are problematical.)

Seeing the Light

2009-11-15T20:46:00.004Z

There’s a common thread about those who haven't finished the trip. They talk of a bright light at the other end. And of feeling disappointed when they don’t go all the way through.

I’ve been there. And the stories are true. About the bright light anyhow. But I don’t remember being disappointed when it faded and I was sucked back through the tunnel. Nor did anyone tell me it wasn’t my time yet.

It didn’t change my life, either. I’m still the same crummy kind that I was before I nearly died in that emergency room.

Actually that’s not quite right. The first bit. Maybe I did change. I probably became even more of the not nice person I used to be. Because I killed Lela in that car wreck, and she was the only one who ever came close to making me a decent human being.

It’s cold tonight. But I’ve been here a long time and don’t feel it much. Cold is something you feel only if you have ever been warm. Living on the streets of Calgary, even in the long-term hotel rooms where I am these days when times are better than bad, doesn’t give you much chance to get used to warm.

My ‘office’ is the streets. Different ones, different parts of them. Tonight I’m in a doorway on Delaraye. The dirty end. Physically dirty, and pretty shitty at the head level too. My clients generally only have one thing on their minds. Or what's left of their intellectual capacity after years of using what I supply.

Intellectual capacity. A big fancy phrase from a dealer. Well, I read. Always did. And I don’t do dope myself. Never have. Does that make me any better than the deadbeats I make my living from? Don’t reckon so. They’re losers, straight. I’m a loser, self-educated, although with money of my own now. The other thing we have in common, neither them nor me care.

Business is bad tonight. Maybe the cold is keeping the regulars away. Or perhaps their financiers, muggable citizens on the streets, are also scarce in the bitter evening. A rasp of sleet rides down the wind. The gust clatters a discarded beer can along the broken paving of the sidewalk. I watch the can boosted in and out of a pothole on the edge of the curb, then it rolls sideways, as if with a life of its own. It shifts direction again and wanders off Delaraye into one of the alleys where my clients usually scuttle to after buying.

I figure it’s time to go. I take a last look around. There’s not even a car in sight, apart from an old clunker across the road. Flat tyres signal it long beyond use. Except maybe as street people accommodation. I’ve been there too.

I leave the doorway, careful going down the cracked steps.

The Gaugin Hotel sounds fancy. Artistic even, unless you realise they misspelled the artist’s name. If you know your Calgary and this particular warren of streets off Delaraye, you know that fancy doesn’t happen down here. Besides, me staying in any hotel is not a recommendation. If they knew, even the fleas would think twice.

The Gaugin has advantages. Mostly about anonymity. Management doesn’t ask for names. Management, whose name nobody asks for either, and which isn’t offered, takes cash only. I could afford better nowadays. I even have enough money for a deposit on an apartment. But there's only myself, and the Gaugin is convenient to my places of business.

I push through the front door. Management doesn’t look up from his newspaper, but I know that he knows anyhow whether whoever comes in is paid up. Once when I was short and a day behind with the next month’s rent, I tried to go through without meeting him. Those are the only times he looks up. You pay whatever you have then or you don’t get back to your room.

I get on the first step of the stairs. A newspaper rustles. “You had a visitor.”

I look back. “Yeah?” It’s as much conversation as I’ve had with him in two years.

“Yeah. A girl.”

“I don’t know any women. None that know I live here, anyhow.”

He rustles to another page. “Not a woman. A girl. A kid maybe eleven, twelve.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know any kids.”

A couple of seconds pass. “Told her I don’t know you either. Told her to beat it.”

I take another couple of steps up the stairs. I look back. “She ask for me by name?”

“Yeah.”

“I never told you my name.”

He closes the paper, turns, looks up at me. His gaze is professionaly blank. “Yeah. I never asked. Like I told her, I don’t know you.”

I continue upwards. In my room I read myself to sleep. As I drift away, voices whisper in the wind outside. Too soft, too far away, for me to hear what they’re saying.

The crash is in slow motion.

We’re arguing. Or I am. Lela sits there, her face tight. She wants us to settle down and have a child. But she doesn’t want the child of a dealer.

She’d just said it quietly, out of the blue, as I drove. And I know, because I know her, that she won’t say it again. I know too it’s yes or no. No, and I know we’re done.

It’s the rock and the hard place. And I blow the moment. I ask her who does she think she is, laying our future on me like that? I only know one thing, how the goddamn else am I going to make us a living?

She sits there, looks through the wipers sloshing across the screen. Her thoughts somewhere beyond the storm. I try to see the road in the sheeting rain. But the real blindness is in my brain.

The bridge looms, slow in my head but too fast for the car. Like in a dream, reactions can’t catch up. The railing bends around the fender and eventually breaks into splinter-edged remnants of the wood. The car rides over the edge into the blackness. I turn to Lela to say I’m sorry. The words don’t come. I watch her head explode the windscreen in a mess of red and grey. I lose my sight, mercifully if only for the moment. And I lose, whatever there is of it, my soul.

I wake soaked. Sweat, not the river. I sit up, click the bedside light. It’s familiar territory. I look at the facing wall for several minutes, seeing nothing. Then I reach for the book. I know that I’ll get through a lot of it during the remainder of the night. First, though, I have to face once again what they told me in the hospital.

Lela was already pregnant when I killed her in the crash.

I’ve never figured when management goes home. Maybe he doesn’t. He seems always to be there. He doesn’t look up when I go out in the morning, heading for breakfast. Daylight is no kinder than the night was. Dirty grey sky instead of dirty light-polluted black. There’s traffic. People walking. Standing. Most alone, some in groups. Commuters, not my business.

If I had known her, I’m sure my mother would have told me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I didn’t. She didn’t. But it is. Sometimes it’s the only one I have. So when I can afford it, I make it a good one. This morning I have The Fat Elvis in the Edgemont Grill. Banana and peanut butter in French bread, dipped in egg and toasted. Not exactly the healthiest start to the day. Even with the side of blueberries, maple syrup and fresh fruit yoghurt. Maybe especially not with those. But I walked a long way to be here. Perhaps that’s a balance.

I like the Edgemont. Hardwood furniture in moody lighting. A nice alternative to where I live. I never see my clients there, another reason to like it. There are few things worse than a strung-out junkie in the morning.

I pay the check. Step outside and squint until my eyes get used to the brighter street. When I can see clearly, I watch the traffic for a couple of moments. Idly wonder what to do for the rest of the day.

Then I see the girl.

Management was right. She’s not quite a teenager, I figure. Dressed in the uniform of her kind, sneakers, jeans and a red puffy jacket. She’s wearing a small daypack. I know it’s her because she’s looking right at me from the other side of the street. Her face is familiar. But I don’t know her.

Her image plays hide and seek in the traffic. She looks vulnerable against the city backdrop. There’s no room in my life for the vulnerable. I turn and walk on.

Down the road I feel I’m still being watched. Eventually I stop and look across the road. She’s there. Watching me.

I look along the street. There’s a crosswalk coming up. I start walking again, not watching her. But I know she’ll be there.

I wait for the signal. She stands at the other side. The signal says cross. I hesitate, then walk. She waits. Says nothing when I stop in front of her.

“You lookin’ for me, kid?” I say finally.

A couple of seconds, then she nods.

“What for? Should I know you?”

She shakes her head.

This one-sided conversation is unnerving. “C’mon, kid. You got something to say, tell me. Otherwise, beat it.”

She still has that overall vulnerable look, but close up there’s something tough behind. Familiar, but I can’t place it. I look at her for a couple of moments more, then shake my head. “Like I said, kid, beat it. Don’t follow me, OK?”

I turn and start to walk away. I get a few steps, then I hear a child voice behind. “Lela sent me.”

If anything is to stop me, that is it. But I give myself time before I turn. “Who?” I ask, loud enough for her to hear above the traffic.

“Lela. She sent me.”

I turn then. “Lela’s dead,” I say, my tone flat. “She’s been dead this three years.”

The kid stands her ground. “She left me a note.”

I finally see something. Maybe it had been there anyhow and I didn’t want to see it. “You’re her ... daughter?”

She nods, hunches her jacket against a wind that whips around the intersection.

“She never told me about a kid.”

The girl shrugs. “They never told me about my mother until a while ago.”

“Who didn’t?”

“The sisters. The nuns where I grew up.”

This is going to be a longer story than can be told at a traffic light. The smart part of me says I don’t want to hear it. “Not my business, kid. Go back to the nuns.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“They only keep us until we’re twelve. Then we go to state residential school.”

I spread my hands. “So go to state school.”

She shakes her head. Her mouth has a stubborn line, one that I can relate to. I didn’t go to the state school, either, after my mother died. I ran. That’s how I got onto the streets.

“You ran.” I say.

I see it in her face. I shake my head. “Sorry, kid. Like I said, not my business.” I turn, ready to walk.

“I have Lela’s note,” she says quietly. Like her mother used to talk.

Now I don’t hear the traffic any more. I don’t see it either. All I see is Lela’s head exploding the windscreen.

There’s a Wendy’s on every other block in downtown Calgary, so I bring her to the next one I see.

She orders all over the card. Classic Burger with bacon and fries, fruit dish, Nesquik chocolate milk. She clears everything methodically. I guess that in the convent the kids learn to eat everything whether they like it or not.

I sip a coffee. I say nothing until she has finished the last of the food. She licks her fingers, then wipes them with a napkin, carefully, completely. Rolls the used paper into a tidy package and puts it on her empty plate. By then I’ve checked a few things out. Her clothes are still pretty clean and she doesn’t smell. I reckon it’s only a day or two since she ran.

“How’d you find me?” I ask.

She lifts her daypack, unzips a pocket, pulls out a crumpled envelope. She pushes it across the table. “The nuns gave me this when they put me in the car for the state school. My mother gave it to them a few years ago. Said I was to get it on my twelfth birthday if she ... if she didn't come back."

I look at the envelope. It’s addressed simply to Gemma. I hadn’t even asked her name. “You didn’t see her when she called?”

She shakes her head. “Hadn’t known she was alive. She gave me up to the nuns when I was two. Couldn’t cope, the sisters said. They told me it was best for me, but I don’t remember.”

I don’t know much about kids. But I’ve read that they can remember from very early. Maybe her infant mind blotted out the before when she was left. A trauma reaction. “So what’s in the letter?”

She shrugs. “Read it. You’re in it.”

I don’t want to. Lela is gone. I killed her. I can’t bring her back.

I sit there, lift my nearly empty cup to my lips. But the coffee is cold and bitter. I make a face, put it down, too fast. Brown drops splash the envelope. I pick up a napkin and reach to mop it. “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to mess.”

She doesn’t comment. And I’m now holding the envelope even though I don’t want to. I put a finger and thumb inside, pull slowly at the single folded sheet.

The first thing is the date. A week before the accident. Lela would have known she was pregnant when she decided that her first child had a right to know where she came from. By the end Lela is telling Gemma that she will be getting a sister, and when she is born they will all be together again.

The middle bit is Lela telling Gemma that she has been living with someone. She hopes they might marry, but they have to discuss that. She also say she’s sorry for leaving Gemma with the sisters for all those years. The language is simple. There's no attempt at excuse. But she does hope that the sisters have given her daughter a better start in life than Gemma would have had if Lela had kept her in the bad times.

There’s a mention of the Gaugin. When I was with Lela, we lived in the apartment she had rented before I met her. But she knew I had lived at the hotel before. Maybe she wanted Gemma to have a point of reference in case she needed it.

Gemma sucks her chocolate milk through a straw.

I have nothing to give beyond this breakfast. “Kid, I can’t help you. Go to state school, learn what you can. It isn’t the best, but it’s better than the street.” I pause. “Believe me. I’ve been the street route. It isn’t good.”

The straw gurgles empty in her glass. She puts it aside. “What was my Mom like?”

Since the accident, I’ve only thought of Lela in the crash, and the minutes ahead of the crash when I was angry. But Gemma’s question is a key to the door of a better past. It throws me. I point at her empty glass. “You want another?”

She nods. “And a waffle. With ice cream and syrup.”

This kid has some appetite. I call a waitress and put in the order. When it comes, I’m ready as I’m going to be.

So I talk about the Lela I met one day. The Lela who thought she saw something that I didn’t see myself. I tell her of the Lela who didn’t talk about her past, and who didn’t judge the past of others. I recall her compassion, totally alien to my experience before her. I tell her how, for the first time, Lela was the reason I opened myself to somebody else. At least a little bit.

Finally I tell Gemma how Lela died. How I killed her. That’s tough to lay on a youngster, but I figure she has a right to know. Besides, it should help convince her that I’m not the one she should be pinning any hopes on.

All the time I’m talking I’m not looking at the kid. Like in the Catholic confession box, it’s easy to let it out because the priest is at the other side of a screen and there’s no eye contact. When I’m finished, I feel tired. Like it’s the end of the day instead of the beginning. I catch the waitress’s eye and signal for the check.

“She sounds nice,” the kid says. She’s finished eating and the glass is empty too. She’s gazing across the table at me, her expression solemn. But I don’t see what I’m expecting. I don’t see anger. I don’t see blame. What I do see is a small replica of Lela.

“She is, kid. Uh ... she was.”

She studies me for a couple of moments. “I’m glad you knew her,” she says. She gets up from the table. She puts on her puffy jacket, lifts her dayback by a strap. “Thanks for the breakfast.” Her voice is steady, but it is still the voice of a child. It’s a ricochet puck that slides right by me. Before I can get up she’s heading for the door. By the time I stand and drop a couple of bills on the table, she’s gone.

I walk quickly outside. I look up and down. Her red jacket bobs out in a group crossing an intersection a block away. I jink across the street through the traffic. Some drivers have to brake, sound their annoyance. I ignore them, make it to the other side.

I can’t see the kid now. But at least I know the direction. I break into a run. There are only two ways she will go, straight along this street or down the next one to my right. At the lights I still don’t see her. A woman stands on the corner, maybe waiting for somebody.

“A kid, young girl, red puffy jacket,” I say. “You see her?”

She hesitates. “My ... niece,” I say quickly. “She’s upset, just lost her Mom.”

The woman nods, points down the cross street.

“Thanks,” I mutter. Step up my pace. If I miss her on this one, the odds are against me being as lucky again. In the city, people don’t see people.

I catch up a block further on. She’s looking at a bus map. I stop a few feet away, catch my breath.

“Gemma?”.

She looks around. I see in her eyes that she didn’t expect me to follow.

“It’s OK, kid. But we need to talk some more.”

I take her to the Glenbow Museum, down on 9th Avenue. OK, just because I deal doesn’t mean I’m not interested in culture. Besides, my business hours are later in the day and I often have time to kill. Museums and galleries are good places to be, in from the cold without having to spend much money. I figure it’s neutral ground for me and the kid.

Maybe it isn’t. The Glenbow is where I first met Lela.

I like the Charlie Russell paintings of the Old West. So we sit on a bench in the room where they hang his ‘Seeking the Trail’. Russell managed to capture the dignity of the Indians on the Great Plains before it disappeared under the relentless tide of us and our crass ways. I point at the painting. “What do you think?”

She looks at it. “Freedom,” she says quietly. “We took it from them.” If I had any doubt about her being Lela’s daughter, I don’t have now. She has the same way of thinking. Some of it rubbed off on me, though maybe not enough.

There’s nobody else in the room this time of the morning. I need to say something, but I don’t know what it should be. In the end, because any more silence would be impossible to cross, I just jump in. “I need you to go to school, kid.”

“Call me Gemma.”

“I need you to go to school, Gemma.”

She thinks on this, raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

I have the answer. “So you don’t turn out like me. Or worse.”

“How bad is that?” She has the mind of a Jesuit.

“Too bad for you to want it,” I say. I’m thinking that I wish somebody might have told me the same thing once. And that I might have listened.

She gets up from the bench. Takes a wander around the room, stops at a couple of the other pieces. In the end she comes back to the ‘Trail’. Stares at it for a while.

“It was easier then,” she says eventually.

“Why?” I try it her way. Ask the questions.

She shrugs. “Everyone knew who they were.”

“Do you know who you are?”

She nods.

“Who?”

Her small smile is like what Lela used to give me. “I’m me.”

I realise then that it wasn't herself she'd meant when she talked about it being easier in the time of the Indians. But I take the hook without even thinking about it. “And who is you?”

She looks directly into me. “Maybe you won’t take the chance to know?”

I know the difference between ‘take’ and ‘get’.

We stand outside the museum. The sun has shifted the earlier cloud, but it isn’t much warmer. I look at the kid. Gemma. Her expression is Lela's calm one. I turn back to the street. It doesn't look like how I've known it.

I wonder how I’ll convince management to let us both stay in the Gaugin until I find an apartment suitable for a father and adopted daughter. I need to talk to the nuns too, find out how I go about adopting Lela's child.

I also need to find another way of making a living. Lela didn't want her kid brought up by a dealer.

None of this is going to be easy. But I think I see just the faintest hint of light in the far distance.

© November 2009 Brian Byrne

Phone books fall like dinosaurs

2009-09-21T14:45:00.003+01:00

The new phone books were delivered this morning. And reminded me how long it has been since I used one. Or, to be precise, that I can't remember the last time I did.

How quickly things change. A decade ago we didn't all have mobile phones, with our personal phone directories on them. We didn't have the Internet, which is where I get most of my phone numbers now, thanks to the on-line Eircom phone book. Or I might even Google the company I want, if it is a business I'm looking for. Very occasionally, if I'm out and about, I might have to resort to calling up one of the number enquiry services, though I'm never quite sure of which one to use, despite the crazy twins antics of one company which advertises a lot on TV.

Anyhow, thinking about all this brought me back much further, as far back as my childhood, actually. I guess we were one of the lucky families of the time to have a phone at home. A wind up model, the number Kilcullen 22. The bar, the family business, was Kilcullen 4, reflecting that my grandfather was what would today be called an 'early adopter' of technology (the Garda Station and the Presbytery, I think, had a couple of the numbers before his).

We wound the handle on the instrument to alert the postmistress, Miss Buckley. When she answered, we gave her the number we wanted, and in a complex plugging and unplugging of wires with brass ends on the switchboard against the back wall behind her counter she would eventually put us through. When we finished our call, we spun the phone handle again to alert her to disconnect, though there was always the suspicion that she knew anyhow.

Over the years the system developed, and eventually we got direct dial phones, and longer numbers. There were more people to ring, too, as the service expanded, although slowly enough. A year's waiting on the list to get a line wasn't unusual, and when the demand really got going, that extended to three and more years in some parts of the country. When I moved into my house four decades ago, I ran an extension line from my parents' home so we had a phone link while we were waiting for our own line.

Even into the early 90s, it was still something of a marathon run to get a phone for one's business. I remember, involved with a new Naas-based company at that time, we resorted to buying one of the new 'mobile' phones, the fondly-remembered 'Motorola brick' so we could be in touch with our clients while we waited for a landline. Fortunately, the then infant mobile phone service, limited to the cities of Dublin and Cork, had coverage just down to Naas.

Many years ago I had occasion to write an article on Timahoe Graveyard, some 10 years after President Richard Nixon had visited to see where his forebears were buried. I talked to some local people who were still very grateful to the President, because he had 'brought them the phone'. It seemed that ten new lines had been run into the little rural backwater for the American Secret Service, and when the visit was over ten local families had phones about five years earlier than they might have hoped.

There was a time not so long ago when phone boxes were lifelines for those without 'the phone' at home, or away from home. With an 'A' button pressed to drop the coins through if a connection was made, and a 'B' one to get the money back if there wasn't an answer. In hotels and pubs, the 'coin-box' phone was an essential for commercial travellers who needed to get orders in, during or at the end of their working day. When the new-fangled 'card' phones came along, obviating the need for change in one's pocket, it was considered progress tantamount to that of landing a man on the moon.

But then the mobile revolution came to Ireland. It was actually a second time around from the days of the Motorola brick, and really only came about when competition arrived in the form of Esat Digifone, Denis O'Brien's alternative mobile phone network. Never mind the cloud that hangs over that business now, it began the process of providing everyone with their own personal communications device. A process that is now not just complete, but has moved up a couple of notches by offering so many other services in conjunction with the Internet.

So, my current iPhone keeps me in touch with all my favourite news sources, my email, even radio stations and TV if I want. It permits me to update my own websites from four thousand metres up in the Andes or just down in the pub. I can keep my online calendar updated, send photographs home or to the 'net, write messages and even longer articles. I use it to interview people, for later broadcast, and I have broadcast on radio from it. Oh, and it makes ordinary phone calls too. With a built-in 'phone book' of all my contacts.

So when I heard the 'thud' of the latest 045 phone book on my doorstep this morning, shrinkwrapped with its Golden Pages companion, was I hearing another dinosaur finally biting the dust? Gone the way of Miss Buckley, the rotary dialler, buttons 'A' and 'B', and the phonecard? And our recently removed last street phone boxes?

I think so. I haven't been tempted to cut open the shrinkwrap yet ...

Bring Them Home

2009-08-29T20:15:00.000+01:00

Kilcullen is kind of lost in the summertime. There's no focus, no point to aim for, and we drift. Pretty soon the summer is over and we haven't noticed anything special, except maybe that it rained again. But we don't have anything to look back on and say: 'That was good; let's do it again next year'.

OK, we have a couple of small points in summer. The Community Day run by the Lions, which this year was coincidental to the one-off of the FBD Milk Ras start. The contribution to National Heritage Week. There are summer camps of various kinds and interests, all for the younger people. There's nothing, though, that brings the community together in an effort to be a summer celebration of our community.

That community is a lot more than those like me who are generations in the village. A lot more than the many lovely new people who have come to live here in recent years. A lot more than the straggling shape of our town and its mish-mash of old and newer buildings.

It is also our memories. It is our photographs of old and more recent times. It is the mementos of times and people gone. And it is the prospect of our town's and our children's future here.

It is also, and we sometimes can forget this, the very many people in other parts of the country and in other parts of the world who have a tether of some kind to Kilcullen. Whether it be the descendants of those who emigrated back in the middle of the 20th century, or those who went away themselves more recently. For whatever reasons, economic, search for adventure, or romance. And who decided to stay wherever they ended up.

These last are our diaspora. Kilcullen's own abroad. Sure, the ease of modern travel and better economic circumstances have made it possible for them to visit back here occasionally, certainly much more so than the waves of emigrants who went forever in the hungrier times of our history. And through the miracle of the internet, with Skype and email and digital photography, it is much easier to stay close to our loved ones abroad even if the physical distance is great. In the almost five years since I set up the Kilcullen Diary I have become very aware of how much our Wild Geese want to keep in touch with what is happening back here in the Kilcullen 'mother ship'. Quite often to the point that they become aware of things that are going on back here more quickly than their parents or siblings still living in Kilcullen.

How many such Wild Geese, first, second, and even third generation, are there? God only knows. But there are many. Very many.

So here's my thought for a possible focus to our future summers. Perhaps beginning with 2010 if enough people think the idea has merit. Let's have a 'Bring Them Home' festival. An organised core event that could provide a fringe of other activities which would be sewn together as a rich quilt of experience, heritage, memories, entertainment, and even consideration of our future.

Many of our Kilcullenites living away who do come home on visits do so for direct family reasons, not because there is a community impetus. It doesn't mean that they don't enjoy the community while they are here, but that is secondary. And that's fair enough; family is, after all, the strongest binder.

But what if we gave them a reason to all come together over a particular time in the middle of our summer? Not alone would they be maintaining a tie with their families and the village community itself, but it would also be an oppportunity for many to renew ties with each other from their locations scattered around the world.

The specifics of such an initiative need to be teased out. But here's my tuppence worth of pointers.

I think a weekend would be too short, and too confining for travel and accommodation arrangements. Perhaps a looser three weeks, maybe the first three weeks of August? It wouldn't be necessary for those coming to be here for the three weeks, but any week or ten days within it could be enough.

The event should have many elements, so that at all times there are attractions for every interest. Because it is possible that there are as many interests as there are those from our town living away.

So, just to throw out a few. We have a rich and deep heritage, so there could be a number of tours and talks scattered throughout the three weeks that delve into our past and how it played into our present. This could include informal gatherings of people telling their own stories and memories, not just of Kilcullen itself, but of the places where Kilcullenites ended up.

We have much music and drama within us, and that could be easily worked into some pageantary that further weaves colour into the whole experience.

We have many sports facilities, with the Boxing Club and the GAA probably most in the memories of the older emigrants. Entertainments and episodes from these could likewise be integrated into the programme.

The pubs, of course, would be important parts of the whole event. More than just meeting places, they could in turn be locations for a number of the other elements of the festival.

Many of our Wild Geese have done well in their adopted home places. There is a resource pool out there that might be tapped to develop our home community in some way, economic, social, or cultural.

Perhaps a book of the event might be compiled, to become part of our modern history, the community, and a foundation stone for something that ideally could become an annual festival.

Some of the proceedings could be broadcast on the Internet, for the benefit of those who didn't make it home. Indeed, the internet could make it interactive for these, and they could take part in some of the events from wherever they live.

I needn't take it any further at this stage. There is an opportunity here which may be worth further discussion. So, I now open it to the floor, so to speak.

The idea could die. Don't let it go, though, without discussion.

Balenciaga on the Beach

2009-08-28T11:46:00.006+01:00

(My inspiration for this one was when I saw a print in a gallery, of a woman in a long dress looking out to sea, with the back end of an old American car in the picture behind her.)

She noticed the car when she crested the path through the dunes. It wasn’t a beach on which people drove, so it annoyed her a little.

It was old. But clean and shiny old. Chrome details flashed sunbursts of light bounced from the waves. There wasn’t anyone nearby. The owner might be along the beach, at the other end towards the cliff. If the car was left for the tide, its brightwork wouldn’t last long. She shrugged away the thought and turned to the shore, the small box warm between her hands.

Jan had always shared her life with the ocean. In times of both sadness and happiness. Expanses of water represented for her life’s real force. The sea tore down and rebuilt coastlines. It carried seeds and animals from one part of the world to another. It fertilised barren volcanic islets. Just being near its energy could often heal human suffering too. Today she had come to grieve a friend’s death.

Since moving to northern California she had rejoiced in coastal sunsets that could never happen on the eastern seaboard. It was yet a few hours off evening, but the descending disc already had set an individual mood. One which, as it happened, reflected her own. Today streaks of clouds softened the sun.

She slipped out of her sandals and walked into the water. Waves splashed flecks of damp on her knee-length chinos. The soft sand massaged her soles as the water ran out again. Small but intense pleasures. Sounds of water, wind and seabirds fought for her attention. But she had something else on her mind.

You drew the short straw, Maggie, she thought. You didn’t get a fair shot. When Maggie died Jan was angry. At first she thought it a rage on behalf of her dead friend, but soon came to understand that it was for her own loss. “Sorry,” she said now, out loud to the ocean. “Sorry, hon, for being selfish.”

She delayed the moment, but eventually pulled the top from the box and tipped it over. A residue of gritty dust fell into the waves. It took only seconds in the flow and ebb for them to disappear. She dropped the container in, watched as it bobbed away. They had told her it was biodegradable, would be quickly absorbed back into nature. Good friend memory moments flooded in as she watched it take water and sink, and gradually she felt the remaining bitterness seep away. Goodbye, Maggie, she threw a final thought into the shifting water and light.

Not yet, she thought she heard. So strongly that it gave her a moment’s pause. Then she turned back to the beach.

She wasn’t alone here any more. A man stood above the line of the waves. The lens of a camera slung from his neck flashed gold in the sun. He was good looking in a tousled kind of way, his fair hair streaked, she guessed from being in the open air a lot.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi yourself,” she answered.

“I was watching.” He said. “Hope you don’t mind?"

She shrugged. “Keeping a promise to a friend.” She walked out, stuck out her hand. “I’m Jan.”

“Steve,” he said. His grip was firm, without being macho. She liked it. She nodded at the car. “Yours?”

He shook his head, gave her a lopsided grin. “I rented it for the day. From a movie supply outfit. It’s a prop for a photo-shoot.”

“It’s nice.”

He looked at his watch, mouthed exasperation. “It is,” he agreed. “Except the model hasn’t turned up. The light will be gone.”

“That’s too bad.” She looked down, located and shuffled into her sandals. “I guess you’ll have to come back another time.”

“Can’t. The magazine needs the shots tomorrow. Even if I got an extension, there’s weather coming in.”

California didn’t often get much weather extremes. Which was why a storm moving in the next day had made the news. Something to do with El Niño, the periodic condition that happened off the South American Pacific coastline. “That’s tough,” she said.

“Guess they’ll have to use something else,” he said.

She figured it wasn’t the first time he’d had that kind of problem. She liked how he was being philosophical about it. “What’s the shoot?” she asked.

“Part of a retro fashion spread. From the early sixties. That’s why the car.”

She hadn’t intended what she said next. “You have a dress?”

He looked at her, curiously. “In the car.”

“What size?”

“Twelve. It’s a Balenciaga.”

She whistled. Old European fashion house. Very exclusive. The dress was probably more expensive than the car. “I’m a twelve,” she said. “It’s not a very model size.”

“Models weren’t as skinny then,” he chuckled. “Balenciaga liked shape.”

She couldn’t help a smile of her own. She knew she had shape. She and Maggie used to joke about it. Maggie had a model figure, and always claimed to be jealous of Jan’s more curvy one.

“I’m no model, but if it would help, I’ll wear it.” What on earth was she doing? He claimed to be a photographer, but he could be anything. A serial killer, even. At that one, she stomped on her imagination.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yes — if it helps.”

He looked at the dropping sun. Decided. He dug into a pocket and held out some keys. “The dress is on the back seat. There’s a hat too.”

“Give me five minutes.” She took the keys and walked by him. He lifted his camera to his eye, moved around, checking light and views.

Jan got in the car, wrinkling her nose at the pungency of the old vinyl in the heat. After a moment she clicked the doorlocks. She trusted him, really, but why take chances? The dress was white, long. Not what she’d wear for herself. But then, her wardrobe wasn’t at the Balenciaga level. She remembered reading once that Jackie Kennedy had been ticked off by her President husband for her lavish spending on the French couturier’s creations.

The old car was roomier than her little VW, so it didn’t take her long to slip out of her chinos and blouse and get into the dress. It was a pretty good fit. She found the hat, old-fashioned elegant. She wondered about shoes, but when she got out of the car she found that the dress trailed, hiding her feet. Her sandals would do fine.

He was at the shoreline, looking out to sea. She had the rather nice thought that he’d been making sure she wasn’t uncomfortable while changing. “Ready,” she called.

He came over, stopped some feet away. “Just stand here,” he said. Looking behind her at the car, then at the sky. “Look out to sea.” She moved into place and he walked behind her, out of her sight. She heard the camera begin to click, moving away. “Think like you’re on your own here,” she heard him say. “Do what you would if you were.”

She let her mind drift. Memories of fun days with Maggie wandered in. After a while she became aware of a weather change. Cloud gusted in and waves snapped at the sand instead of caressing it. A squall plucked at her dress. From the distance of wherever her thoughts had gone, it all became rather ominous.

“Sweet. Really sweet.” Startled from her reverie, she turned. Steve was beside her, his camera down, flashing the grin that she was beginning to find very attractive. “Done,” he said “At least, that’s all I’m going to get. Now it’s up to the magazine.”

The squall had moved on. Somewhat disoriented, she found herself oddly lost for words. She nodded, managed a smile. Both were silent for a few moments. “I’ll go take a walk,” he said then. “Let you change back.” He gave a little wave and wandered away.

Ten minutes later she was back outside the car. “Hey!” she called, waved when he turned from the shore. “I’m done.” He waved back, and walked up from the water edge. She watched him, enjoying it.

Busy at her work, she hadn’t been particularly interested in men for a while. “You’re takin’ root in that studio of yours, gal,” Maggie had said not long before she got sick. “It ain’t healthy. You need some lovin’, honey. You need to sip the nectar.” Maggie had always been very direct. Especially about men.

“You’re doing enough for both of us,” Jan had laughed. Her friend was a magnet to men, and made the most of it. Until little more than three months ago. From a full bloom flower Maggie had gone in that time to a handful of dust. Now scattered into the ocean she too had loved.

“Don’t be sad.” He was beside her now, showing a little concern. She shook her head, knowing though that she probably wasn’t convincing. “Not sad, just day-dreaming.”

He nodded, smiled. “Good. Listen, thanks for helping out.”

“No problem. It was a new experience.”

“A nice one, I hope?” His eyes twinkled.

“It was, thanks,” she smiled back. “What happens now?”

He packed his camera away in a bag he took from the car’s trunk, then began rummaging for something. “The magazine’s art editor goes through them. They use whatever they decide in the spread. Ah—” He pulled out a sheet of paper. “I need you to sign this.”

“What is it?”

He looked at her. “A waiver. Gives me permission to use your picture for commercial purposes. Still OK with that?”

“Sure. Anyhow, maybe your editor won’t think them good enough to use.” She flushed. “Whoops— I didn’t mean your photography.”

He shook his head, easing her embarassment with that smile again. “Oh, they’ll like them. You and the camera have something going. Has anyone ever told you that?”

A chat-up line, she wondered as she reached for the paper? He dug a pen from his pocket. “They’ll need your address.”

“Why?”

“To send the check. There’s a model fee.”

She laughed. “I’m not a model. I wouldn’t expect to be paid.” But she filled in the form and handed back paper and pen.

“It’s a commercial job,” he grinned. “You’re entitled.” He stuck out his hand. “Thanks again, Jan. You really saved my day. Hope it didn’t mess up yours?”

This time she held the handshake a fraction longer than before. “Nope. It got a lot more interesting.” She felt that she should do something now, for once, as Maggie had urged her to do. But she didn’t. Habit. Probably a bad one. “’Bye, then,” she said. “Nice meeting you, Steve.”

“Likewise.” He smiled again. She gave him a wave and turned away. Then she stopped and looked back. He was closing the car’s trunk. “Forgot to ask—”

“Yes?”

“The pictures. Where will I see them?”

“’American Vogue’,” he said.

“Thanks,” she waved again, then walked away to her car. Wondering what Maggie would have thought about her almost-reclusive best friend appearing in the pages of the nation’s biggest fashion magazine?

For the same reason that she couldn’t afford Balenciaga gowns, Jan’s home wasn’t located directly on the coast. But twenty minutes inland from the beach wasn’t at all bad. On the edge of the hills, the house was high enough to give her good sunsets. By the time she got home, this day’s one was nearly done.

She had a light salad with some fruit juice, then pulled a much-washed smock over her clothes. Her ‘studio’ was really a grand name for one of the house’s bedrooms. She worked there so she didn’t have to rent another space for her business of providing individual art for decorating corporate buildings.

Among the commissions she had in play, a seascape for an office foyer was almost complete. A little more work and she could make it money in the bank. But this evening something else was pulling at her. She took a fresh canvas and set it on an easel. Squeezed some paints onto a palette, dipped a brush. Made first strokes. The piece moved quickly. Outlines became a scene. A beach. A woman stood in a long white dress looked off the canvas. The tailfins of a car.

Jan finally stood back. The face was almost fully detailed. It wasn’t anybody that Jan knew. But her expression was pensive. And had something else Jan couldn’t quite pin down.

Outside was now complete darkness. Time to finish, she decided. She put her brush into a jar of cleaning fluid. Pulled off her smock and hung it on the door. She reached to turn off the light, looked back. Now she saw what else was in the woman’s expression. Fear.

‘Slap, slap, slap’. Feet behind, running on the sand that was wet, soft, holding her in slow motion. Sucking at her feet as she frantically tried to keep ahead. ‘Slap, slap, slap’. She felt herself falling.

Sweating, Jan sat up. In her bed, not on the beach. No chasing feet noises. But her heart was thumping and her lungs felt as though she had been gasping for air. Her night clock showed six-thirty. A pre-waking bad dream. She got up and went to the kitchen. Put on the kettle and then walked out on the deck. The promised bad weather hadn’t yet arrived.

When the kettle shrieked she made coffee and brought it back to the deck. Watched the day brighten. Breakfast later, a shower and dressing, and it was time to work again. She was, after all, running a business. Deadlines to meet, commissions to finish. But for some reason she was reluctant to cross the hall to her studio.

She busied herself with housework. Two hours further on, essential dusting, brushing and polishing was done. A load of clothes swirled in the washing machine. She picked up her bag, closed the door behind her, and got into her car.

Jan wasn’t surprised to find herself back at the beach. There, the weather was going downhill. A cooler wind from the ocean whipped frothlets off nervy wave tips. There wouldn’t be a sunset here this evening.

She walked far enough up so that her sandals didn’t get wet. The sea usually cleared her head, but today it was broodingly uncooperative. She couldn’t get the image of the woman in her painting out of her mind. It was all Maggie’s doing, she thought. If she hadn’t come down to the beach yesterday, she wouldn’t have met Steve. She wouldn’t have worn the dress. She wouldn’t have a strange painting in her studio. She wouldn’t be confused.

Above the grumpy sound of the ocean she became aware of a ‘slap, slap, slap’ of feet on the softer part of the beach. Running up behind her. She turned.

“I figured you might be here,” Steve said, a little breathless as he slowed. “You sure take catching up with.”

He had called her house, then followed his hunch about the beach. Spotted her in the distance from the dunes. He’d called out, but knew she was unlikely to hear him against the wind. So he had run. “Things are getting a little weird,” he said.

They sat on a rock in the lee of the cliff. He fished in his pocket, held out some photographs. From yesterday, Jan wearing the dress. “At the back, behind the car?” he prompted. She looked closer. In several prints she saw a figure. Shadowy against the dunes. A man, maybe wearing a long dark coat. She looked up. “There wasn’t anybody else here yesterday.”

“Nope. But that’s what my camera saw.” For now, he wasn’t smiling.

Thunder cracked. Ominous initial spatters turned in seconds to a roaring deluge. They ran, but by the time they reached their cars, they were wet through. His car today was a well used SUV, foreign. She saw the name Land Rover.

“My place?” she shouted above what had become a rolling succession of thunderclaps. “You can dry off.”

His hair was dark and flattened from the rain. Jan didn’t want to know just how bedraggled she must look herself. He nodded. “Thanks. I’ll follow you.”

The storm was still coastal and by the time they got to Jan’s house they were in sunshine again. She showed him the guest room and found him a man’s tee-shirt and swim shorts to wear while she ran his wet clothes through the dryer. “My friend Maggie had men friends over,” she answered his unspoken question.

She made coffee and they sat on the deck. Steve pulled a sheet of paper from his bag, pushed it across the table. “You might like to know whose dress you were wearing.”

A copy of a newspaper story. ‘Anthea Delacroix Missing’, the headline ran. Dateline 25 June, 1962. Jan drew in a breath. The head shot was grainy, had little tone. But it was enough. She stood up. “Come with me,” she said softly, sounding calmer than she felt. “I need to show you something.”

He looked at the news clipping. Back at the painting again. The woman Jan had painted was the woman in the clipping, Anthea Delacroix. The face on her canvas was somebody real, though somebody she had never heard of.

“They never found her,” Steve said. They were back on the deck, having given up trying to solve the puzzle in her studio. He had made a call to the magazine’s researcher. “Police figured foul play, but without a body it didn’t go anywhere.”

Jan was looking again at the clipping. “They usually suspect the husband first.”

He shrugged. “She might just have run?”

“Rich heiress flees marriage into oblivion?” Jan shook her head. She didn’t buy that. She sipped at her coffee. “What happened the husband?”

“The researcher thinks he remarried. She’ll call me.” He looked at his watch, then back at her apologetically. “I have to go, Jan. I’ve a client to meet later and I need to get home and change.”

She nodded, then got up and went inside. When he followed through she had taken his things from the dryer and was stuffing them into a Wal-Mart plastic bag. “Thanks,” he said, taking the bag. He hesitated, gave her that grin again. “It’s been a funny couple of days.”

“Sure has.”

He hesitated. “Listen. Would you, um, like to meet tomorrow? Maybe an early dinner? I might have found out more.”

Her laugh was gentle. “If this is a roundabout way of asking for a date ... sure.” Maggie, she thought, was somewhere pumping her fist in the air.

“Hey, that’s good,” he said, his grin a confirmation of his words. “Do you have a cell?”

She shook her head. “Used to. Too intrusive, I dumped it. I’m mostly here, or clients get me by email.”

He pulled out his wallet and gave her a card. “Here’s my cell number. You call me, OK?”

She felt almost schoolgirl giddy. It was nice. “I’ll call around noon,” she said. “See how it’s going.”

For a moment she thought he might kiss her. But it passed. “Bye,” he said, squeezing her hand instead. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

She watched him drive out of the yard. He waved before he went out of sight. As she went into the house she thought she heard Maggie chuckle. “Sip the nectar, honey.”

She ate sparingly. Washed up quickly and went to her studio. She stood looking at her latest work in progress. She had no doubt now that she had indeed painted the face of Anthea Delacroix. Despite never having seen the woman before, or even knowing of her.

She picked up a brush. Dipped it, flicked it on the canvas. With a few strokes she had a figure outlined in the background. A man, in a long coat.

She stopped and thought for a while. Then got another blank canvas, set it on a second easel. She had a portrait an hour later. A man, longish face, heavy nose. Intense and brooding. Nobody she knew, no more than Anthea’s had been the evening before.

She put her brushes to soak and wiped the palette. From the doorway she again looked back. Maybe it was how she had placed the two easels, but the man seemed to be staring intently at the woman. From Jan’s perspective, he looked ... menacing?

She closed the door. Decided the rest of the evening should be spent with a bottle of red and a book. Preferably not a Stephen King.

Maybe with the help of the wine, Jan slept that night without any strange dreams. When she woke, and had worked up her first cup of coffee of the day, she decided that she needed to get back to proper work. Clients had to be satisfied. The last couple of days had been distracting tangents.

In the morning light, she didn’t see in the two paintings the intense emotions of the evening before. She looked through her order book. Two current pieces were promised for delivery in a week or so. Locating the first from the works stacked against the wall, she got busy. The morning passed easily and by lunchtime she was satisfied with progress. She picked up the phone, dialled from the card. He answered, and she felt her heart do an unfamiliar flip. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You still want to meet?” Giving him an out. Bad habit again.

“Sure. My idea, remember?” She could hear the smile at the other end.

“You got anywhere in mind?”

He told her. Neutral, not romantic. “Good,” she said. “See you there.

She hung up, then did something she hadn’t for quite a while. Started to worry about what she should wear. That distracted her work for at least half of the afternoon. Finally she gave up and began trying on different outfits. Not that she had that many.

About to drive off, she thought of something. Back in the studio she took the second painting from its easel and slipped it into a protective sleeve. She put it on the car seat and left the yard.

“Glad you’re here.”

“You didn’t think I’d call?” she grinned.

He shrugged, smiling too. “Guess I wasn’t sure. But I really am glad.”

He was dressed smart casual. After all the clothing combinations tried in the last couple of hours, she too had finally kept it simple.

The restaurant was an Irish bar that had escaped becoming trendy. They ordered steaks and trimmings. He took a beer, she had wine. The place wasn’t far from her home, so she reckoned a taxi ride was a probable option. Suggestions of another she put out of her mind.

‘Sip the nectar, honey’ she heard in her head. Took an unladylike gulp at her wine instead.

“I found out more.”

They had dealt with the steaks, had a couple more drinks. Their conversation had been of the kind that people have when trying to get to know each other. Now Steve brought them back to what both had been trying to ignore. It was a bit like she’d felt when coming down after her first flight in a sailplane. “What kind of more?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “The husband. He did marry again. Anthea’s sister, May. Half-sister, actually. Anthea’s father was a widower, had married again.”

“And—?”

He shrugged. “There wasn’t much more in the newspaper morgue. Anthea was never found. She was officially certified dead after the statutory period. The husband — his name was Tarsin, by the way, Jack Tarsin — then married May.” He pulled a paper from his jacket, a copy of another clipping. “This was Anthea’s wedding photo.”

Anthea she recognised. The dress too. It seemed the woman had got married in the Balenciaga. But there was something else. If Jan had been still holding her cup, it would have crashed on the table. She stood up, a little unsteady. “Wait here a minute, Steve.”

“OK,” he said, clearly concerned. Even more so when, instead of going to the ladies’ room as he had expected, she left through the restaurant’s front door. She came back a minute later, carrying a folder.

“Maybe you should order us both another drink.” Her smile seemed a little forced.

Steve raised a finger to their waiter. “More wine?”

She shook her head. “Whiskey. Irish. No ice, splash of soda.”

He ordered the same for himself. When the waiter left, Jan took the canvas from its cover. She held it up, face across the table. He frowned, picked up the news clipping and looked at the wedding picture. “Same guy,” he murmured, lifting his eyes to hers. “The husband.”

She nodded. “I painted that last night. From nothing. It came out of my head.” She told him about putting the outline figure on the first painting, as it had appeared in his photographs. “It had no detail. But I did this separate painting. Which—” she touched the paper “—which is him.”

Their drinks arrived. Jan sipped at the whiskey, its warm smokey flavour doing its best to counter the sudden chill which she felt. She looked at him. “I ... I’m really spooked, Steve.”

“Me too,” he muttered. “I’m not into the supernatural thing. But this is just ... bizarre.”

She ran a finger around the rim of her glass, then looked up. “During the shoot, I thought the weather got funny. But there’s no sign of that in your pictures?”

He shook his head. “The weather didn’t change, Jan. It was perfect. Just what I’d hoped for.”

She brooded for a while, then picked up the clipping. “This was forty-seven years ago. He would have been, what, twenty-six?”

He glanced at the picture. “Guess so.”

“He’d be old now,” she mused “Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “But I will find out.

She shivered again. “Would, um ... would you please take me home, Steve?”

At her house, he walked with her to the door. “Coffee?” she asked.

He squeezed her hand. “Only if you want some. Otherwise, I think we should both get some sleep.” He hesitated. “You want me to come in and check around?”

She was tempted to say ‘yes’, but shook her head. “No. There’s nothing to worry about out here.” She stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. “Call you tomorrow?”

He nodded. “I’d like that.” He squeezed her hand again. “Good night, Jan.”

“‘Night.”

After he had driven away, she leaned against the inside of the door. “Not tonight, Maggie,” she whispered. “Not because I’m scared. Wrong reason.”

She didn’t put the painting of Jack Tarsin back on its easel. Instead, she left it in its cover on the kitchen table. Give Anthea a break, she thought. Then she went to bed.

She woke in the night. Something was trying to get her attention. She got up, went to her studio. She gazed at Anthea’s picture for a while, trying to pull open a door in her mind. Eventually she turned off the light and went back to bed.

She waited until after nine before making the call.”Steve? It’s Jan. Hi.”

“Hi you, too.” He sounded pleased to hear from her. “You sleep OK?”

“Yes.” She cut straight to the reason for her call. “Do you still have the dress?”

“No. The agency took it back to the Museum. The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design. It has a couturier section. Seems that Anthea’s husband gave it to them after she disappeared. Said it was too upsetting to have around.”

“Could you get it again?”

“OK,” he said after the barest hesitation. “I’ll ask.”

She spent the rest of the morning working on her commissions. When the phone rang, it took her out of deep concentration. Wiping her hands on a rag, she picked up the handset.

“Hi, Jan.”

She felt that little flip again. “Hi. What’s new?”

“Jack and May Tarsin died five years ago. Car crash. No children. And there’s a twist.”

“Yes?”

“They lived in the Delacroix family home, where Anthea and May were brought up. When her parents died, it went to May. That house is just above the beach where I met you.”

No wonder there was so much atmosphere about the beach, Jan thought. “Any word on the dress?”

“They sent it straight over. They’re keen to keep me sweet because of the publicity with the spread.”

She hesitated, fighting a tinge of apprehension. “Can you bring it here?”

“Give me an hour?”

“Sure.” She hung up. For several minutes, she stared again at the painting of Anthea Delacroix. Eventually she cleaned up her brushes and palette and left.

When the Land Rover pulled into her yard it was rather more than the hour he had promised. “Sorry,” he said in her doorway a few moments later. “Traffic.” He had a box under his arm.

She took his hand.“No problem.”

“I think I know where you’re going with this,” he said, a bit bothered. “Firm it up for me?”

“It’s something that’s gotten into my head. If anyone else said it to me, I’d say they were crazy.”

He put an arm across her shoulder and squeezed. “Tell me anyhow. At this stage I’m the least likely to think that.”

When she finished, he sat quietly at the table where she had talked out her idea over coffee. “OK,” he murmured finally. “It’s worth a try. If it comes to nothing, only you and I know.” He raised a smile. “And I sure won’t tell if you don’t.”

She changed into the dress and they drove to the beach in his Land Rover. She put the hat on when she got out of the car. “OK. Ready, I guess.”

He held her hand as they walked through the gap in the dunes.

The beach was deserted, for which Jan was glad. Whatever might or might not happen, it was probably less likely to if there were others about. They stopped at the upper tide line.

“Let me go on from here,” she said. “Stay back. But watch.”

He squeezed her hand. “I’ll be close enough, don’t worry.”

The weather took a turn for the worse soon after she started walking. The sea got cranky and fractured. The sky darkened. Wind snatched at the dress. This time, she again felt the growing sense of fear, but more so. And it was, oddly, as if she was experiencing someone else’s panic. Suddenly she found herself running towards the cliff, the wet sand slowing her. Again she heard the sucking ‘slap, slap, slap’ behind. She stumbled, spinning with the fall. But, unlike in her dream, this time she got to see who was chasing her. A man. Jack Tarsin’s face. Her husband. She blinked. No, Anthea’s husband. She had jumbled flashes of memory. Scrambled emotions. Joy, confusion, betrayal, fear. A wedding celebration. A rumpled bed and discarded clothes. Somebody who shouldn’t have been where she was.

Tarsin was upon her. Hand raised, swinging. She put up her arms, knowing, though, that her attempt at protection was probably futile. A flash. Pain. Darkness.

Then she was an observer, looking at a woman lying in the shadow of the cliff. A kneeling man, leaning over her. A rock dropped to the sand, blood that had glistened its surface washing away in a receding wave. She saw the man stand, look back the way he had come. He waved. Jan tried to see, but the scene was disappearing. She got an impression of another figure.

She found herself back on the sand. A man kneeling over her. Instinctively she raised her hands. “Jan? It’s OK.” Steve said, taking her in his arms. “It’s OK, hon.”

A few minutes later they walked side by side back towards the dunes. Retracing two sets of footsteps, hers and his. Wherever she had been, she thought, there would have been a third set.

She left him in the kitchen making coffee. When she had changed out of the dress, she found he had also produced a couple of sandwiches. “I’m used to making do with what I find,” he said as he saw her smile.

In between bites, and eventually sips of the cooling coffee, she told him what she had been part of. “That other figure,” he said when she finished. “Was it familiar?”

She shook her head. “No. Too indistinct.” They sat at the table in silence. Eventually she stood. “I want to try something, Steve. Will you stay?”

He nodded. “Sure. Long as you want.”

She bent down and kissed him on the cheek again, thinking she’d have to do better soon. “Thanks. I’ll be in my studio. I think I need to be alone there.”

She went first to the original painting. Using black paint she added a second, smaller figure beside the outline of the man. Then she put aside Tarsin’s portrait and placed a fresh blank canvas on that easel. Soon, again, she found herself in a different place. When she finished she gazed for a few moments at a woman’s face, staring back at her. “Steve?” she called.

“Hi,” he said seconds later from the doorway. He came in and put his arm across her shoulders. She was getting to like that. “The third person?”

“Yes. Know her?”

He shook his head. “No.” The woman was pretty. Younger than Anthea, he thought. Maybe even vaguely like her. But there was something different about the eyes. She wasn’t a soft person, he thought. He looked at the portrait for a bit longer. “I reckon we need to take this further up the line,” he said then.

Steve had a friend in the Detective Squad, which meant that they didn’t have to get their story through a Desk Sergeant first. Jan was sure that would have consigned them immediately to the weirdos file.

The detective, Matt Dexter, listened without comment as Jan told everything. Steve added details of his own as appropriate. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she said at the end. “It sounds even crazier now, telling it to you.”

Dexter shrugged. “I get worse than that. A lot worse. Besides, I know this guy—” he nodded at Steve “—he can be oddball sometimes, but he’s not crazy.” He reached for his phone and punched buttons. “Marie? Listen, I need you to dig out an old cold case file. Delacroix. Anthea Delacroix.” He looked up at Steve. “When was it?”

He passed on the date, then put the phone down. He nodded at the canvasses stacked against a wall. “There’s something familiar there,” he said. “I worked cold cases a couple of years. Maybe I saw the file.”

After a few moments of thought he picked up the phone again, punched more buttons. “Traffic? Listen, it’s Dexter, Homicide. I need a report on a double road fatality, about five years ago. Hold on.” He looked through the notes he’d scribbled. “Tarsin. A couple, both killed. Yeah. Thanks.”

A young woman walked in with a faded file jacket. “Thanks, Marie,” Dexter said as she put them on his desk. She glanced at Jan and Steve as she left, giving them an appraising smile.

The detective leafed through the file’s contents until he came to the case status summary. It took him just a couple of moments to scan it, then he looked up. “There was pretty strong suspicion about the new husband. He came in for her inheritance when she was certified dead.” He put the sheet back, shaking his head. “No body, no witness, no case,” he sighed. “Long time, it’s not likely there’ll ever be evidence to reopen.”

His computer beeped. He reached for a mouse and jiggled it. “Mail,” he murmured, “from Traffic.” Another click, then his face changed. He spun the monitor around. “Look,” he said softly. “Anyone familiar?”

There were two people, both elderly. The man was Jack Tarsin, his strong features retained in age. Jan turned and looked at her newest picture against the wall, then back to the monitor. The woman’s image was much older, but there was no mistaking the expression in the eyes.

“Anthea’s sister,” the detective said. “May Delacroix. Later the second Mrs Jack Tarsin.” He spun the monitor back, then tapped a pen on the desk. “Jan, was there any way you could have seen these pictures before?”

She shook her head. “I never heard the name, or the story of Anthea Delacroix, before this week.”

He nodded. “OK. This is a long shot, and a little crazy. But if it finally closes this case, it’ll be worth it.”

They found the remains buried deep in the sand at the base of the cliff. There wasn’t more than bones. A necklace found with them, gold and uncorroded, was familiar from the wedding photo. Jack Tarsin’s wedding present to his first and short-lived wife.

“He couldn’t take it from the body,” Matt Dexter said as they watched the remains being placed in a coroner’s wagon. “Questions would have been asked if it had turned up.” He scuffed his foot across the sand. “Burying her here was clever enough, too ... the tide quickly smoothed off any signs of digging.”

He turned and looked out at the sea. “May was probably in on it. The money coming to Anthea had been a trust from her grandfather. He hadn’t approved of the woman who had married his widowed son. May’s mother. Only gave them an allowance. But she still inherited the house, and Tarsin had already gotten Anthea’s inheritance.”

He looked at them. “Listen, guys. I don’t know how this worked. I don’t even want to try and know. I can close the case with a note in the file, since there’s nobody around to bring to trial. No family to ask questions.” He shook his head. “But I’m not going to make anything public. It sounds too crazy.”

He shook hands with both of them, then turned back to his crime scene business. Steve took Jan’s arm. They walked back along the beach. Where they’d first met, she squeezed his arm and stopped. She looked out to at the ocean, waiting.

Nothing. Maggie had moved on. Possibly with that other spirit who had been waiting so long to be set free. She turned away and took Steve’s arm again. “Let’s go home,” she murmured. “It’s time to sip the nectar.”

She could see he didn’t understand. But he would.

©2009 Brian Byrne.

On blasphemy

2009-05-04T07:16:00.002+01:00

Would you want to be fined, jailed, or even put to death for saying that Brian Cowen is not the true Leader of Fianna Fail? Or for, as cartoonists regularly do, showing him in a comical or undignified light?

Of course not. And, despite the deepening economic crisis and increasing criticism of An Taoiseach, I'm not aware of any plans to introduce such penalties for these acts.

But it's a good thing that Brian Cowen isn't considered a god, at least outside his own party. In many parts of the world there are serious punishments for doing such things in relation to God, the Supreme Being, Allah, or whatever is the name chosen by followers of major religions for their mystical heads. The 'crime' is called 'blasphemy'.

Blasphemy, according to one description, is 'to use the name of one or more gods in a manner which is considered objectionable by a religious authority'. It's pretty open-ended to a lot of interpretation. And to misuse.

Now, I can understand adherents to religious faiths being miffed if someone not of their persuasion depicts their supreme being in an unflattering light. Or even suggests that such said supreme being does not exist. It hits at the core of their belief systems, even implies that they are people who can be easily led by an unproveable concept. But that goes with choosing to be in the territory of faith.

I'm not making argument here for or against religion of any kind. Nor do I take the side of atheist or agnostic, or even those who don't care one way or another. I hope, though, that I'm speaking for reason and sanity, both of which can often be absent or forgotten in a world where people seem easily whipped to religious hysteria.

'Blasphemy' is a dodgy concept on which to base a law. It is first ethereal, because offering indignity to a Being which may or may not exist isn't something rooted in visible foundations. It has, also, been an excuse to revile, abuse, and even kill ordinary people who patently do have a real existence. If some recent extremes in this matter are more noticeable in Islamic contexts, we who have been born into the Christian tradition should take note that four centuries ago 'our crowd' were enthusiastically torturing and murdering in most horrible ways people who disagreed with them. If you haven't paid attention to history, it was called the Inquisition. And it didn't stop there.

Religion and politics have always been intertwined, the first being used by the latter as a method of control. Which is why the worldly leaders of religion have always sought to make sure their views were enshrined in the legal frameworks of countries where their beliefs were established. Our Irish Constitution is no different, with elements providing a special place for the Catholic faith.

It was probably little known that the Constitution even has a prohibition on blasphemy. But that changed recently when the Minister for Justice revealed that he's preparing a proposal to create an actual crime of 'blasphemous libel' in this country.

What in God's Name is he on about, if you will excuse the expression? Lord knows, we have so much recent bad experience in this country relating to religious division, why are our politicians even considering making religion more powerful in our secular lives?

Is it because they're being pressured by the established religions here to further protect their positions? Or is it lobbying from incomer religious interests, so they'll have a legal whip available here against anyone who might disagree with how they keep their adherents in line?

Blasphemy has been slipping off the perch in many parts of the modern world. Even where there are still laws against it, they have been rarely used in the last fifty or a hundred years.

In the UK, blasphemy was removed from the criminal justice code of England and Wales as recently as last year. In the US, where the offence does still exist in some states and where there is an often visible extremism in matters religious, the last blasphemy conviction was in 1928. The individual, an atheist named Charles Lee Smith, had the charge thrown out on appeal.

In Australia, federal legislators dumped the blasphemy laws in the early 1990s, apart from a prohibition on naming a ship with a blasphemous name. Canada still has blasphemy on its statute books, but a later Charter of Rights and Freedoms all but makes it unprosecutable.

Still, blasphemy or blasphemous libel has also been regaining ground in a number of arenas. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is disposed against blasphemy as a crime, but resolutions passed in recent years in the UN Human Rights Council, relating to 'defamation of religion', seem to reinforce the concept. The supporters of these resolutions put them in place to 'prevent the defamation of Islam'.

In Iran, where a fatwah was famously issued to kill author Salman Rushdie because of his 'Satanic Verses' novel, blasphemy is based on shariah law, which the European Court says is 'incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy'. In Islamic Pakistan, blasphemy carries life imprisonment and even the death penalty, and has been used as a political weapon. In the Torah, the basis of Judaism, blasphemy is listed as a capital crime.

The Catholic Church's position on blasphemy is rooted in biblical authority. It once tortured and burned blasphemers and heretics at the stake, but today provides less terminal prayer regimes by which such sinners can make reparation.

Closer to home, several European countries retain blasphemy as a crime, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and The Netherlands. Most haven't used the laws for decades, though a prosecution was taken in Germany as recently as 2006.

Our Minister for Justice seems intent on strengthening the concept here, on the basis that our legal framework doesn't carry through the constitutional prohibition. As if he didn't have quite enough more pressing and really important legislation to get through?

Wouldn't it be better, instead of shoring up something that is patently archaic, and potentially an instrument against democratic freedom of speech, that he would propose to simply take the blasphemy prohibition out of our Constitution altogether?

Whether I believe it or not, I cherish the right to be able to say, or for you to say, that 'God is a Ghost'. Which phrase, by the way, was the reason that Charles Lee Smith was brought to trial in the US.

I don't want anything introduced here which would prohibit the expression of a personal viewpoint that any religious godhead might not be what followers say it is. I don't want anyone to be prosecuted for their freely-held views on an ethereal matter.

Of course, I don't want religious believers of any kind subjected to hate or abuse for their beliefs either. But we have already on our statute books incitement to hatred and anti-discrimination laws which can easily deal with this. A blunt instrument making blasphemy a crime in this day and age could come back to beat us all, believers or not.

Forget it, Minister. Put your attention to less lofty, but much more earthly issues in our criminal justice system. God, Allah, and the rest of them are perfectly well able to look after themselves.

Disconnection

2009-02-26T20:11:00.002Z

It takes nine months to be born, but only about as many days to reach Limbo.

The building was nondescript in a street of forgettable frontages and the dun-coloured door was the kind you walk past even when you know what you're looking for. I did it at least three times.

No sign, not so much as a business card tacked into the layers of paint. Eventually I found a bell-push which had been slapped with the same dun-loaded brush, hidden high in the corner. I pressed it. I could still step back, but what would that prove? Only that I didn't have the commitment which I had promised her memory.

After a few moments the door was opened a crack. An eye reflected the late afternoon behind me. 'Yes?' A soft voice, female.

I held up the newspaper clipping. 'Your advertisement? I phoned yesterday.'

'Come in,' she said and stepped back into the gloom, pulling the door with her. When she closed it behind me a light came on automatically, revealing - unexpectedly after the outside - a clean and pleasant hall area, simply furnished with a modern desk and a couple of small lounging chairs. The woman, a neat brunette, pointed towards one. 'Someone will be with you,' she said.

'My name is-' I began, but she cut me off.

'I don't need to know that, sir,' she said briskly. 'Someone will be down.' She went to her desk and pressed a button on an intercom, but said nothing.

I sat.

Outside had been a cacophony of people and automobiles and distant sirens, the sounds of a city under stress. Here, all was quiet and muted colours. There wasn't even any Muzak. After a while I sensed a presence and opened my eyes . . . I hadn't realised I'd closed them.

The man standing in front of me wore a short-sleeve shirt and tie, and a straggle of light beard attempted to compensate for the recession of his fair hair. 'Come with me, please,' he said without introduction. I recognised his voice from our phone conversation.

Our progress on carpeted stairs was soundless. Two flights up he motioned me into an office. There was one desk, facing a wall, with two captain's chairs in front of a computer. Fishes swam across the screen, gobbling each other whenever they met.

He noticed my glance. 'Screen-saver, stops burn-in,' he said. 'The fish remind me of, of out there.' He waved at one of the chairs. 'Sit.'

I did. He sat on the other, smiled briefly and then tapped on the computer's keyboard. My name appeared on the screen. 'Why do you want to do this?' he asked, sliding the keyboard away and turning to look at me.

I shrugged, trying to hide my discomfort. 'How many reasons d'you want?'

'Don't be flippant,' he said sharply. 'If we're going to do this, you've got to be absolutely straight with me. Otherwise-' he paused '-otherwise . . . it's all a waste of time.' His eyes levelled into mine with an intensity that didn't fit their soft brown colour. 'Details, every detail I ask for,' he said.

'I'll know if you try to hide anything. If you do try, that's it - we quit, no matter how far we've gone. OK?'

'All right,' I said. 'One question, though . . . is there any reason that would make you refuse?'

He raised an eyebrow, then reached in a drawer and pulled out a photograph, an old Polaroid with its blacks browning and once-white edges tinged yellow. It was of himself, but younger . . . and wearing a Roman collar.

I looked back at him. 'A priest?'

He nodded. 'Jesuit.'

'For long?'

'Long enough. If I haven't heard of a sin, it probably hasn't ever been committed.'

I told him all of it then. I brought Kay briefly back to life, resurrecting some happiness. The heartache had never died.

'So you see,' I said when I'd finished, 'it's not the cops, or the IRS, or the mob or anything like that. It's just that I don't think I . . . should . . . stay connected.'

He nodded. 'It's not unusual, about eight per cent of those who come here - most of the rest are running from things outside themselves.' He swung around and pulled the keyboard towards him again. 'It usually works out OK for people like you.'

'How come?'

He shrugged. 'Who knows? Maybe because you'll know when it's over?' He looked carefully at me. 'You know it's irreversible?'

'Yes, you told me on the phone.'

His fingers hovered over the keys. 'OK. We'll start with your social security number.'

It's only when you look that you realise how much you're connected. It starts with the registration of your birth. No, even before that, when your mother's first scans are tagged. After birth, the family doctor's records begin, at home your name is written into the family Bible, and sometimes, depending on circumstances and parental ambitions, it's even the time they put down your name for your first school, maybe even your second too.

Then there are the official links: driver's and marriage licences, tax returns, passport, credit rating. The operational listings of living: credit card transactions, airline tickets, purchases' delivery receipts, car and home registrations. And the involuntary ones: parking tickets, divorce petitions and death certificates.

People are paid salaries to monitor us, lists are sold to people who want to market something to us, global trends are forecast and millionaires made on the bits of our life which are countable. Sure, it can be uncomfortable if you think much about it, but it does give us a sense of belonging.

'Why do you do this?' I asked during the third evening's session, when he'd already told me more about me than I knew myself.

He paused from tapping at his keyboard, and when he spoke his voice was soft. 'The church is a complex organisation,'he said. 'Like any outfit its size, it has its own police, its internal intelligence service. The Jesuits have traditionally filled the role.' He shrugged. 'Sometimes we had to investigate our own people, and one day, inevitably, I was ordered to look into the life of an old friend.'

He resumed clacking the computer keys. 'Priests are human too. I found there was a woman involved, and a child. The matter was sensitive, the woman political. My friend was transferred, to remove him from the situation.' His voice dropped. 'He hanged himself. After that, I found I had a conscience. I realised that privacy is the last human right, one under threat of extinction. And if he had had this option, maybe he could have absolved himself.' He stopped working again, briefly. 'I decided to use the order's apparatus to give people that chance. It's by way of gaining my own absolution.'

It costs everything you own, however much or little. And there's no point in trying to hide anything.

'The more that institutions take to technology, the more they become dependent on networks,' he murmured as he continued tapping into my electronic being. 'And once there's a network, there's a way in.'

It wouldn't be perfect, he admitted. There were bits of paper scattered through my life which couldn't be located, or retrieved. And unconnected computer files, not on any major network. These would remain as shadows.

It was weird watching my life scroll up on his screen, evening after evening. There were some surprises: he found a driver's licence I'd forgotten about, in another state. And there were three years where I hadn't filed an income tax return. My credit rating was interesting - I didn't know I would have been able to borrow so much. He hacked into a nationwide database which analysed my credit card spending and broke me down into half-a-dozen lifestyle categories. All my addresses were there, even my current rented one, milestones of my life with their attendant memories.

'That's the database which decides your junk mail,' he murmured, and skimmed through until he reached something which he copied onto another part of his own screen. Then, with a few deft keystrokes, he made his special connection to the file.

'You'll still be in places which you don't know about, but this-' he pointed to what he'd copied '-this is a record of who has bought you on lists, so we should be able to get at them too.'

'Personal relationships,' he said.

I didn't answer for a few moments, as Kay's memory came to life for the second time since I'd come here. It was always two Kays - one a picture of the bright and beautiful woman who had spent our early years together simply loving me, the other an alcohol-distorted vision of her broken body in the remains of the car I'd been driving. I had received a suspended sentence on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. In the following months, I'd often thought of suicide. But it would have been a final rebuff to her memory.

'None current,' I said finally.

'Friends? In your apartment building? At work?'

'I've- I've been keeping to myself, since-'

He nodded. 'You can't say anything about this to anyone.'

'I know.'

He put his hand on my shoulder. 'This was your choice. We don't encourage or discourage, as you've probably noticed. But you can still pull out.'

'It was my choice,' I agreed. 'Is my choice.'

His brown eyes were serious. 'The idea, and the need, are as old as man. But today it's harder to get away.'

The last day was a Friday. It always was, he said.

I went to my bank in the morning and closed my account, taking the money in cash, money which was mostly Kay's life insurance, money which I could never spend. In an envelope it seemed an even worse insult to the value of her life.

I left the office late. Gretchen, a pool secretary, was the only other person left, waiting at her desk for fresh nail-polish to dry

'Have a good weekend,' she said brightly.

'Thank you, Gretchen,' I smiled. 'You too.'

'Sure. See you Monday.'

I nodded.

The note informing him that I wouldn't be back was on my supervisor's desk.

He opened the dun-coloured door himself, the brunette receptionist was gone for her weekend.

'Come in,' he said gently.

I handed him the envelope.

Upstairs we sat beside each other for the last time. I felt funny, very close to him. He was the one who knew my life most intimately, though I knew nothing more about him than what he'd told me that one evening. That had been simply him establishing credentials.

'OK?' he asked.

I nodded. 'Tell me something, though, if you can.'

'What?'

I pointed at the screen. 'How?'

He smiled quietly. 'The church is everywhere, my friend,' he said.

He pulled the keyboard towards him and tapped my name one last time. Then his special programme began working its way across the networks, eliminating me from every place we had located my digital self - police files, the IRS, birth registration files, and many more. In a matter of minutes, I disappeared. Digital decease.

Transfer to Limbo.

He held out his hand. 'God go with you,' he said.

It's OK up here, it has a calmness even in stormy weather. This is where we're closest to whatever it is that we exist for, what the ancient hermit monks found.

The cabin is part of the deal, high in a mountain chain. There are many, it seems, scattered all across the nation, owned by the group, the order. I get a visitor once a month, driving a 4WD truck. I leave him a list, and go trapping, and he leaves me the supplies. They're not much, and get less each time. I don't need much - out here you quickly become self-sufficient. I saw him once, climbing into his cab as I came back from the woods. He wore a priest's collar.

There's no way back into the system, of course, but that's not important. Lonely? No, not really, in a world that is now myself, my own. There's plenty to think about, and the time to do it. The time it will take to absolve myself. There are others like me, and if I ever feel I want to go and find them, that's when I'll know it's over.

(I wrote this one in the mid-90s, and it was published in The Alsop Review, under my pseudonym William Trapman. It seems to have travelled well through time.)

Witness in the Park

2009-01-03T00:03:00.016Z

When I'm in a strange city on business, I like to relax by walking its empty places in the sleep time of most of its citizens.

Which is why I am tonight walking alongside the railings that enclose a park in Valencia, Spain. By day I'm sure it is a pleasant, open place for the people of that lovely city, but at this time of the early tomorrow, tall black metal forbids entry. Stars burn above the city's night light, some bright enough to shine through. There's the middle of a moon cycle, which further brightens the sky, making it even more difficult for them.

The weather is balmy, at least compared to the mugginess of the daytime at this time of the year in Spain's most cultural Mediterranean city. There's a rich smell, the kind that you only get here in what is often called the City of Flowers. An aroma of many sweetnesses, along with lemons, olives, and stuff less defineable. In my experience, every city has its own smell. Indeed, every district within each city too, though I only get to know these if I have longer than my usual few days.

Anyhow, just now it's my kind of night walking weather. And I'm memorising the smell of this part of Valencia, so I can I can recall it when I get home.

Suddenly I'm not alone in this place. A woman, inside the closed park, her hands reaching through the railings. Her eyes wide. "¡Ayúdeme! ¡Por favor, señor, ayúdeme!" Her plea is a hoarse whimper. I don't speak or understand Spanish very well. But I do know she's scared out of her wits. And 'help me' sounds the same in every language.

At first I only take in her eyes, then I get the sense that she's oddly dressed. But, truth to tell, I’m actually as scared as she seems to be. I reach out and touch one hand. She grabs mine. She looks behind her. I look too, but see nothing in the darkness beyond. I turn away, seeking up and down the street. Nobody. I turn back.

Now there's a shadow moving up behind her. He quickly becomes a man in a long coat, his face dark under the peak of a cap, a glisten of eyes. His puts his hands around her neck.

“Get away!” I shout, reaching through with my free hand. Trying to punch. Or grab. But he, and his hands, are beyond my reach. My words have no effect, maybe because I use my own language.

His eyes lock on mine, but he doesn't break his concentration on his actions. It seems odd, but she's not screaming or struggling. Just gripping my hand.

“Leave her!" I shout again. "Help! Someone help!” But, at this time of night, I know there's little chance of assistance from the dark buildings across the road.

I hear her attempt to breathe. And I feel her weakening. I'm numb. With fear, helplessness. And I finally know the moment she is gone. When her fingers relax, she takes part of me with her. It's also an unexpected, and unwanted, sensual feeling. I feel guilty, though just for moments.

He holds her for a short time slumped against his chest. Then he lets her fall. We stare at each other, in a strange shared place. Then he turns and strides into the blackness.

She's a heap of shadow beyond the railings, beyond me.

I'm a stranger in this city, an overnight visitor who knows no more than a Google search about it. I don't know where to go. I don't know how to call emergency, and anyhow I've left my mobile in my hotel's safe. So I run. I find a small hotel on the corner of a side street. It's closed, but has a light, and a bell. After looking carefully through a glass panel, a wizened, elfin man unlocks the door, and its outer gate. He doesn’t seem surprised at the arrival of a late, and, especially, a distraught, visitor, but I'm not in a frame of mind to think much about that.

Eventually I lead a detective and two uniforms back to where I'd seen the woman killed. They trip the lock on a gate and search the park.

No body. No shadowy killer in black.

"You should go home now, señor."

We’re back in the hotel. The detective is respectful. And fortunately for me, has good English But he's obviously tired. So am I. And, I'm sure, so are the other two policemen.

It's only an hour since the hotel porter called them, but we're all up past our best time. And there's clearly a language and cultural difference in this city where I haven't had even a tourist's time. Only the short overnight of a business traveller. But even at that, I'm puzzled. The detective doesn’t seem surprised at the night’s events, either my report of a killing or his failure to find anything.

"Come and see me tomorrow, señor," he says. He snaps his notebook closed, the sound a full stop to the night. He leaves, presumably to other Valencian criminal concerns. I walk back to my own hotel, no longer comfortable in the sleep time of the rest of the city. I sense things following in the limbo of my shadow.

I call to the detective in his office. It is an unusual police building, located in the long narrow park which used to be the river that flowed through the city. The river was diverted when they redeveloped the city after a flood in the 'fifties, and now its former course is used for special amenities, including the magnificent aquarium, and an opera house, amongst others. The police station is much smaller than any of these.

I'm expecting the visit not to be pleasant, possibly that I will be warned about wasting police time. But it isn’t like that.

The detective's desk is in a corner of a scruffy large room. The varnish is long gone from any visible surface, and myriad coffee mug rings could probably provide a fairly accurate estimate of its age. Piles of folders, many bulged beyond their designed capacity, are piled everywhere. The detective lifts a bunch of them off a visitor chair.

“Sit, señor. You would like coffee?”

“No thanks. I had breakfast.” This is true, but the reality is I don’t want to extend the experience here with refreshments. I sit. So does he. He picks up a pencil and doodles on a notepad, then looks at me. "You know what they call this desk, Senór?" I shake my head.

"It's the Dead Corner. And me, I'm the Dead Detective." I don't know whether I'm supposed to laugh. He's not smiling, so I don't. He taps the pencil on one of the file stacks. "These are the Dead Files. Nobody but me cares about them." I just nod. He'll get to the point.

"Your dead woman. I've a file on her, señor. Goes back a long time." I'm surprised, he hadn't mentioned that the previous night.

"You know her, then?"

He nods. "I know about her. What you saw—" he stops and purses his lips, considering "—what you saw, happened. A long time ago. Fifty years ago." He pauses again. Maybe waiting for me to say something. I say nothing.

"Nineteen fifty-eight," he says, closing his eyes, speaking from an intimacy with the story. "Maria Aguero. Found in the park, strangled. No assailant detected. No known motive. No family claimed her. She worked the local streets. It has always been believed that one of her, clients, killed her."

"You're telling me a ghost story?" I don't believe in ghosts.

He shrugs. "Who knows?" He taps the file. "Her record here has sightings like yours every once in a while. Every three, maybe four years. It's a Dead Corner file, so I've been dealing with them since I took this duty."

"Any of them see it different to mine?"

"No. Always much the same thing."

"Seems to me it's a job for Ghostbusters." A bad joke. He doesn't laugh, maybe they haven't seen it in Spain? I get serious again. "Why do you spend so much time on this, if it doesn't go anywhere?"

He shrugs. "It comes with the Dead Corner job, señor. Besides—" He lets the 'besides' hang. Which means I have to ask. "Besides what?"

"The disappearances."

"What disappearances?"

He opens one of the folders. Scans it, though I suspect he knows it by heart. He flips it closed and then looks up. "Some people who report these things disappear. They turn up on missing persons lists."

His pencil taps on the desktop. A slow beat, like a military funeral march. He doesn’t seem to want to say anything more. I don’t know what more to say, either. So I get up.

He doesn't rise. I give him a slight wave. He tilts his head, barely. But before I reach the door, he calls out. "She touched you, didn't she, señor?"

I turn. I nod, “I told you. She grabbed my hand, held it."

His expression shifts. A shadow of some kind on his face, it seems like. "Do not go back there, señor," he says after a moment. "OK?"

"OK," I say.

We both know I'm lying.

No moon this time. Nor clouds. The night is clear, though dark. I'd watched how they had slipped the lock and I get through the gate, into the blackness.

I'm scared, but also excited. There's something to complete. I've never been inside the park before, but I make my way along the path confidently. At a certain point I slip through a gap in the bushes. I stand in the shadows, silent, invisible.

Between me and the park fence, a silhouette figure, up close to the railings. There’s a screeching sound to the left, an old gate closing. There are footsteps. I see the walker, on the path outside the park.

The figure at the railing calls out, a woman's voice, hoarse. "¡Ayúdeme! ¡Por favor, señor, ayúdeme!" The man stops.

I walk up behind her. He looks at me, raises a hand in farewell, then walks away. Long coat, face shadowed by his cap.

I put my hands around her neck. This time, I'm not the witness. Until someone else comes back, I'll be doing this every night in the sleep time of the rest of the world.

When it is over I notice a strange thing. I can't smell the flowers, or anything about this city, any more.

©2009 Brian Byrne.

The Spirits We Know

2008-11-16T20:06:00.004Z

Everyone has their personal demons, whether they begin life among snow-capped mountains in the American west, the green hills and fields of Ireland, or anywhere in between.

---

He flickered on the edge of my vision as I picked up my bag and walked into JFK. You won't be able to keep up with a 747, I thought, and an hour later I was flying higher than he ever could.

I should have felt free. But what I really felt was lonesome.

---

I got off at Shannon, where the immigration officer was a big red face under untidy thinning hair. Friendly, easygoing, professionally disarming.

"Business or holidays, sir?" he asked. His hands, broad and weathered, flicked through the pages of my passport. Maybe he farmed in his spare time. Jenny's people had been farmers; mine too.

"Just a short holiday," I said.

He stamped the document. "I hope you enjoy it, sir."

---

The rental car was small, but I smelled the newness and thought of an old truck with a sagging bumper, and of an old man and a mixed-up young boy. I
turned on the motor, shifted awkwardly into gear with my left hand, and drove out of the parking lot. A sticker on the windshield reminded me that here, they drive on the left.

Now and again, without thinking, I looked skyward.

---

Green and rolling fields gave way to harsher land with rough stone walls instead of hedge rows. It was an environment different from both New York and Wyoming -- a place without the noise of one or the dust of the other.

It rained differently here, too -- sudden fine mists of wetness catching windshield wipers unawares. In New York it rains acid out of clouds invisible from the bottom of the skyscraper canyons, and in Wyoming what rain there is tastes angry. I got out of the car once and the Irish mist that trickled down my face was sweet.

I found the ocean, first in brief snatches beyond seafront villages, then below high cliffs which marked the western edge of the land. From that height the ocean seemed peaceful and slow-moving, until I saw how fiercely it chewed at the base of the cliff. I'd had to walk a path along the side of the precipice, inside a fence of stone flags laid on their edges. Beyond these were flat grassless areas of clifftop, some with people lying down to look over the edge. At the top of the path I sat out on one myself and looked across the ocean.

Jenny's ocean. The other side of the ocean she'd walked into. The only way she knew to go home. The sun came out suddenly, gently warming my
back, and then a voice intruded.

"There's nothing to see out there."

I turned to find backlit hair haloed red, and everything inside me went wild until the sun hid itself again. Then her face came out of shadow, I saw that she was someone else with red hair -- someone with smiling green eyes, wearing a bright rain slicker. A small backpack hung from her shoulder. The sound of the wind on the clifftop had prevented me from hearing her coming.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you," she said, and waved out over the sea. "You were looking the wrong way for the best scenery."

I shrugged, rather ungraciously; I didn't want distraction. "It depends on how far you can see."

"And how far can you see?"

"Wherever I've been." It wasn't my usual style, but my tone was unmistakably dismissive.

"Sorry," she said, and gave me a little wave before walking back to the path, clambering easily over the stone flag fence, her red hair floating against the sky.

I turned back to the ocean. The crashing surf was soundless from 700 feet above it, but the keening and mewling of the seabirds on the cliffs were the songs of the wake I'd come to keep.

I came back down the pathway past a weathered man posing for photographs with a donkey. On its back was a small dog wearing a cap, with a pipe in
its mouth. I guess it's easier to show friends back home a picture of foolishness than to try and understand and explain a different culture.

I drove from the parking lot after a quick look at a map, turned left and found myself on the wrong side of the road with an approaching motorist panicking on his brakes. Swerving back, I gave the guy a suitably chastened look; he muttered something I couldn't hear and didn't need to. A bit further, a hitchhiker stuck out a thumb, and, still a bit shaken, I pulled over.

"Hi, going towards Galway?" she asked, bending to window level. "Oh -- " green eyes grinned, " -- the man with the long-distance vision."

This time I smiled back, thinking absently about second chances. "Sure. Get in."

When she'd done so, she held out a hand. "I'm Finnoula. Finnoula Regan."

"Mike," I said, accepting a firm and friendly clasp. "Mike Rainwater." I put the car in motion again. "Hey, I'm sorry I was short with you on the clifftop."

"That's OK. It was your space. I've used the cliffs to clear my head too."

I glanced over; she caught my look and smiled again, open and incurious.

"What's Galway like?" I asked.

"It's nice. Lively. It's a university town with lots of young people. Great crack."

I gaped at her and the car swerved slightly.

She burst out laughing. "No, not what you think... 'crack' means fun, enjoying yourself, music and drinking." She paused and looked thoughtful, and there was the resemblance again. "If you don't mind taking a small detour for lunch, I'll show you."

---

She brought me to a little pierside pub, which was full, mostly with foreigners enjoying the music and the food. We ordered salmon on coarse Irish bread and Finnoula asked for a glass of beer. I had a Coke.

"I don't drink," I told her when she suggested I try a beer. "It's a genetic thing. Low tolerance to alcohol."

"Genetic?"

"Native Americans and alcohol don't mix very well."

She was puzzled. "Native Americans? Oh... Indians?"

I nodded. "Yes, but we prefer 'Native Americans.'"

She looked at me, openly curious. "You're the first I've met," she said, "as far as I know."

"And how would you know?" I'd had this conversation once before.

"I don't know. Your skin isn't really red, just... outdoorsy. Your features, maybe -- they're not European." Her eyes glinted mischievously. "Maybe you shouldn't have stopped wearing feathers?"

"Maybe you should still be riding donkeys," I retorted.

She laughed. "Touché. Sorry."

We let it go and listened to the music, but she was obviously still thinking about it. "How does it work out in your job?" she asked when the musicians took a break. "Is there prejudice, like as if you were black?"

I work on Wall Street, where a Sioux is unusual in an environment of Jews and WASPs who tend to keep things in the family. But I had made it my business to become very good at what I did, and as long as I produced I was tolerated, I told her. "I don't get invited to certain parties, but it's no big deal."

It had been at one time, when I'd scholarshipped my way through a college too good for my breed; when hard work brought me high grades, which disturbed some of my financially and racially advantaged classmates. When comments about `good dead injuns' held real malice and a couple of physical confrontations made me wonder if they wanted to make it really happen. There were some depressing times.

The early times of the eagle.

---

Back on the road she told me something about herself. She was 21, an only child, and worked as a computer programmer. And her parents had split a month after her last birthday.

"They had it so well organized. I realized they'd only been waiting until I turned 21," she murmured. "They tried to be so damned civilized about it, but I know now the marriage probably ended years ago. They'd stayed together for my sake."

"That's bad?"

"Yes. They didn't think about how I'd feel, knowing I was the only reason they'd stayed together living what must have been empty lives."

"And how do you feel?"

She looked at me and winced. "Mixed up. I was angry with them and said things that maybe I shouldn't have. That's why I'm over here, trying to clear my head."

Two of us doing the same thing. "I'm sorry I didn't let you share my space."

She grinned at that, which was better. For both of us.

---

We drove through layered hills of uncovered limestone, the color of the clouds which sometimes came down over them. I'd not seen anything like it.

"There's plant life here that's not found anywhere else," she told me, and brought me to a perfumery which concentrated the scent of rare flowers. We went to a cave with bones of bears ("There haven't been bears in Ireland for five thousand years!"), and then she brought me to something which threw me right back to home.

"It's a dolmen, a stone age burial site." Four large rocks sat in a massive but delicate construction that looked poised to fly from its rocky field. "There are lots of them in Ireland, and in Britain. Some say they have magical properties."

I put my hand against one of the upright stones. "We have places which feel like this -- " I said quietly " -- they are places of... communication."

She didn't laugh. "Communication with what?"

"Memories, and things beyond memory."

I felt her green eyes scanning right through me. "You're a deep one, Mike Rainwater," she said eventually.

---

As we walked back to the car I thought once that a high shadow flickered just beyond my vision. But I didn't look up.

"I'm going to stay with a friend from college." She was poised at the half-open door of the car.

"Thanks for the company," I said, "and for the tour. Maybe we'll see each other again sometime?" I didn't expect to. And then I did one of those impulsive things which don't come from rational thinking.

"Come with me tomorrow," I said.

She nodded, and I was surprised.

"Four in the morning," I warned, expecting a change of mind.

"OK," she said, then smiled, touched my hand briefly, and got out of the car into the bustle of the Galway evening.

---

I sat on a limestone slab a little back from the dolmen and waited for the sun. She was beside me, bundled in a warm jacket.

"You're not going closer?"

I shook my head. "It's not necessary."

It was like a sound which kind of sneaked in and built slowly, growing under the lightening sky, and when the sun slipped up from behind the eastern hills and cast the shadow of the dolmen around me, the stones relayed its song. The ancient music enveloped me like the old robe of buffalo skins in which I had taken my tribal initiation vows, bringing me away into the past. It lasted until the sun cleared the stones, and it was long enough for Jenny to tell me that she hadn't meant to do it, and to properly say her goodbyes. And then she was gone.

I looked at Finnoula.

"Finished?" she asked quietly.

I nodded. "Could you hear?"

She shook her head.

A pity. She would have liked Jenny.

---

We had breakfast in a local hotel, the first customers of the day. She waited until we were finished to tell me she was going to Dublin on the afternoon train. To see her father. The prospect was bothering her.

"You don't know what to say to him?" I asked. "You're scared?"

"It's difficult for me to talk to either of them just now. Somehow..." she paused, searching. "Somehow I feel guilty."

I looked at her for a few moments, then signalled the waitress to bring the check. On the road I told her about my grandfather.

"He raised me. My parents died when I was small, killed when their old truck went off the road. He was the one who pushed me into regular school, instead of the one for people like us. One day I came back upset after somebody called me a no-good redskin --" It all welled up again. "Know what I was feeling? Guilty. Guilty for being an Indian. I was feeling ashamed because history had written us as the bad guys."

"That feeling wasn't rational," she murmured.

I grinned at her. "No, it wasn't. Is yours?"

Then she smiled too -- tentatively, but it was there. "No, it's not." She reached across and squeezed my arm. "Thanks."

"You're welcome. And remember, you still have parents to talk to."

I don't like railway stations much; too often they're places of saying goodbye. But we had time for coffee.

"How did you handle the guilt problem?" she asked.

I added sugar to my cup and stirred. "My grandfather took me on a trip into the Tetons, high up until we could stand on a ledge and see back down over Wyoming. Then he told me simple truths. That my people had been there long before the people who taunted me. That we had a civilization in this land much older than theirs. That though the white men had taken the land, they couldn't take our souls."

"He sounds like a wise man," she said. "But it doesn't sound like enough to solve all your problems."

I nodded. "You're right. But he also gave me something else that day."

---

We were high, but he was higher still, circling in the air currents around the peak. My mind's eye provided detail which distance hid. Talons and beak razor sharp, eyes which could find a mouse hundreds of feet below, a majesty befitting his place in the kingdom of life.

"That is your soul, Michael," my grandfather said softly. "That eagle will always be near when you need him, when you have difficulty finding yourself. Look up and you'll see him."

The bird dropped a wing and came swooping down towards us. I made ready to run but my grandfather held my arm firmly. "Do not be afraid of your soul," he murmured.

The eagle came so close that we could feel on our faces the wind of his slowly beating wings, and I could see the beak and talons and eyes which I'd only imagined before. He circled us once, then gave a strident call and rose back up into the blue above the Tetons.

---

"I haven't felt guilty or afraid since then," I said when I'd told her about him. "Call it superstition if you want, but I believed in that eagle."

"Have you seen him often?" she asked.

I nodded. "Several times, in school and later in New York when I needed sorting out. I'd look at the skyscrapers and see him wheeling around the peaks of the city."

Until he failed me: when Jenny went, I blamed him. I needed something to blame, even though it had been inevitable. A genetic thing, a low tolerance to life. And one night, when the demons of fear had momentarily overcome her, she had gone to the ocean and walked in until her red hair floated lifeless on the waves.

I had asked him to help her and he'd failed me, and afterwards I wanted to be free of him to curse him. But there is no freedom from the spirits we know.

"There was a girl... Jenny, an Irish girl, in New York," I told Finnoula. "Neither of us fitted perfectly in our lives. Both of us were lonesome for our homes and our own people. But we had also both said our goodbyes and we had to make good."

I had my eagle, but Jenny had a different bird, a raven that sat on her shoulder. That's what she called her depression.

"She'd been dumped by a guy, her husband, in the small village where she came from. She felt... ashamed. She became convinced it was her fault, that she hadn't tried hard enough. She ran away, from her village and her shame." I paused, remembering the helplessness, hers and mine. "We became friends, and I was trying to help her see that she couldn't hold herself responsible for what happened, but one night when I wasn't there, she drowned herself."

I looked at Finnoula and saw the woman that Jenny could have been. "I came here to be sure she got home."

The public address system blared a call for the Dublin train and she stood up. "I have to go, Mike." She came close and kissed me on the cheek. "Thanks, again," she whispered, then she drew her head back and looked at me. "Will you be coming to Dublin?"

I shook my head. "I've only another couple of days, and there's something I have to do before I go back. But I'll come here again."

"We don't have eagles in Ireland now," she said softly, a little sadly. "We used to."

I hugged her and she felt warm and soft and very close. "They're inside of us, Finnoula," I whispered. "We just have to let them fly."

She waved to me until the train disappeared around the first bend. And then there was only the locomotive's horn mourning me a fading last goodbye.

---

The village was tiny, a straggle of houses tight into a bay, with a small finger of pier pointing toward America. When I drove in, I knew every house and the hidden people behind each window.

There was no family to see; Jenny had told me her parents had died some years before she left. And an only brother had gone to Australia since then. When her crisis came, there was no one close.

I parked the car near the pier and walked slowly through the main street, and it was as if Jenny was beside me pointing out her happy times. I recognized the house she'd grown up in, now closed and dilapidated, with a 'For Sale' sign that also looked tired. A school seemed too new to be the one she'd talked of, and then I found the original one-room building was now a library. A church at the end of a laneway stood guard on a graveyard and I creaked open an iron gate which echoed the final hopes of generations.

I found her parents' grave and said goodbye for her.

I met a few people as I walked back in a cool wind coming off the sea, but none paid me much attention. Most seemed to be old. It was like the tribal villages back home, where the young people had left because there was nothing for them. On the pier I stood for a few minutes looking at the bay. Waves staggered in from the ocean, falling exhausted onto a rocky beach from which the child Jenny had paddled and swam, and on which years later the woman Jenny had decided to run from her raven. But it had followed her to the other side of the ocean.

I went back to the car and took a small box from the trunk. When I stood on the end of the pier and scattered her ashes into the waves, the raven finally flew from her shoulder.

---

The morning before I left, I waited on the clifftop. Soon I heard the sun begin to rise behind me, and, as the music got louder, a speck on the horizon grew.

Eventually I could feel on my face the wind of his slowly beating wings.

©1995 Brian Byrne.

REPARATION

2008-10-28T08:04:00.002Z

The hair was the same, you can't really get rid of curls. But she'd probably had laser treatment, because she wasn't wearing glasses any more. Sometimes you can tell when it's more than just contacts. Overall, she looked good.

"So, why come back now?" I asked. "Been, what, eighteen years?"

She nodded, with a slight smile that didn't reach her eyes. They held a familiar speculative look, one which, thankfully not so often now, still intruded into my dreams. She just sat there, her almost-smile playing around her mouth. I thought maybe a little sadly.

There was one of those funky wooden clocks behind her on the wall of the coffee shop. I watched the sweep hand make its standard circular journey. It seemed to take a lot longer than a minute at a time. She lifted her cup and sipped coffee. That gave her almost-smile an excuse to leave.

"Sarah?" I asked eventually.

I'd had it figured from the time she'd made the call. There wasn't any other reason why she might come back all those years. She blinked and put the cup down.

"You remember her?"

Of course I remembered. Well, kind of. Little Sarah had been three when her mother had left my orbit and headed for the other side of the sun.

"You told me not to."

She'd told me much more than that. After the baby arrived, she had made it very clear that what we'd had together was over. I was vulnerable then, not in a position to protest. A pastor's congregation in a small New England town didn't look kindly on his dallying with a married woman. That's why I could only now remember beyond the distance of eighteen years.

"I remember a three-year-old," I said, at the end of another long journey on the clock. "That's all I was left with."

"I'm not going to say I'm sorry. We both know it's too late for that."

Most people figure that the woman hurts most when a relationship breaks up. Something about their being regarded as the softer gender. Truth is, they're an awful lot tougher than men, especially when they're doing the dumping. A woman will generally only break up a relationship after trying hard to keep it together. Trying to mend it, if they can. Or if they want to. When a woman quits, she has normally thought the move through.

So if the guy hasn't been expecting it, it's like he just got a knee where it hurts most. First he's lost, confused and in incredible pain. Then he gets his breath back, and there are probably some tears. Followed by an anger that eventually eases down to a sense of loss. Then, if he's lucky, he goes numb about the whole thing. Depending.

Depending on the fallout.

"I'm not a pastor anymore."

"I know. When I asked in Mayville, most people couldn't remember you."

"Don't want to talk about me, more than likely. I'm a black spot on the town's reputation. Small towns don't like that."

She nodded.

By now I was counting the ticks the clock made as well as mentally pushing the sweep hand around. I found I was waiting for it to reach the top of the hour mark before I spoke again. Clockwork punctuation, maybe you could say.

"Did they talk about you? Remember you?"

She shook her head, her curls remaining tight to the movement. "I didn't say who I was. If they did remember me, nobody said."

"You said 'most' couldn't remember me. Some did?"

"The Chief. He's retired now, but he remembered. He didn't say much, good or bad."

Chief of Police Sam Oates had always been a fair man. A small town cop who knew his people and relied on that knowledge to keep things in order. He hadn't judged me before I left, or said anything that made me think I deserved judgement.

"He found me for you," I said.

"He made some calls. Said it wasn't hard, since you work for the Commonwealth."

Yeah, my work. My church called it repentance. Unlike the Catholics, we do our Purgatory on earth.

Joe was her husband. I knew them as a couple in my congregation. Just faces first, when they came new to Mayville. No kids, so they didn't show up at the family events we ran. She was more regular at services than they were as a pair. It was one of those Sundays, when she'd come on her own, that she started to open up. I was, as usual, outside the church door after service, meeting and greeting.

"He's, ah, unwell," she said when I asked about him.

It was how she said it. You get to tell in the pastor business. I suggested a cup of coffee from the table on the church porch, but she smiled gently and shook her head. "Thanks, but I got to go home and fix dinner."

The next time, though, she did stay for the coffee. We chatted, and she left. It was two or three Sundays after that when Joe next came to service with her.

"I got a drink problem, Pastor," he said straight out when I asked after his health. I hadn't expected such bluntness, but it answered a lot of unasked questions. It also killed any further conversation that day. I made an anodyne offer to listen any time he wanted, and they left.

That's where it should have stayed. But soon afterwards she took up the vacant part time position of church secretary, and it went on from there.

'Working for the Commonwealth' of Massachusetts was a classy description for my very unclassy job.

"How long you been there?"

"Five years, maybe. Hard to tell sometimes."

Hard to tell, because the old men where I worked as an aide had no sense of time themselves any more. The Alzheimers Ward in the public mental hospital didn't exactly need calendars for its residents. Even clocks were redundant when memory span might be as little as a couple of minutes. The whole place, the whole job, smelled of old men and old age. It wasn't necessary to care. But I did.

"Before that?" She absently pulled at a curl, a habit I remembered from before. I let the sweep hand get back to the top of the clock. Thought about the days I couldn't remember.

"Doesn't matter," I said.

"Maybe it should."

I knew it was wrong. And probably unfair. But I said it anyhow. "Not any of your business, any more, is it?"

Like a slap to her face. Obviously even all those years hadn't killed off my anger completely. I felt momentarily good, even a little triumph. Then I felt lousy and small. As I should.

"Sorry," I mumbled, lifting my cup to my lips to avoid having to say anything more.

She shrugged. "You're right. It is none of my business. Not after what happened."

"Maybe if—" But I let the thought hang. Eighteen years on, maybes are always dead.

"She's gone."

I'd been surprised when I opened the door and saw it was Joe. He hadn't been around much in the last year. She had told me he was much better these days. More content in himself. Off the sauce and working regular at the Jiffy Lube. I'd put it down to the child's arrival.

"Sarah too. She took her away, too."

He just stood in the doorway, looking lost. Weaving a little, as if he was tipsy. But it was middle of the morning, and he didn't have any smell of alcohol.

"You want to come in? A coffee?" I didn't know what else to say.

Joe stayed put, though. His eyes were blank. I'd seen that look before, in the face of a local 'Nam vet. He would always have it, things he'd seen had seared his brain. Maybe things he'd done, too. Killed his soul.

"Upped and gone. Left a note, just to say they ain't never comin' back. Never."

Then he turned and the doorway was empty. I heard his car start up at the road, and he drove away.

I closed the door and walked back to my small kitchen. Making coffee was a ritual, to put off having to think about anything else.

I felt like I'd been kicked. And worse, that I deserved it.

"He came looking for us. I heard he had been asking around. Friends kept me in touch. But he never got close."

The waitress came up with a coffee jug, offering refills. I looked across the table and she shook her head.

"No thanks," I said. "We're about done."

But, of course, we weren't, yet.

I didn't see Joe again for six months. I knew he wasn't around much, though I'd been told now and again that he'd been seen back in town. Always briefly, usually sighted in the bar out on the Boston Road.

I didn't go looking for him, anyhow. I preferred my own company for drinking. And, though it was getting more difficult, for praying. But in the end, it wasn't up to me.

"That coffee still on offer?"

It was a deja vu. He wasn't who I'd expected when I answered the knock. Again he stood there, weaving slightly. No smell of alcohol this time, either. But the blank look was gone. Now his eyes held only a sad resignation.

"Sure." I stood back and waved him through. His timing was good, I'd just brewed. Trying to kick-start a sermon I wanted to prepare. Like the praying, this had also more difficult.

"I knew, you know that?" he said from the couch, after taking his first slug and now warming his hands around the mug.

"You knew what, Joe?" It's always the same, isn't it? Trying to stall the inevitable, even when you know the lie is open between you.

"I knew. But I was OK about it." He was almost talking to himself, really. It was like I wasn't there. "She was happy about the kid. And I was happy because she was."

"A child blesses a marriage, Joe." God should have struck me down as a hypocrite then and there, me playing the consoling pastor.

"Baby Sarah did that," he nodded, gazing into the blackness of the mug. "She made us a family."

Then he looked across at me. "Truth was, she was a miracle, Pastor."

I could have returned with the platitude that all babies are miracles. But something inside had finally given me a little grace.

Joe's expression had changed. Along with the resignation, there was the trace of a lop-sided grin. "Y'see, Pastor, we couldn't have children. Well, I couldn't, anyhows. We'd gone to all the clinics, done all the tests."

I just sat there. A car horn blew outside, jerking the curtain of silence that had suddenly fallen between us. Joe took another sip of coffee, then put the mug down on the low table beside where he sat. "Yeah, Pastor. Sarah was a miracle all right. Your miracle."

He stood up. "I knew it was you, Pastor," he said softly. "But that was OK. I could live with it, as long as we were a family. Like I said, she was happy, I was happy."

He sighed, then walked past me to the door. I didn't turn to watch him go. But I sensed him stop.

"We're not a family any more, Pastor. She's gone, for good. They're both gone. I tried, but I know I won't find them. Ever. Not in this life, anyhows."

He closed the door gently behind him. I almost wished that he'd slammed it. Anger would have been easier to take.

I sat looking at my own coffee, black and as impossible to see into as was my own soul. I put the cup down and tried to pray. That God would bring solace to Joe. Also, selfishly more important at that moment, to me.

"You knew he died?"

She nodded. "A friend sent me the newspaper clipping."

I changed my mind. Raised a hand and caught the waitress's eye. She nodded and brought over the coffee jug and two fresh mugs. It gave the sweep hand time to do two full journeys. And gave me time to remember things I didn't want to.

"He came to see me that morning," I said after the waitress had left. "He told me he'd known all along. He told me why."

She hesitated. I think it was the first time I'd ever seen her seem to not know what to do.

"You never told me he knew," I said. "And you knew he did."

Now it was her turn to wait for the clock. Except that she couldn't see it, of course. So I watched it instead.

"It wasn't necessary," she said eventually. "Things were already too complicated."

I shook my head. "I was part of the problem, part of what made it complicated. I had a right to know. And I had to pick up the pieces."

"I just wanted the child," she said, almost too softly to hear.

"Joe ate his gun," Chief Oates said bluntly. "There's no need for an autopsy. The gun was registered to him, was still in his hand. And he left a note."

I wondered what was in the note. Me, maybe? But I didn't ask. And the Chief didn't volunteer.

Joe had no other relations that anybody knew about. So I had to arrange the service and the burial myself. But first, the Chief asked me to make the formal identification. "No kin. Pastor's as close as we'll get," he grunted. There was no discernible irony.

I hadn't seen a gun suicide before. Though the main force had taken off the back of his head, the explosion in his mouth had destroyed most of his face too. But I forced myself to look for a few moments, then turned to the Chief and nodded.

"Over there," he said, pointing to a sink in the corner of the morgue. I only just made it before throwing up everything I'd eaten that day.

"The service was a full house. Joe wasn't the most popular man in town, but I think he got the sympathy vote. Especially when his wife and child weren't there."

She winced. I was getting worryingly good at this.

"I didn't know," she murmured, her eyes closed. "I didn't get the clipping until a month after."

"Would you have come back if you had known?"

She forced her eyes open again then. They were clear of tears. "No."

"At least you're being honest now."

I never did find out what was in the note that Joe had left. And I was pretty sure that Sam Oates didn't tell anyone either. But the good people of Mayville weren't fools. They could get four when they added two and one and then another came along to complete the equation.

The senior of the church elders did all the talking. They'd waited a decent period after the funeral, but now, in my living room, it was showdown time. They'd been true New England polite about it, but there was no mistaking the message.

"It isn't working for me now, anyhow," I said. "It isn't working for any of us. It's time for me to pull back for a while, for everybody's sake."

We all knew, though, that I'd never be back.

"So, did you marry again?"

It could have been her turn to cut me this time. But we seemed to have run out of things to say. Besides, the box of memories had been well and truly opened, the cobweb seals torn.

She shook her head. "No. Didn't feel the need to. I had Sarah, she had me. We made out well enough on our own."

Can't say I was surprised. She had always been capable, could always focus on the things that were important.

"But you came back now."

"Yes."

"You still haven't said why."

She looked at me again. "Sarah's twenty-one soon. Next week, in fact."

I nodded. "I know. I remember every year."

That actually surprised her. Fact was, it was one of only two anniversaries I had ever been able to remember, without fail. For a moment she seemed to lose her direction, but recovered.

"She's been asking. About where she's from. About her father."

"And you said—?"

She shrugged. "Not much. Never have. There was just the two of us. She seemed happy with that, all the years."

I looked in my cup, already knowing it was empty again. Just like part of me inside had been all those years. Knowing, too, that another refill wouldn't be good for me.

I pushed the cup away.

"I go to clean Joe's grave once a year, anniversary of his death," I said. "The newspaper, as you probably saw, reported it as a home gun accident. You can thank the Chief for that."

I stood up then. "Take her to see it, sometime. Nobody'll say anything else."

She got to her feet too, though she seemed a little uncertain. When we had met in the coffee shop earlier, it had been uncomfortable. We hadn't hugged as old friends do, or even shaken hands. Now we stood close together, but apart, wavering on the edge of something.

"Live in peace," I said.

She nodded.

I turned and left, going back to look after my smelly old men with no memories remaining. Reparation, and what the Catholics called penance, until I could be forgiven and become one of them.

©2008 Brian Byrne.

Waiting for Waves

2008-07-06T07:38:00.003+01:00

Does art really imitate life, or are we attracted to art that is destined to reflect our lives?

---

The fire pulled itself higher on the wind, flickering ruby highlights through her wine. She shivered as the gust blew to climax and subsided.

The room was alive in the semi-darkness, outlines of doors and furniture shifting in the reflections from the fireplace. She loved the intimacy of this time of the year, fall not yet over but winter pushing against doorways, testing to see if summer had made people soft. She lifted her glass and as she drank her eyes came in line with the picture.

The painting had power even in the gloom, and though she knew it was only a trick of the firelight, the two sweater-clad men seemed to move as they pushed the currach against the incoming waves. To one side, a woman looked beyond them to the gray of a restless Atlantic.

Sweet Jesus Christ, how long will it take?

Another gust of winter pulled at the chimney, and she tasted again the spray from the sea salting her cheeks and lips. She wiped her face with her hand and found that it really was wet.

---

Megan had come across the picture in a fashionable Dublin shopping center. Drifting among the currents of shoppers in a pleasant interlude of aloneness, she'd browsed in a bookstore, fingered patterns in Aran sweaters, and, over the steamy rims of several cups of coffee, watched the patterns of movement from the central open-plan restaurant. She once found herself being observed, by a man who didn't drop his gaze when she caught it. He wasn't really coming on to her and she let it pass. Attention was something a woman lived with.

"Hi, Megan."

The interlude was over.

She smiled up at the two men. "How was the museum?"

Peter's glasses shrugged as he wrinkled his nose. "Tacky. An exhibit of what museums used to be."

"Hell, Pete, it wasn't that bad. The Celtic jewelry was cool."

Jeremy was the T-shirt of the trio, the towheaded younger of the men. Peter and Megan had first met up with him during a rowing regatta--both he and Peter were keen competitive whaleboat oarsman, pulling for Harvard and Boston U. respectively. Though at the comfortable stage of an "understanding" with Peter--they were to marry when he joined his law firm--Megan had found herself attracted to the young artist.

"Gold brooches in glass cases don't show context, Jeremy."

But Jeremy wasn't really interested anymore. He looked around the mall. "Hey, Meg, what's this place like? Buy anything?"

Her hair swished a negative.

"Not yet. There is a place--" she nodded over the boundary rail of the restaurant "--that picture stall. I like the styles."

"Let's look," Peter said.

"Yeah. Let's pick a picture." Jeremy gave his sloppy grin. He liked to be doing--he was going to set up a sculptor's studio when they got back to Boston.

She rose and slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder. "Let's make waves, then," she smiled.

---

Pictures as memories, that had been the plan, one from each of the three countries on the trip. They'd drawn straws, and Peter had won Italy, their first stop. Jeremy drew Spain, leaving Ireland to Megan. The others could advise, if asked, on choices made by the buyer of turn.

Peter had considered in his careful way and had bought a watercolor of the Leaning Tower in Pisa.

"It's likely to fall eventually, and there'd be no point then," he'd explained. "Now I have what I've seen."

Jeremy had impulsively but definitely opted for an oil of charging bulls on the Pamplona Run, the beasts snorting on the heels of the scattering runners. "The runners could lose their lives," he said. "It makes life sweeter."

Now, in Ireland, it was Megan's turn.

The framed paintings in the stall were Irish, in themes typical of the country--moody landscapes, rugged portraits, thundering horses at race.

"They're all originals," the woman selling them said. "They all worked at it for their living."

The portraits she discounted because they were too specifically personal. One equine painting did attract her, three horses on a beach, one galloping a length ahead of the other two. The trailing pair almost touched, veins on their necks bulging as each strained to break ahead.

"Power," she murmured, leaning back against Peter and linking an arm through Jeremy's. "Power and freedom."

"Stallions chasing the mare, actually," Peter grunted.

"Same thing." Jeremy laughed.

She dug her elbow against him and linked her other arm in Peter's, moving them all to another stand.

She could almost hear the waves crashing on the shore as she saw the boatmen and their currach. And the woman watching. A signature was scrawled in a corner: Mairtin O'Driscoll.

"A good piece, a strong painter."

This time Megan noticed details about the stallholder, red hair and a face that was no stranger to wind and sun--and in the brief woman-to-woman contact she saw a sadness.

"Where was it painted?"

"Inishmaan."

Her puzzlement showed.

"Inishmaan, the middle one of the Aran Islands. In Galway Bay."

Megan turned back to the painting. Unlike the picture of the horses, where the subjects were playing in a fairly benign sea, the characters on the Inishmaan beach seemed more threatened by moodier waves. There was again the separation of the males and the female, but in this painting she wasn't the challenge.

"What do you think?" Megan asked.

Peter shifted his glasses on his nose, a gesture she guessed would become well known in the courtroom.

"I don't like the frame--it's too light for the subject," he said eventually. "But the painting haunts. Or maybe it's the place."

Jeremy had already decided.

"I want to go there," he said.

"Me too," murmured Megan.

She agreed to the price with the woman, who offered to have the picture reframed. They looked at other paintings to find a suitable style, chose a frame, and arranged to pick up the picture some time in the next week or so.

Walking away, Megan looked at the woman's name scrawled on the bottom of the receipt. O'Driscoll.

---

"Wow! Are we really going to land there?"

Jeremy was impressed by the sea dashing against the little pier as they approached it.

"Aye, we are," the boatman answered. "It's smooth enough today."

Grinning at the blatant untruth, Jeremy returned to enjoying the views and the spray.

The 30-foot motorboat had seemed substantial enough when they'd boarded at Doolin, but what had seemed to be a mild swell from inside the little harbor was deceptive. They'd had a spectacular ride across the sound to the island, the middle of the three Arans in size. They had earlier passed to the north of the smallest, Inisheer.

Peter and Megan sat in comparative shelter on the lee side of the boat. The journey across Ireland in the rented car had been tiring, and each had developed a mood--in Peter's case, an unusually dark one that had been reflected in the two men sniping at each other during the last 30 miles. Megan was glad they'd been able to separate, even by the short distance available within the boat.

She gazed back at the mainland, the distant rocks of Doolin misted in the spray of waves ending their Gulf Stream journey. She knew that when they returned, all their lives would have changed.

"It's an end of the world."

Peter's words seemed to echo her thoughts. He hadn't spoken for nearly an hour.

"What d'you mean?"

He pointed back towards Doolin. "Maybe it's how Columbus felt, that what was fading behind him was it, an end. In front of him, for all he knew, was nothing."

"But we know there's something." She turned to the island, then looked back at him. "Isn't there?"

A splash carried on the wind blurred his glasses. "I don't know. This place is different, Meg. This is going to be an end itself."

Then the boat was lifting up and down on the waves sloshing at the pier and they were distracted by the boatman's efforts to gauge a landing that wouldn't leave them smashed on the stone wall. Only feet away he cut his engine and shouted, "Now!"

Jeremy threw the roped old tires over the side to buffer the boat in the swells. Two weathered men above caught lines thrown to them and tied them securely to rust-crusted bollards.

"Smooth enough," the boatman observed as he handed up their rucksacks. "Thanks for your help, young fella."

"You're welcome." Jeremy grinned, hefting his luggage over his shoulder.

Megan looked across at a small beach beyond the pier. She touched Peter's arm.

"Look."

Three currachs were drawn up above the weedy tideline, upside down against the weather, looking like long black beetles asleep on the shore.

---

Later, in the way of visitors new to a place, they moved around to find their boundaries. On an island so small this didn't take long, but doing it improved their spirits.

They were fascinated by fields bounded by high limestone walls, built drystone, most minuscule. A few had post-harvest stubble and narrow stooks of hay stacked in the lee of the walls, drying before storage for the winter feeding of the few cows on the island. Most of the enclosures were without gates, and finding the lowest points in the walls so they could traverse the island was like trying to get through a maze with no breaks. A maze that sometimes led to surprises.

"Look at that." Megan pointed when they came around the ruins of a little medieval church, into the wind which was everywhere on this exposed Atlantic rock. Two vertical rocks with a long capstone stood stark against the sun setting into a dark cloud mass.

"A dolmen," Peter said.

It dominated a terrain where there were no trees. Even light-hearted Jeremy was affected.

"Men built it and we don't know them," he mused. "It'll be there when we're gone and nobody will know we've even seen it."

They looked at it for a long time.

"It will still be there even when the tower at Pisa falls," Peter said finally, breaking the spell.

---

"It's the bed of Darmuid and Grianne," the old man in the Tig na Ceoil said, taking his pipe from his mouth.

"Who were they?" Jeremy's innate romanticism always influenced him into being intrigued by any story that involved a man and a woman and a bed.

"He was one of Finn mac Cumhaill's Fianna warriors, and Grainne forced him to take her away on the eve of her wedding to Finn, because he was getting old and she didn't want to marry an aging man."

"Forced him?" Megan asked.

The old man looked at her, his eyes blue twinkles in island-ruddied skin. "Aye, young lady. He didn't want to betray his chief, but she put a geis on him and he had to do it. And later she seduced him."

"Ah, blame the woman for everything." Megan laughed. "What's a geis, anyway? Some kind of a spell?"

"No, girl, it's more than that. It is a prohibition ignored at one's peril. She doomed him to death and dishonor if he would not take her away. He had no choice."

"Why him particularly?" Peter wondered.

"He was special. He'd once been taken as a lover by a beautiful fairy woman, and she put a mark on him which ever more made him irresistible to women."

The old man ended his contribution by beginning the recharging of his pipe.

Jeremy stood up to get them another drink. "Boy, I wouldn't mind meeting that fairy woman myself." He laughed.

"You must have done it at some time," Megan teased him. "Aren't you already irresistible?"

Behind him the door opened and a clatter of men and women came in.

"If I am, why are we here?" he asked softly, then turned away.

Some of those who'd come in were musicians, and Megan idly watched them unpack their instruments. At another level she thought on the old man's story.

"You don't like Grainne," she said. "You don't approve of how she behaved. But if Diarmuid had been made irresistible by some magical means, surely it wasn't her fault?"

He scratched under his wool cap. He had rekindled the pipe and was expelling aromatic, contented puffs.

"Aye, but even with the magic mark, Diarmuid wasn't her first choice. She'd already asked Finn's son Oisin to take her, but he wouldn't. Finn commanded great loyalty, and even with Diarmuid she had to use the geis to get him to betray him. No man should be put in that position."

She wasn't going to let him get away with that.

"But why should a woman be put in a position that she must marry someone she doesn't want to?"

The old man pulled at his pipe. "Women mesmerise us, young miss," he said. "They always had power over men. Anything they want, they can make it happen."

His words made Megan uncomfortable. She turned and watched one of the musicians squeeze an under-arm bag-powered instrument, and at the same time Jeremy arrived with their drinks. She moved to let him put them on the table and caught Peter looking at her, and she knew he'd overheard the conversation.

---

"Hey, this is great!"

Jeremy grabbed her waist and swung her around in the center of the flagged floor, then released her to the arms of a man coming in from the corner of the formation. Breathlessly, Megan managed to laugh agreement before the dancing took him briefly out of her sight, and then she was back on the sideline as another foursome took their turn to the music.

It had been made clear early that visitors were expected to get fully involved in the entertainment at the Tig na Ceoil. Now the musicians played an end-of-set flourish, allowing the three to retreat to their table.

"Whew! They dance hard over here," Jeremy gasped, flopping into his chair.

"There's nothing smoochy about it," Peter agreed, flapping his arms to cool himself.

A bodhran hand-drum rapped out another roll of rhythm and one of the musicians called out something in Gaelic.

"What did he say?" Megan asked.

"It is the turn of the ladies," the old man told her, and nodded in the direction of a young woman walking across toward their table. "And it looks like one of them is going to take her turn here."

She had the same red hair and outdoor complexion as the woman who'd sold Megan the painting. Her eyes laughing, she stood before Jeremy and held out a hand. When she spoke it was also in Gaelic, but the meaning was clear.

Jeremy rose, grinning at the others.

"Could this be the fairy woman who will make me irresistible?"

"I don't know why she'd want to," Peter retorted.

The younger man gripped the girl's hand. "Jealousy, Peter, suits you," he laughed, and then the two walked across to where a set was forming.

It was their normal banter, but Megan could feel the undercurrents coming stronger, waves fighting each other to claim the shoreline. She looked at Peter.

"I don't feel like dancing. Would you like a walk?"

As soon as she'd asked, she wished she hadn't. She might have trapped herself.

But Peter nodded and pushed back his chair. "Sure. I'd like some quiet myself."

---

The pier had a single light on the end that didn't seem nearly a strong enough marker for a boat trying to land at night, particularly an engineless currach. Megan wondered about it as they looked over the edge.

"Boatmen have done it for thousands of years," Peter said.

A gust of wind scattered across the pier and Megan shrugged her jacket closer. She walked to one of the bollards and sat, knowing that before long its chill would force her to rise again. She heard a rasp and turned to see Peter cupping a match to a cigarette.

"Oh Peter! You haven't smoked since--since we started the trip."

He spun the match into the wind, and the tip of the cigarette glowed bright as he pulled on it.

"I think there are more important things to consider right now," he said quietly. "We're flying home soon."

Another gust whipped a taste of spray over her.

"Yes," she said eventually. "I know."

"What happens?"

She shook her head. "I haven't decided. I..." Her voice trailed off.

The cigarette glowed bright again for a few moments.

"I think I have, Meg. I don't think I can wait any more."

"We agreed to wait. We all agreed--"

"It's become too much of a game, Meg."

"No, Peter. It's not a game. It's a decision for my life."

"And for mine. And for Jeremy's...."

From somewhere beyond the harbor came a dull metal sound. A buoy of the kind used to mark shoals near land. It clanked in an uneven rhythm, ominous, funereal. Megan stood up and looked back towards the village, willing herself to hear music from the Tig na Ceoil that would drown the unseen bell.

"We'd better go in," she said.

"Hey! Conas ta tu?" Jeremy hailed them. "Mairead here is teaching me Gaelic. What d'you think?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me what it means." Megan laughed, her mood lightened momentarily. "Did you get your `irresistible' mark yet?"

"It means `how are you?' and no, I don't think so. What's it like outside?"

"Wind coming up," Peter said. "It could be squally tomorrow."

"Great. I've arranged for us to take a trip in one of those currachs, to the small island. It'll be interesting in a real sea."

"Hey, that sounds good." Peter said, brightening too. "How'd you swing that?"

"Mairead's grandfather--the man who was with us earlier?--he's going to check his lobster pots tomorrow, and he wants to visit a friend on Inisheer. He said he'd take us with him."

"Well, it'll be different from the whaleboats." Peter became thoughtful. "Hang on while I get a drink."

He looked at Megan, an eyebrow raised.

She shook her head. "I'm tired. I think I'll go home to bed."

"We'll have this last one," Jeremy said.

She felt something exclusive between the men. It was uncomfortable.

Mairead stood up and smiled at her. "I live beside your lodgings. I'll walk with you."

"Thanks." She smiled at Jeremy. "G'night."

"G'night."

When they got to the door she looked back. The men were deep in conversation. Peter was doing most of the talking, and both of them seemed excited.

---

She woke to rain blustered on her window by a keening wind. She figured it was after dawn but not yet day. She savored the moment--the luxury of spare time before having to get up shouldn't be wasted on slumber--and thought back to the last early morning with Peter in Boston. She'd told him she didn't think she'd be going to Europe.

"Why not, Meg? We've planned this for over a year." He turned from where he'd been looking out at the street. "This is our celebration of my finishing law school--we're going to be married when we come back."

His face was in shadow against the window, but she could hear his frustration. She sat on her bed, feeling miserable.

"I'm confused, Peter. I didn't plan this, but it's happened and I need to work it out. Going away with you to Europe simply doesn't seem to be the way to do it."

He sighed and came across and sat beside her, reaching for his cigarettes. He shook one out, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it back in the pack.

"OK, honey," he said, leaning back against the headboard beside her. "Let's think it through."

And they had, sitting and talking for the rest of the morning, Peter balancing the weights of the situation on one side and the other, as he'd been taught to do.

"OK, I'll go along with that," Jeremy said later in the restaurant to where they'd all gone for an extended lunch. "I'd nothing set for the summer anyway. But are you sure that you wouldn't be better working this out on your own, Meg? You know what they say--out of sight, out of mind."

"You really mean, `make up your mind,' don't you?" She laughed, shaking her head. "Maybe I'd let go of you both. No, at least this way we're friends together for the summer, and what will be, as they say, will be."

They sealed the pact in the rosy glow of a second bottle of wine, and each made his or her way home separately. For Peter and Megan that was the first indication of the changed circumstances: it was understood between them that there would be no more sex until the matter was resolved. That night both wondered what on earth they'd done.

It had seemed such a mature way of dealing with the problem, Megan thought as she got out of her bed on Inishmaan and drew back the curtains on her window. Yet now she felt angry. Damn both of them! It wasn't fair to put her in this position.

It was gray and wet and wild outside in the Aran morning. Dressing quickly in woolly jumper and jeans, she went to the dining room and saw only one setting for breakfast.

"They left an hour ago, a leanbh," the landlady told her as she brought her cereal and juice. "They said they wanted to make the most of the waves, that they had been waiting too long."

---

White tips coasted in on the beach in never-ending armies, sometimes battering across each other before collapsing on the sand and then slithering back into the undertow. Above them, leaden clouds scuttled low before the wind. Mairead's grandfather was standing beside a lone currach.

"They're not coming?" he asked. "Your friends? They were to meet me here, ten minutes ago."

"They're gone, gone an hour."

The old man looked to the other side of his boat, at the marks where two others had been, rapidly washing away under the weather and the sea.

"They are good with boats, they told me."

"They are," Megan whispered.

---

"They were racing, it seemed like."

The boy on Inisheer had seen the two currachs approaching. "A wave caught one boat badly and it went over. The other stopped, and after a minute the man from it dived in. Then there was rain and I couldn't see them anymore."

The guard from Inishmore looked up from his notebook. "Could you make out which one was which?"

The boy shook his head. "No, Sergeant. They were too far."

The policeman sighed and closed his book. He turned to the two women.

"I'm sorry, miss," he said to Megan. "The currents here are treacherous. We can't even be sure that the bodies will ever come in."

Megan turned to Mairead. The young islandwoman, drawing on the reserves of courage from generations of sea tragedies, held her stricken friend tight and comforted her and looked out beyond at an ocean which had once more left a woman bereaved. This time twice.

---

"Are you related to the artist?" she asked the woman at the picture stall.

"My husband."

The sadness that Megan had seen once before came back, but this time the American could feel it too.

"We lived on the island. He died a year ago... he'd been sick for a long time."

"I'm sorry. He was good."

The woman nodded, reaching for wrapping paper.

"This was his last painting, some time before he died." She deftly worked on the packaging. "He didn't like it much after it was finished. Before he died he asked me to destroy it, he said that the woman was watching men going to their deaths. He said women have the power of life and death."

She finished her task and shrugged her shoulders. "I couldn't destroy it. I felt sure it would be important to someone."

---

The wind keened again and the firelight brought the waves and the clouds in the painting to life once more. To its left the bulls of Pamplona thundered closer to a runner, and on the right the leaning tower seemed to shift another fraction.

This is one of the stories in my story collection Mariseo's House and Other Stories published in 1996 under the pseudonym William Trapman.

Home is the sambo, home from the pub

2008-03-30T18:23:00.004+01:00

In the family pub as I grew through childhood and my early teens, I recall sandwich making duty as a daily chore.

The bread was catering size white sliced pan. The fillings were thin cut on a silver electric slicer, either from orange-crumbed hams delivered by a vanman from McCarrens in Limerick, or from catering-sized blocks of Galtee cheese that came in soft-wood boxes.

It was simple fare. The perfectly square slices of bread smeared corner to corner with butter which had been slightly melted to make the job more efficient. A slap of ham or cheese, the ham slice usually larger than the bread and hanging out the sides.

The results were stored in glass cabinets on the bar counter, the pan heels on top of the sandwich piles to stop the bread underneath from drying out and curling. It wasn't a real danger most of the time, because the three buses that came through each morning would have enough hungry passengers to clean out the supplies before lunch. Making the job a recurring one for the evening buses coming back.

On occasions such as the Punchestown Races it was 'all hands' the night before, family and staff, making many multiples of the normal requirements. The made sandwiches were repacked in the pan wrappers to keep them fresh overnight. Virtually everyone on their way through Kilcullen to the event stopped at The Hideout for nourishment before the afternoon's tournament with the turf accountants. Those who elected to take their sandwiches away, got them in small greaseproof paper bags which we closed by holding the top corners and swinging the bag and contents through two or three loops.

Even after the Hideout began providing more sophisticated fare, steaks and pork chops done on a grill, chips freshy cut and sizzled in a deep fryer, and the place became famous throughout the country and beyond for its food, the ham sandwich always remained available for the traveller not requiring a full meal. It was a true staple.

In subsequent years, when I'd be motoring the roads myself, there were other places where I remember the ham sandwich being simple but essential fare for roadgoers like myself.

The original Red Cow pub, for instance. The last place to stop before leaving Dublin proper, they had a particularly good ham sambo that went very well with a Club Cola (the pub was a last stand against the more expensive Coca Cola import).

Morrisseys of Abbeyleix was another, where the proprietor would slice the ham or cheese as required and make the sandwich up fresh. The Black Horse in Inchicore did a rare good one too.

Some places used home-cooked ham. But that could be dodgy, sometimes cut too thick and with annoying chunks of fat. The 'real' ham sandwich was always made with commercial pressed hams.

Most small rural pubs didn't officially do sandwiches. But if someone came along around lunchtime and looked for one, the barperson might happily go next door to the grocer and acquire the needed ingredients. This was even easier if, as was often enough the case, the pub and grocery were part of the same operation.

What prompted this recent meander through memory is the realisation that, as far as I know, there's no pub in Kilcullen any more where one can get a simple ham sandwich through the day and the evening.

Either they're into the full restaurant business or the Bill of Fare stops at crisps and peanuts. Those that provide bar food offer exotic imported concepts like paninis, usually with rabbit food trimmings, but the ordinary sandwich, plain or toasted, is apparently unavailable.

In Fallons, you can get a ham 'sandwich' at lunchtime, up to 3pm. But though very tasty, it is of the fancy 'open' kind, which really doesn't qualify at all for what the Earl of Sandwich is supposed to have invented. It's the kind of food you have to attack with a knife and fork, because it doesn't have the form that you can lift with two hands and chomp on it. And it certainly wouldn't survive a swing in a greaseproof bag ...

Next door in McTernans, the situation is simple; 'no food of any kind at all', except the crisps and peanuts. Fair enough, though it wasn't how Joe used to do things.

In Bardons, you get plates of sandwiches gratis on some crowded occasions, and just recently there are available from a new bar food menu what are hopeful sounding 'doorstep' sandwiches. But only until 3pm.

Billy Dowling in The Spout isn't in the food business either. But nobody expects it. It's a sports pub, where the screens and access to Ladbrokes are the important things.

Then there's the Hideout, where this all started. You can get a sambo at lunchtime, until the Coffee 'n Cakes section closes at 3pm. After that, though, it's either the starter or the full meal.

For most of us looking for parallel nourishment as we down our quota of pints or wine, a simple food option is all we want. No chips ... or even 'french fries'. No chicken wings on Ceaser salad. No lasangne starter portions.

Just two slices of plain bread with our filling of choice. And preferably not with a handful of crisps on the side. A bottle of Chef brown sauce, or a dollop of English mustard, would be a welcome bonus.

There's a national worry about overweight. Amongst us in the drinking class, I blame this partly on the necessity to eat more than we want, because what we want isn't available. The result can be all too often a fat-focussed side-trip to the take-away on the journey home.

The local pub that could give me the ham 'sanger' on demand, which I remember from my youth, is the one that would get pretty well all of my business these days.

But meantime I keep a slab of cheese at home in my fridge, along with a quarter pound of sliced ham, and the plain pan in the pantry cupboard. Because too often I have to wait until I get home to make for myself what I want.

Carmel Kennedy, an Appreciation

2008-03-26T06:47:00.002Z

When I heard that Carmel Kennedy had died, the news brought back a flood of memories. All of them relating to Carmel and the Hideout. For many people Carmel was the Hideout. At the very least, an integral part of it in its heyday.

For me growing up as the eldest son of the Byrne house in my early teens, it seemed that she had been there forever. While a day student in Newbridge College, I'd cycle home after class and get a quick mid-afternoon lunch before pedalling the five miles back to early study -- a matter that reflected both my antipathy to playing sports and to the quality of the food in the college itself.

Carmel was most of the time the person who cooked that food. Looking back, I realised I was a very fortunate person indeed to be raised on Nolans steaks, but even more fortunate that there was somebody to cook them for me!

For many years beyond those days, Carmel was the person in charge of the kitchen in the Hideout. She was the one to whom regulars would make their case if they arrived in after the food service was ended. Mostly they were from the racing fraternity, because that was an era when the Hideout was Mecca for that group, a place to unwind after a long day at the horses, whether as owner, trainer or punter.

It helped their cause that Carmel had an interest in the horses herself, and even if the griddle and deep fryer had been turned off, she could be persuaded to switch them on again if she was in good form. Though that form might well be dependent on whether the pre-races advice from those same people had been productive ...

For years the cooking area in the Hideout was wide open in the front bar, and there were many who liked to sit at the counter and chat with Carmel, some even preferring to eat there instead of the restaurant on the other side of the wall. The food itself was an attraction, but equally so was Carmel's banter and chat about ... well, mostly horses.

The front bar wasn't always the easiest place for a woman to be. Language could be robust, and tempers might not always be held in check. But my recollections of Carmel, quite apart from the obvious soft spot she'd had for me since I was a youngster, include her ability to absorb uncouthness with unfailing good humour, and to calm the obstreperous with a skill equalled only later by Ireland's UN peacekeepers.

She wasn't just a passive member of staff -- Carmel got involved in everything that was going on at the edges. Such as playing darts with the lads in the front bar when things quietened down, and even being a member of the bar team when it travelled to other pubs around the county like Nolans of Kilteel. She threw a mean dart, and when she was on form the only one to equal her was horse trainer Con Collins.

Con was one of her favourites in the racing game. More, he was one of her best buddies. There were others, like the late Tom McCallion, who was a perpetual punter and the only one for whom we kept Johnnie Walker Black Label. Neither of those gentlemen ever had to plead for a late meal.

In matters of who might be accommodated with late food, my father was the owner of the Hideout but never the boss. He could suggest, but Carmel decided. On nights that she wasn't on duty he had a better chance to go beyond the boundaries, usually by getting myself to do the cooking.

Carmel didn't marry, but she had her admirers and she had her admired. The confluence of both didn't happen, but that's life. In her own life in the Hideout she touched very many people, in formative ways to some, and she was never less than a lovely person.

When I left the family business I had known Carmel for two decades. It is probably true to say that she knew me better than I knew myself, and her wisdom as somebody a decade older was on a number of occasions something that put me back on track when I might have been in danger of slipping off. As far as I know she had never worked anywhere else than the Hideout, but I was no longer involved when she finally retired.

I went in my own directions when I left. And it is only my own fault that I didn't keep in touch. That she had been ill and I didn't know it is a reflection of the gap that I allowed to happen.

It is a strange thing that on the day before I heard Carmel had died, she came into my mind for no reason, and made me wonder how she was?

How she was, over the years that I did know her, was a warm and caring woman of great humour and humanity.

May she rest in peace.

Sally sticks and humiliation

2008-02-13T08:29:00.003Z

Not to speak ill of the dead, much ... but since the 'Ould Scal' chronicles have been raised in a recent 'Bridge' story, there's been a spate of stories going the rounds about her.

One is about the time she died, and the brother of one of her former pupils rang to tell him that she was on her way to her native Kerry for burial.

"Are you sure she's dead?" he was asked.

"Yep. Gone. Headed for the graveyard tomorrow."

There was a momentary pause at the other end.

"Right," the former pupil said. "You go out to Spollens tomorrow and order 20 tons of concrete. I'll pay for it. Then have it sent down after her to Kerry and fill her grave with it. No matter what pull she might have with the man above, He'll never be able to rise her on the Last Day."

I have memories of my own of Ould Scal.

I was rarely one of her victims. Scal was many things, with sadism and vindictiveness among her traits. But she was above all a snob, and her worst depredations were reserved for her poorer pupils. My parents were in business, so I was not on her radar for ridicule.

One of her regular things -- especially on a wet day -- was to say that somebody in the room was 'smelly'. She would line up a number of the 'suspects' at the back of the room (actually where Julie's desk in the Library is now) and walk behind them, sniffing loudly.

And she'd come up triumphantly with a 'culprit', always somebody who had probably had to walk in a distance in the rain. And never somebody who was a child of one of the more well off families in the community.

Scal liked to humiliate people. She got off on it, to use a modern expression. And she liked to beat them too. With sally tree switches.

I don't remember how she sourced the sally sticks. They were black and of a suitable length and she kept them 'seasoning' in an outside toilet reserved for the teachers in the school back yard.

She used them enthusiastically. And if, as often happened, such useage resulted in a broken stick, the unfortunate who it was broken on was sent out to the toilet to get another so the punishment could be completed.

That's just a taster of what far too much teaching in Ireland was at the time I grew up. There were people appointed to positions in charge of childern who never should have been.

It was part of a time of Ireland's life. That it was a bad time is no reason why it should be forgotten.

The good news is that, from the educational experiences of my own children, I know that all has changed since Ould Scal bit her last Kerry dust.

And I write this not out of spite against her, but to salute those in charge of our children's education today who are the total anthitesis of what schools and the 'Scals' in Ireland used to be.

The cement mentioned at the beginning of this piece might not actually be holding her in her grave. But the kind of school experience that she represented is well and truly dead.

On the Road to the Clouds

2008-01-07T08:27:00.000Z

What kind of will power does it take to decide to eliminate your tribe? To collectively cease to have children, and if one happens to be born that it be thrown from a cliff to its death?

That's part of the tragedy of the Diaguita tribe which lived in what is today northwestern Argentina in the 15th century.

In their city of Quilmes near Cafayete, they resisted the Inca empire which spread from Peru through the Andes, though they later accepted a certain co-existence in return for technologies such as irrigation which the invaders brought. In the Inca decline, the Spanish invaders became their next enemy, and for 130 years they fought against subjugation, eventually being defeated.

As the history goes, the Diaguitans then decided on a form of collective deliberate extinction, by vowing not to have any more children. I recently stood on the outcrop above the ruins of their city from where it is said they killed any babies which happened to be born despite their extinction effort.

In the end, the population of the city had reduced by two thirds to some 2,000 people. At that point they left Quilmes, one group heading for Cordoba, the other for Buenas Aires, some 1,500 kilometres away. Many hundreds died on the way, and the settlement where the Spanish rulers effectively put them on a 'reservation' was eventually abandoned, as it had become a ghost town.

Today that settlement is also known as Quilmes, but is famous only because Argentina's best-selling beer of the same name comes from there.

Hearing that very strong story made my visit to ancient Quilmes a very thought-provoking one. Looking down over the excavated ruins spread below that outcrop, I could almost feel the sense of hopeless determination amongst a people who had once been the masters of the Calchaqui Valley.

That visit to Quilmes was a side-track to a Land Rover drive up to the highest national road in the Americas passable by car, and then only a few months of the year without using a 4WD vehicle. At some 5,000 metres the Abra del Acay is higher than Mont Blanc.

Our journey was from Cafayete to the provincial capital of Salta, by the long way around. It took us up along the course of the Calchaqui River right to the ice-capped springs on the slopes of the Nevado de Acay which are the river's source.

It was billed as 'The Road to the Clouds'. We didn't have any clouds, though, they aren't due until around the end of the year.

It was an amazing journey not just to see the capability of the Discovery 3 in its element, but to traverse an area where the people today are a mix of many races.

The trip wasn't just a history lesson in conquest, but also in winemaking and the slow development of the wine industry in this part of Argentina. It produces today wines to rival the best in the country, and the world, and we camped on the estate owned by American Donald Hess, which has the officially highest vineyards in the world, at 3,015 metres.

Getting to the Paso Abra del Acay the Land Rover way involved taking the cars offroad much of the time and travelling through the gorges and canyons carved out by the Calchaqui River.

The Terrain Response system inaugurated in Discovery 3 when it was first launched proved to be a big help in negotiating the boulder-strewn riverbed, and along the sandy sections worn out on the river's bends.

Out of the river, the journey was most of the time a very dusty affair, as even when on the main roads of the region we were generally on dirt and rubble surfaces.

These were when the radio systems used while travelling in the short convoys proved their usefulness. The lead vehicle could warn of approaching vehicles or pedestrians which otherwise would have been invisible in the dust. On the narrower sections, sometimes with scary sheer drops on one side, this also provided the opportunity to find a slightly wider stretch of road by which the opposing vehicles could pass.

The views from the Paso, when we finally reached it, were spectacular and worth all the worry. Indeed, at the top we drove offroad on a truly lunar landscape in order to breach the actual 5,000 metres level above the road. That the wind chill and the altitude had us all wrapped up like eskimos under the blazing sun didn't take from the sense of achievement.

Afterwards it was downhill all the way, with an overnight stop at the 3,800 metres mining village of San Antonio de los Cobres. It is famous for being a station on the highest railway in South America, 'The Train to the Clouds', now unfortunately, not in use. From there, we followed the line of much of the track before ending the journey in Salta, the provincial capital.

The Discovery 3 2.7 litre engines were designed to operate efficiently at up to around 3,500 metres and it was interesting to see what effects the thin air and steep gradients caused on the 'Road to the Clouds' odyssey.

There was a noticeable fall-off in power as we climbed to the higher levels. And the turbocharger would spin faster than usual trying to develop enough pressure to do its thing. But though pickup was diminished especially when trying to redevelop momentum after negotiating a slow uphill hairpin, at no stage did the cars let us down.

The biggest danger was actually for us drivers, as once above 3,000 metres we lowlanders were prone to altitude sickness. Symptoms include headaches and nausea, and the problem can lead to hallucinations and erratic judgement and even sudden unconsciousness. We were all on our guard, drinking a lot of water and moving around slowly, and though some members of the group did get sick as we descended from the Abra, fortunately there were no serious instances.

But back home, I'm not thinking about the cars so much. What I can't get out of my mind is the thought of those children thrown from the rocky outcrop over Quilmes.

I'm not judging the Diaguitans for slaughtering their babies. That's something they will have come to terms with themselves hundreds of years ago.

It's just the enormity of their decision of extinction that makes my small travels on this planet seem so relatively insignificant.

Postcard from Monaco

2007-12-15T08:19:00.000Z

There's an advertisement in Nice Airport which sums up the ethos of that part of France.

It is for YachtsOnly insurance, a Swiss-based company that specialises in protecting the favourite toys of the super-rich.

Even in Celtic Tiger Ireland you wouldn't have seen its likes in Dublin Airport -- an airport where, incidentally, a few hours before, a mediocre breakfast for two with coffee from machines that didn't work properly had set us back more than 25 euros.

Yet, on the harbourside of Monte Carlo, playground of the really super-rich, a properly brewed tasty coffee will only cost you 2.50 euros, and a main course to go with it maybe 6.50 euros.

Thing is, the French, and the Monagasques, don't let anyone rip them off. Sure, it'll cost in the Cafe de Paris in the same town, but that's paying for the splendour. Dublin Airport doesn't do splendour.

Anyhow, if you ever get to Nice, a spin along the Corniche coast to Monaco is well worth the visit. You can choose between three routes with views, the Grande, Moyenne and Basse Corniches, or the boring but efficient A8 motorway.

We went by the Moyenne and came back by the Basse. A short time in the little principality's capital, not even enough to buy that good value coffee, revealed a couple of gems.

The first was transient but quite special. Because we drove in within a week of Christmas, there was a 'Fete sous la Neige' Christmas Fair set up on the harbour front. All wooden kiosks with everything from cake decorations through cakes themselves to jewellery as well as plenty of eat-on-the-hoof food stands. A seasonally-decorated ferris wheel, and the harbour swimming pool converted to a skating rink. And in the middle of it all, a really festive-friendly recreation of Santa's Kingdom.

We were in Monte Carlo, where the shops on the parallel street were all at the Prada level, and the fair stalls were charging accordingly. Right?

Nope. Prices ranging from two to 30 euros would get you things that would cause no cringing at the Christmas Day post-dinner presents opening.

But that wasn't even important on the day. The unexpected presence of the spirit of winter's most important festival was one key to a very special couple of hours.

The other was the Christmas Crib in the tiny votive chapel that looks out on the harbour of millionaires. Dedicated to St Devote, the principality's patron saint, it is the simplest of religious structures, dwarfed by the expensive apartment blocks all around. One could say it looked out of place in its surroundings, but in fact it seemed that all the other buildings were the ones not quite in sync.

The inside is also beautiful in its simplicity, a place to stop the turbulent world for a few precious minutes, whether a religious believer or unbeliever or anything in between.

The crib was, like all of its kind during Advent, waiting for the day of the birth of the Redeemer. But along with the Wise Men and the others we know from the traditional story, there was a long retinue of other figures representing all the crafts, professions and simple working people. Waiting to pay homage. To look for guidance. To ask for forgiveness for any transgressions, major, minor and unwitting, and to find peace. To give thanks for being alive and being able to care.

After that the walk back to the car park through the Christmas Fair might have been expected to be anticlimax, even banal. Except that it wasn't. Now it was twilight rapidly dropping to darkness, and the magic was intensified.

Back at the car, trying to pay for time, another little piece of magic. In Monte Carlo they give you an hour free in the undergound car park before charging, and then charging moderately. We'd been there close to a couple of hours, but the ticket still came out 'gratuit'.

Heading back in the quickening night through the small towns along the Basse Corniche, each with their own magical Christmas lights ablaze, we reflected, and concluded that somehow, in Bert's Celtic Tiger, we've either missed out on, or lost, something in our small westerly outpost of Europe that has become Ripoff Central.

You don't have to break the bank at Monte Carlo to feel very rich there indeed.

A night for the dentists

2007-12-09T11:02:00.001Z

This is a transcript of a talk that I gave to the Kildare Dentists on the occasion of their Christmas Dinner, held in Fallons on 8 December 2007.

I'm still a little unsure of how I got to be here ... as a journalist I'm normally reporting on the after dinner speeches, not giving them.

But when Gary Collins asked me to to come and join you on this occasion, I thought it might be a good opportunity to briefly recall where Kilcullen has come from ... and mark where it is today ... by using a few of my own memories.

The basis for me doing it is that I'm -- frightening thought -- the senior man of a family that has been here for four generations, since my great grandfather arrived as a young carpenter from Myshall in County Carlow to help a pair of elderly aunts.

They had a grocery shop and bar up there where the supermarket is now, and when my great-grandfather wasn't busy helping his aunts with their business, he made coffins out in the back yard, which is how my family got into the funeral undertaking business.

Anyhow, his son Jim moved things on a bit and set up a hardware and drapery operation beside the pub and grocery, and later, in 1922, he bought Flanagan's Motor Bar up on the Chapel Road corner and turned it into Byrne's Hotel. He also developed a land sale and auctioneering business.

In the 50s my dad, also Jim, took over the hotel and turned it into what became rather famous as The Hideout, with Dan Donnelly's Arm and other stuff -- but that in itself is a story for another time.

Through the eyes of a child, here's a few snapshots of the kind of place Kilcullen -- and every other small town in Ireland -- was like in the 50s.

Across the river we today have what's called the Valley Park. When I was a ten-year-old that was a steep scrubland almost impenetrable to an adult, but for us kids there were a series of trails and tunnels through the thorny brush that were playgrounds like none that are available today.

Then there's the woodlands surrounding what is now Tony O'Reilly's Irish home at Castlemartin. When I was at the playing cowboys and indians stage, all of us youngsters had the run of those woods, They were in a rather decrepit state but all the better for that -- we had camps, gangs, and streams flowing through the woods into the Liffey that became places for ambushing each other. There were climbing trees and storm-downed trees that made bridges over some of the muckier parts.

After a school holidays afternoon spent there we'd come home dirty, scratched and bleeding sometimes, often with soaked and soggy shoes. Occasionally minus shoes which had somehow floated away down the Rio Grande of the Liffey. And we'd be tired too, but we'd had great times, and there was always the prospect of tomorrow.

There's no such prospect for today's kids, of course. Castlemartin, like all the other big estates around, is well guarded now. The holes in the walls through which we gained access to the woods have all been long since repaired, and any bunch of small intruders these days would probably have a posse of garda cars surrounding them in double jig time, responding to whatever alarm systems are around the place.

In the supermarket today there are an amazing variety of cartons of milk -- vitamin enriched, low fat, whatever. But in the 50s, local farmer Tom Molloy had a herd of cows out the road which he would bring in twice a day to be milked in a shed just behind where the Credit Union is now. And twice a day, myself or one of my brothers, would bring a brace of tin milk cans down to Molloys to have them filled by a jug dipped into one of the buckets of milk, fresh from the cows. Lots of our friends were doing the same chore.

It was all right going down the town with the empty cans, but bringing them back full wasn't so nice. The cans had thin wire handles and they could really cut welts into small hands by the time we'd got home again.

Just across the road was Jim O'Connell's bakery, and when not on the milk run I'd often be sent down to buy a batch loaf or two hot from the ovens. He'd wrap them loosely in a kind of a soft tissue paper, but by the time I got them home, I could have eaten a hole halfway through one of them. Those batch loaves had a kind of texture that lent itself to being pulled out in strips and munched all the way back up the hill. Somehow, the wrapped Old Mr Brennan's Pan in the supermarket doesn't have the same attraction ... albeit, it will get home in one piece.

Kilcullen was a very small village then, but I remember it supported no less than five drapery and outfitting stores, all of which were attached to other kinds of shops too. It was long before Dunnes Stores was even imagined, and if somebody really needed to push out the boat in getting clothes, an annual expedition to Clerys in Dublin was the thing. But for the rest of the year, any clothing needs were all met locally.

The same local emporiums had big rolls of material for women's clothes too, and there were quite a number of local women who made their living sewing up gunas from a pattern which would have been chosen at the same time as the material. Just over there in the corner of the square, where the new development is being completed, one of those women lived, and I have many recollections of going into her parlour with my mother and watching a new dress or suit being pinned up at a fitting.

Where we're sitting now used to be Jim Kelly's tailor shop. He made up suits for a lot of men around, and he lived to a great age. He was also the town's historian, and over my later years I'd often come to talk to him. Indeed, he told me a story one day that there was a girl buried down on an island in the river below Castlemartin, a place where I used to swim as a child. He wouldn't tell me the circumstances -- there were still family members of the people involved living here, he said.

But I went away with the thought in my head, and some time later I used the idea as the basis for a short story which I set in the early part of the 20th century. It became my first published fiction. When it appeared in Woman's Way some time later I brought a copy down to Jim. He read it, nodded, and told me that fiction or not I'd got very close to the truth -- just the time was a little out.

And he still wouldn't ever tell me the full real story ... so if you hear a ghostly whisper here tonight, maybe he has decided to reveal it.

I was a child of a business family, and we Byrne kids were friends of children of other business families, like the Bardons just over the bridge. But though our parents would have been described as comfortably off, it didn't mean that we were flush with spending money. We earned what we could, but at least the earning possibilities were availble to us 'in house', so to speak.

Bardons had a pub, just like we had, and in those days all the pubs used to bottle their own Guinness and ales, whiskeys too, from barrels.

The bottles had to be labelled, so we Byrnes would go down to Bardons to help our friends stick the labels on the bottles with our pals, getting paid something like a penny a dozen, and the Bardon kids would come up to our pub to do the same at a similar rate.

Then my dad bought a semi-automatic labelling machine, in the process thus eliminating a valuable income stream for us kids.

I wasn't of an age to notice, but I was growing up in the Lemass era when the country was beginning to find its own place in a Europe and a world still reeling from the effects of a world war. So I was growing at a time towards and into the 60s which was heading towards exciting.

That was yet to come, though. The big excitements for us coming into our teens were the annual parish carnival in August, with amusements and marquee dancing. In between Augusts we made do with whatever films were showing in the cinema across the road there. Today it is our leather seated town hall theatre and our Heritage Centre, where you can see quite a collection of pictures and other memorabilia, much of it from the times I've been wandering on about.

I remember going in there to see Tom Mix and Flash Gordon 'folloyer-uppers' -- serials -- and later the big Cinemascope specials like Giant and Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back, and others. And of course it was the time of a host of horror movies like I Was A Teenage Werewolf and The Blob and lots of other stuff like that . And we absolutely loved them.

At the time it was 8d to get into the show. We'd typically come down with a shilling, leaving 4d to spend in O'Connell's sweet shop that used to be just the other side of the alley there.

One film that I remember running for a week, Rock around the Clock, with Bill Haley and his Comets who started what became rock 'n' roll. And it was also there that I saw the movie based on the BBC TV pop series Six-Five Special. I went back every night just to hear the one song, the one that prompted me to take up the guitar myself, Lonnie Donegan singing 'The Grand Coulee Dam'.

Tonight that same location is packed out with an audience appreciating the continuing work of a drama group that can trace its history back to the 1940s, and I for one think it is great that there's still an interest in going to local live entertainment produced by local people just because they can.

All those thoughts are, quite frankly, an indulgence on my part. Because having to come up with something for tonight gave me the opportunity to wallow a little in my past.

Kilcullen today is quite different, rapidly shifting from a position of a declining population as recently as 1997 to bustling with a growth that has resulted in more than doubling the number of people living here in the space of a very few years. And there's no slowing of that in sight.

The new people -- who now vastly outnumber us 'old' Kilcullenites -- are bringing new ideas and movement into their adopted home town. They bring also the possibility of viable new services, like Gary's full time dental practice which compares well to the annual visit of the dentist to the school in my national primary days. We have new shops and boutiques which could never have survived in the most recent decades, and no doubt there will be more.

Kilcullen can only prosper as it moves forward with yet another generation. Those who have come to live amongst us have inherited a number of very good facilities provided by the imagination and initiative of others living here before them, and they will build on that. The town, I'm sure, is in good hands.

For me, it's a funny weekend, that in a way closes out how I started with you tonight.

When I left the family business, the Hideout, 30 years ago, to try and make a living by writing, my younger brother Des took my place. Des sold the Hideout a decade or so ago, and with his wife Josephine continued to develop the filling station and shop beside the home where he and I had grown up.

Des died two years ago yesterday, prematurely, a victim of lung cancer. And tomorrow evening, Josephine retires from the shop and petrol station business, ending a presence of the Byrne family serving Kilcullen people that began four generations ago when my great-grandfather, sitting on the shaft of a pony and trap where he had hitched a ride, came to help out his aunts.

We've come a kind of a full circle, haven't we?

I hope I haven't bored you with these few very parochial thoughts. But, perhaps because we all live such busy lives, we don't often take the time to detour back down our own memory lanes ... and so I thank Gary, and yourselves, for unwittingly giving me the chance to do so this evening.

Thank you.

I acknowledge with thanks the donation which the Kildare Dentists are making to the Hospice on the Curragh because I gave this talk.

Postcard from La Boca

2007-11-21T09:00:00.000Z

There's a bust of Admiral William Brown, the Irishman who founded the Argentine Navy, in the La Boca area of Buenos Aires. It overlooks a harbour which, thanks to generations of corruption and a waste disposal mafia, is now reckoned to be the most polluted body of water in South America.

Behind Brown's memorial is the Caminito, a triangle of streets famous for its bright colours and tango cafes. Individuals selling paintings with tango and local architectural themes vie with street tango performers for the attention of any visitors. The colours are from when the section was renovated as an artists' centre under the direction of one Quinquela Martin.

The Caminito is busy with daytime tourists, and there's a strong police presence. The policemen are very polite and helpful, though I was told that this is a fairly latter-times phenomenon. "They've had training in being people-friendly," I was told. "They weren't always like that."

But the police aren't there after dark. Nor are the tourists. La Boca is off-limits then to all but locals. They effectively govern themselves, independent of the city authority. In every way. The paintings, for instance, are all individual, but no outsider can get into the business, which is an integral part of the local independent economy.

Where once other citizens could wander freely and enjoy the cafes and their famous music in the evenings, they can't do that any more. "When I was young it was the place to come," says Alicia, a city native. "Since the eighties, not any more. It's unsafe at night. I miss it." Then wistfully, but without any real hope, "maybe someday we'll be able to come down here again?"

Coming down in the comfort of the coach we had passed the famous 'Boca Juniors' soccer stadium where, amongst others, Maradonna learned his trade. Under its looming presence a homeless man lived in one of its streetside indentations, complete with a full metal bed and his worldly good stacked under it.

As the dark began arriving, we headed back to our bus. Presumably those new-friendly policemen were also leaving.

Admiral Brown stayed, his expression unchanging even in the stink of the harbour over which he watches for eternity.

'Explaining is sacred'

2007-10-28T09:50:00.000Z

I don't think I've ever met an extermination camp survivor before.

On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a pleasant beginning for a four hour plane journey from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, which I was taking on the way home from a trip to Israel. But it didn't feel like four hours in the end.

Sara Gottdiener was twelve when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen camp. She'd been there a year, her family one of many thousands of Hungarian Jews sent to the camp for 'processing' under the Hitler grand plan to cleanse the world of 'undesirables'.

Some 60 members of her family were murdered in various ways and she saw her father die in 1944 in Auschwitz, where the family had been shipped prior to going to Belsen, from the deprivations he had suffered in a forced labour camp to which he had been taken some four years before. But of 16 of her siblings, 13 survived. With her on the flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt were her husband Uri, and two of her sisters still living.

That her father had died was in an ironic way fortunate for Sara and her brothers and sisters, because they were allowed into Palestine while children who were not orphaned were turned away.

When she arrived there, four months after liberation, her weight was just 17 kilos. "Our food in the camp had been bread made from wood dust, and soup made with grass," she says. "There was sometimes meat, but the meat came from the crematorium attached to the camp. So we were made cannibals too."

She recalled how one of her sisters had a birthday in the camp. "I gave her a piece of my bread ration as a present, it was the only thing of 'value' I had."

Having reached Palestine she felt so lucky that she 'wanted to run around shouting that I was alive and that I was a free Jewish girl'. She learned Hebrew and with others of her age also learned how to fight, with sticks because under the British occupation of Palestine weapons were not allowed to the refugees.

In 1948 that changed with the formation, under a League of Nations declaration, of the State of Israel for the Jewish nation and Palestine for the Arabs. The British left, and the two new nations were immediately embroiled in the Israeli War of Independence.

Sara graduated from high school in 1949 and studied at night for her further education. It was in those classes that she met her husband to be, Uri Atzmon, a young soldier. The son of a German Jew who had come to Palestine in 1932 as a British soldier and settled there, Uri today is a retired Lieut-Colonel who has fought in every subsequent Arab-Israeli war in a tank division. Sara, who also did a stint in the Israeli Army, is an artist, whose paintings of her recollections of Belsen are world-renowned.

The paintings didn't happen in her early years of marriage and raising six children. She didn't want to talk about the Holocaust and blanked it from her mind.

"I only started painting after my first return visit to Hungary 20 years ago," she told me. "I met Hungarians who asked me why I had left? I got angry because they didn't seem to know anything about what had happened."

That anger led to her first painting, which featured a red child's shoe because during her time in the camp she had one red shoe and the other was a women's high heel. She didn't paint again immediately.

"Then the first Gulf War broke out and I felt we were in danger, and that triggered me into painting more. It got so that I couldn't stop painting. You need to deal with the stories that stay in your mind."

Sara has been on a mission ever since then, to tell in her own particular way the truth about the greatest cataclysm to happen to an ethnic group of people in the 20th century. She lectures particularly in schools because she feels the young people don't understand fully what had happened during WW2.

Her use of paintings as a medium is ironic in one way, in that the Jewish religion doesn't allow sculptures or paintings in its iconography. "Visuals are things that all people understand. They speak alone, without the need for different languages. You need to use all things that you can to describe the turmoil."

That need has led her to experiment with short film and audio in recent times. A seven-minute documentary she produced uses the clacketing of railway travel as a background, reflecting how most of the Jews who died in WW2 were transported by cattle trains to their deaths. The piece has had profound results when she shows it in schools. "I am looking all the time for ways to come close to the souls of the young people."

She exhibits around the world, and speaks in every country she gets a chance to. She is pictured above on a visit to India earlier this year.

When I met her a few days ago, Sara was flying from Israel to speak at the opening of a new museum in Bergen-Belsen this weekend. She had prepared a short address, outlining her background and her reasons for continuing to try and keep the details of the Holocaust in the minds of generations who weren't even born when it happened.

"We, who were here in real time, lost parts of our body and soul," she will say at Belsen later today. "Every time that I arrive, I search for that childish happiness of mine that was lost here.

"In my mind I hear the prayers and souls of the poor people that could not hold on, still hovering around in this space. In hearing the prayers of these white naked skeletons screaming with open mouths, I am once again that little girl watching in fear, hoping that maybe they will come back to life. But this does not happen. At night time, just as I heard my neighbours weeping after seeing their dear ones led to the altar, my fears prevail that we will all die then and there.

"But we survived, and maybe we are here to tell this generation, who will pass it on to the next generations, that these victims, in their death, ordered us life and screamed the outcry of the Jewish Nation."

Sara makes the point that the survival of the 13 Gottdiener siblings meant that 200 children and grandchildren were born to the family subsequently. "Therefore, when history states that six million Jews had been murdered, one needs to understand that nowadays they would be more than 60 million."

Her mission is based on her belief that the 'duty of explaining is sacred'. "We must explain to today's youth that they are the last to meet living survivors, that they are our hope that the message to the next generations will be passed on because they are the ones that met survivors. We are the remaining living evidence."

Sara is adamant that she and people like her do not hate as a result of what was done to them. "No, we do not hate, and we do not teach our children to hate. We saw and learned what hatred leads to."

Sara's website.

Remembering Whiskers

2007-09-23T09:27:00.000+01:00

We have a new kitchen window now. With a much lower sill. It would be perfect for Whiskers in her old age, with jumping to the old one probably becoming more difficult.

Except that Whiskers is no longer with us. During the summer we had to have her put down because an injury to her paw became gangrenous. So now there's a gap in our lives, and an empty cat space on our new window sill.

Whiskers was with us for around 14 years. She was an outside cat, a stray kitten who came to beg food and stayed to have a comfortable life. Having an outside cat suited us, as we didn't want indoor animals. And it suited Whiskers too, because she appeared to have a pathological fear of enclosed spaces. If the back door was open in summer, she would venture into the kitchen, and even further, to have a look around. But if her exit closed, she'd get very anxious, even terrified.

She was also very timid, and could be bullied by other cats in the area. She ate in small bits, usually leaving some of her food on the plate outside the back door while she digested what she'd eaten so far. If one of the neighbouring cats came in to filch what was left, she'd just sit on the sill watching them. Maybe occasionally mewling in a quiet but ineffectual protest.

Sometimes she would whine at Vanessa from up the road when that larger cat came around on her territory. But unless Whiskers could see that one of us was in the vicinity as backup, she wouldn't do anything like chasing her unwanted visitor away.

All her life she kept a distance from us. Sure, she'd come and nuzzle around our legs when we sat out on a summer day. But she was always wary of even being petted. Bending down too quickly to do so would have her scampering away. And she wouldn't let us lift her. Once in the early days when we did, to put her in a cage to bring to the vet for treatment, the result was a bad scrape on an arm. So apart from that one visit, she never had any other treatment or shots.

It didn't seem to do her any harm down the years. Two regular meals a day and an unstressed life kept her very healthy. Though we figured she might need worming occasionally, we could never get her to take the medicine. Even breaking the contents of the capsules into her food didn't work, as she would resolutely refuse to eat it then.

Through the years she was a constant companion to the house, probably earning her keep by keeping outdoor mice from coming indoors. She wasn't hard to manage -- if we were going away there were always kind neighbours who would set out her food, and beyond that she required little attention.

Maybe we'd have had her a couple more years, though 14 is quite old for a semi-feral cat. But she got that wound on her paw. Skittish enough at the best of times, she was even more wary when we tried to take a closer look at it. One try to get her into a cage for a vet visit was the beginning of the end.

She escaped from my attempt to bundle her in, and after that wouldn't come around again to the back door where she had always been fed. Indeed, she disappeared into the field behind the house for a couple of days, and when she came back eventually she would only stay close to where she could hide again.

We left out food, and hoped that natural resistance would deal with the wound since she wouldn't let us help. But it didn't, and over a week or so the wound and her overall condition deteriorated. She was dying, and it was terribly hard to watch from the distance she kept between us. Finally, as she ate some food one morning, we managed to throw a rug over her and bundle her into a box. Then it was straight to the vet, with her mewling under the rug on my lap. That was the hardest part, that she was enclosed, in the dark, and probably terrified.

We knew the only thing that could be done was to let her go. It was a sad morning, and we cried as we left the vet's. But it was also a relief that she was now out of what was clearly a miserable situation.

Goodbye, Whiskers. Thanks for being with us for so long, for your sometimes reluctant company. We remember the way you'd tap on the kitchen window if your food was late, how you seemed to know when it was Sunday and you'd get an extra treat at lunchtime from our own dinner. Sometimes we forget that you're gone and look to see if you're on the window, waiting.

We'll be putting a flowerbox on the new sill, so there won't be any other cats taking your place. And we'll remember you in the flowers.

Am I linked to crime?

2007-07-23T21:24:00.000+01:00

If a terrorist bomb had blown up a ferry which sailed between Portsmouth and Bilbao on 5 April last, or a non-Basque bomb had exploded anywhere in Northern Spain on or soon after the same date, I could have become a key suspect. Even though I wasn't on the ship.

Why? Because my identity had been used to book passage on the ferry. The day before, the 4th, somebody who knew my name, my credit card number, and its expiry date used it to buy a ticket for that particular P&O Ferries sailing, to the GBP value of 770 euros. They made the booking by phone, sailed on the 5th, and probably got away with it because P&O don't ask for card security numbers on telephone bookings. I say 'probably' because, for all I know, the thieves may well have had that number too.

I'm not writing this to discuss how my card details were acquired. Such things are possible in many ways, especially when people travel a lot. Technology will eventually deal with them. And the card companies absorb such frauds and still seem to make extraordinary profits. The deduction from my card account will eventually be refunded.

It's the matter of my identity being used which worries. Especially since there's not a lot I can do about it. I can't even search for the perpetrator because P&O won't disclose to me the registration number of the car that actually sailed on the fraudulently obtained ticket. I presume they will do so to the card company's investigator, and would do to the police in Spain if I were that hypothetical bombing suspect.

I do know, gleaned with some difficulty from a conversation with a P&O official, that the registration was neither Irish nor British, and also didn't equate to any format used in the EU.

It could have been false. The car bearing it could, previously or subsequently, have been used in the commission of a crime, even that hypothetical bombing. If so, the only connection to that registration would be my credit card, however fraudulently so.

I travel to Spain often in the course of my work, as I do to many other parts of Europe and the world. I'll be going through Madrid again next month on my way to South America, for instance. I'm also likely to visit Spanish cities many times over the medium term future.

Spain is the first of the European countries to introduce API, advance passenger information, as a requirement for travellers coming in from outside the Shengen Agreement area. Ireland and Britain are outside it, because Maggie Thatcher wouldn't agree to Britain being part of passport-free travel between EU member countries. Under API, inaugurated by the US under its anti-terrorism regime, airlines are required to give the US authorities -- and now Spanish ones -- details about incoming passengers which include addresses, passport numbers and credit card information where available. It is a requirement which will become EU-wide by the end of the year.

Back to my situation. If the car registration which was fraudulently connected to my credit card was used in the commission of a crime in Spain, it is quite likely that under API my name would be 'flagged' on the computers of all Spanish points of entry. The next time I arrived in Spain, I'd be taken aside and arrested by immigration. It could even happen in any other country under Interpol agreements.

From a foreign country, with a different language, it isn't always easy to get such mistakes straightened out. Actually, on the historical evidence, it can be bloody difficult. Sometimes, even, it can be impossible.

OK, I've obviously changed my credit card since spotting the fraud. And there was only the one -- albeit large -- such transaction recorded on it. So it was clearly deliberately used as a once-off piece of thievery. Very professional, on the basis that it would show a month later and be challenged. Maybe even sooner if it had shown through internet banking.

But the link of my name to the transaction, and anything associated with the vehicle involved, is already indelibly made. Somewhere, maybe in several somewheres, this particular Brian Byrne could be connected, circumstantially and inaccurately, by an electronic chain to criminal activity of some kind. All because somebody once used my name and card number to book a ferry sailing.

But I'm innocent. I don't need to worry.

Do I?

Making a bags of it

2007-07-03T09:01:00.000+01:00

As I write, the environmental tax for plastic bags has been increased to its statutory maximum.

It is part of the blurb from the PR agents of the Department of the Environment that the tax has resulted in something like a 90 percent decrease in use of plastic bags.

I beg to differ. But first, I don't disagree that the tax has resulted in a markedly less appearance of plastic bags as litter. That fact is visibly true.

However, it was part of the hype at the introduction of that tax that it would also result in a lessening of the amount of plastic bags that would end up in landfill.

Not from my household, I have to say.

Sure, there used to be a lot of plastic bags littering the countryside and the streets of our town. Most of them the kind of bags which were provided by our local and regional supermarkets and convenience stores, as well as the nightly droppings from the people frequenting our town's fast food outlets after they'd left the pubs.

I have to say that whatever plastic bags were dropped in that era were probably dumped by the people who do that same thing with paper bags on our streets today (or last night).

And that's the kind of thing that neither the Government or we people of Ireland can legislate for. Litterers are litterers because they know no better. Or because they do and don't care. Probably the latter.

However, let's go back to the claim of the '90 percent drop' in use of plastic bags.

Maybe that's so in terms of bags provided by shops to customers, which is identifiable by the tax which was imposed on such things.

But that doesn't take into account the extra bags which my family -- and presumably many hundreds of thousands of similar families across the country -- have had to buy to line our kitchen bins in the absence of the 'free' bags we used to get from the supermarkets we used.

So, while our relevant Government ministers have politically and eagerly taken the credit for 'reducing' the numbers of plastic bags being used by the people who elected them to their positions, it is arguable that they have got it both ways.

The people who used to drop the bags on the street were always a minority. OK, they don't get those bags anymore. Or they do, and what they pay extra for the privilege is of little consequence to their spending on a six-pack and whatever else goes with it.

To the bottom line. What the ministers who claim the credit for the results of the plastic bag tax don't acknowledge is that those of us who didn't use them to litter now have to pay for what we used to recycle.

The ministers said that it was to reduce plastic bags in landfill. But for those of us who used to always put, and therefore recycle, our 'free' plastic bags into landfill, what's the difference?

The bags that we are now forced to buy, to replace the ones in which we brought home our groceries, are as much a problem to landfill as were what we used to use for free ... and which we never used for littering.

I'm confused. Convince me that I'm wrong.

The Final Sin

2007-06-21T08:02:00.000+01:00

When the sins of the fathers are indeed visited on the sons ...

The chink and rasp intruded on the steady rustle of rain through the trees. Drops streamed on the face of the grave-digger as he shovelled earth into the hole, toiling with the rhythm of a man well used to his work. His breath steamed, and every now and again he turned and spat on the ground beside the grave, a punctuation of his efforts with the spade.

There were just six people on the small river island, one a young priest, his Roman collar barely visible behind the turned-up lapels of his black coat. He held a missal and prayed soundlessly for the departed. The other men were similar in mien and dress to the grave-digger, patently not mourners. They stood with hands in pockets at a little distance from the grave, people waiting to quickly depart.

The grave-digger threw the last few stones on the grave, then took a tattered overcoat from a dead branch on the lightning-blasted tree, the only feature on the island. Nodding to the priest, he put the spade on his shoulder and joined the other men. The cleric closed his prayer book, crossed himself, and turned away.

The group trudged in silence along the river bank, moving faster as the drizzle turned heavier. It had been a long walk to the island with the coffin, and most of them were now thinking of creamy-headed porter in McKeady's bar. Ten minutes later they came out on the Main Street through an arch beside the mill and stood in a huddle while the priest had a few words with the grave-digger, eventually holding out some coins.

'It's not much, Jack, but it'll buy the lads a drink.'

The grave-digger pushed his hand back. 'It's not necessary, Father Breaffy. The lads did it for the poor girl's memory.'

'Take it anyway, Jack. You've all earned it, coming out on a day like this.'

The grave-digger took the coins then. 'Thank you, Father. Not for the money, but for coming down-'

'It was the least she was entitled to, Jack,' the priest said gently. 'I'd have wished for better, that she'd have been buried in the graveyard, but you know the situation with the Canon.'

'Aye, Father. It's not your fault, I know. But then it was her own wish anyway, on the note she left me. It was a queer way to get instructions for a grave-diggin'.'

The priest turned his coat collar tighter, hunching against the rain, now much heavier.

'It was indeed, Jack. But there's no accounting for the ways a young girl's mind will take in her position. You'd better go in out of the wet.'

The grave-digger nodded, touched his cap, and then led the five men across the road and into McKeady's. The priest walked up the hill towards the presbytery, depressed as the weather.

•••

On the wooded bluff above the river, a young man had watched the burial from a window in a big house. As the six men disappeared into the misted evening, he raised a glass to the forlorn island.

'Stupid, spiteful little bitch,' he muttered. He drank, opened the window, and threw the empty glass far down. He turned back into the deepening gloom of the room, then stopped as he saw the shadow of another figure.

'There's the end to one night's madness, young Thomas,' his father said.

'A stupid little bitch,' Thomas repeated.

'Her only stupidity was spreading her legs for you.' The older man laughed, a sardonic and cruel sound.

'She was just an ignorant little trollop.'

His father flared then, his temper changing.

'Ignorant she might have been, and maybe a trollop,' he growled. 'But she was the daughter of my head man, a man I can ill afford to lose. Why couldn't you take one of the town wenches? It cost me thirty sovereigns to square with her father.'

He paced the room, a big man growing in his anger. 'The money is not of moment, but I'm now in his obligation, and that's something money can't settle. And then this happens!'

His voice had grown halfway to a roar as he pointed through the window towards the island now lost in the evening.

For all his twenty-two years, Thomas was still afraid of his father. He tried to get around him towards the door, but the old man caught him by the wrist in a steely grip. With blind instinct he swung his free hand, knuckles bunched, but it brushed only air.

'Ye'll need to win more bar fights before you catch your old man like that,' rasped his father, forcing the younger man to his knees. Thomas screamed at the first sting of the riding crop through his shirt.

The old man struck again and again until the silk was torn and bloody, then let his sobbing son fall. He strode across the room, struck a match and lit the two gas mantles over the fireplace. Then he took a decanter and two glasses from a cupboard and put them on a small table. He filled the glasses and nudged the young man with his boot.

'The next time you want to piddle, don't do it on your own doorstep,' he said roughly. 'Come, join me. I've a thirst that'll take the bottle to slake.'

He sat in a high-backed chair and drained his first glass. Thomas got painfully to his feet and fell in a chair opposite, taking a large gulp from the whiskey.

The old man refilled his glass and looked across at his son, a glint in his eye. Then he opened his mouth and laughed, a harsh sound that echoed through the dark empty house. After a few moments Thomas joined in, hesitantly at first, but soon the tears running down his face were no longer from pain. In the wavering light from the gas mantles, their faces gleamed like demons from the darkest ranges of Pandemonium.

•••

Father Breaffy toyed with the haddock. The Canon, on the other hand, had cleared his plate with relish and was now pouring himself a brandy from a bottle which seemed to have the miraculous attribute of never emptying. Then the old man picked up his breviary, and began to read by the light of the two paraffin lanterns that illuminated the parlour of the presbytery.

The housekeeper came in and began to clear the table. She looked accusingly at the curate's plate, sniffing at the waste of God's good bounty. She'd got it cheap because it was four days old and wouldn't last the night, the saving going into the nest-egg priests' housekeepers built up to augment whatever they were left in the wills of their clerical charges.

After she'd left, Father Breaffy settled in an armchair and tried to read the morning paper. But he found it difficult to concentrate and rustled the pages to and fro without settling on any article.

'You went down then, John?'

He looked up.

The Canon was gazing across the top of his Breviary. 'To the burial-'

'Yes, Canon. I went and prayed for their immortal souls. Hers and her unborn baby's. It was . . . my Christian duty.'

He realised he'd dealt an unconscious rebuff, but the Canon didn't appear to take the remark in anger.

'Mary Langan was a wayward girl,' he mused. 'She fell not alone to the Original Sin, but compounded her affront to the Almighty by committing the final one.'

'But the first may not have been a mortal sin,' objected the younger priest. 'I doubt she gave consent to the act. You know as well as I do the reputation of Thomas Kilbride, and indeed that of his father. They still believe in the droit de seigneur.'

'Such unholy traditions are no longer relevant,' the Canon demurred.

'When the son of the landlord wants to make hay with the daughter of a servant, there's only one relevance, Canon.'

'Come now, John - you must not slander the name of a man like that. It's not Christian.'

'Aye. And it's not Christian that a poor girl of sixteen and her unborn babe are lying buried on that island, unconsecrated and alone,' blazed the curate, letting loose the pent-up frustrations of his day. 'It's our Christianity that refused her poor abused body eternal rest in the graveyard. It's the Christianity of her father who beat her after she found she was pregnant and went to him for help.'

The young priest's anger flowed in a cleansing tide. 'Luke Langan comes to Mass each Sunday, driving the carriage for his employer,' he continued. 'That makes it all right, I suppose - once people fulfil their church duties and leave their pennies on the plate, they're Christians.'

He crumpled the newspaper and stood up.

'You forget yourself, Father,' the Canon said coldly. 'It was the girl's own wish that she be buried on that island, otherwise we would have buried her outside the graveyard, in the space reserved for those who die in the state of the final sin.'

'How generous is our religion,' muttered the curate wearily. 'Forgive me, Canon. I've had a difficult day. It's time to close the church.' He started for the door.

'Do that, Father Breaffy,' said the Canon, no forgiveness in his voice. 'While you're there, pray for the humility the Lord requires in those who serve Him.'

•••

McKeady's was smoky as usual. Jack Kinlay sat at the worn counter in the back of the grocery shop. The bar was lit by two hissing gas lamps and the counter was tended by a large comfortable woman in her late forties.

'Give us another one, Brigid,' he said, putting his drained glass on the counter.

She put the tumbler under the brass spout and pulled back on the wooden handle several times. The creamy porter filled the glass and she put it on a tray to settle.

'That business has affected the lads, Jack,' she said. 'They're quiet.'

He nodded gloomily. 'God knows I've put enough people under in my time, I should be used to it. But there's something different about burying one who was little more than a child, and her expecting one of her own, too.'

Brigid ran a rag up and down the counter. 'It's bad doing, Jack, a young girl drowning herself like that all because of a man.'

'Well, we all know the man, Brigid. But sure it takes two to make a baby. There must've been something between them.'

The woman angrily topped off Jack's glass from a copper jug of black flat porter, then put it in front of him. 'You know yourself that little Mary was as timid as a rabbit. If Thomas Kilbride wanted his way with her one drunken night, she'd be too scared to refuse him. If the truth be known, he raped her and left her with a fear so bad she'd never tell a soul.'

The grave-digger moodily took a draught from his glass. 'But why did she want to be buried on the island? That's all the note said that she left with you for me. It was a strange way to get instructions for a funeral, from the person I was going to bury.'

Brigid McKeady shrugged.

'That's a woman's mind, Jack. She probably had the notion that young Kilbride would grieve ever more if she was buried where he'd see her grave every day.' She sniffed. 'More fool she to think that any man will grieve after a woman he's defiled.'

Her voice softened. 'She knew she'd not be buried in the graveyard, anyway. I hope she haunts the young bastard to a sleepless eternity.'

'You saw her, Brigid, when she came in with the note. Did she give any sign-?'

'Lord, no, Jack. If she had, I'd have talked her out of it. She'd been crying, and there were bruises on her face. But she didn't want to talk, and I thought it was because she was embarrassed. She was just beginning to show.'

'Her father gave her the bruises,' he muttered. 'Mickey Flynn said Luke went home drunk the night before, swearing he'd teach her not to disgrace him.'

Behind him, the bar door creaked open.

'Speak of the Devil,' Brigid murmured.

The grave-digger turned.

A dark and stocky man stood in the opening, weaving slightly. Luke Langan was groom, driver and gamekeeper to the biggest landowner in the county, who used the high unemployment of the time to guarantee cheap labour during the harvest. He left it to Langan to choose who would work, and the man dangled the pitifully-paid employment before the workless lined up in the town square each morning. The lucky few were always paid for their day's labour in a pub, and Langan usually therefore drank for free.

He moved to the counter.

'Gi' me a whiskey, Mrs McKeady,' he slurred heavily.

Brigid silently turned, poured the drink into a glass, and handed it to him. 'That'll be four pence, please, Luke Langan.' There was no warmth in her voice.

Langan looked along the counter. 'Jack Kinlay. Gi' Jack one, too,' he muttered.

Brigid turned to pour, but stopped when Jack called out.

'I won't have one, Brigid,' he said softly. 'Thanks all the same, Luke.'

'C'mon, Jack. Have a drink wi' me,' Langan insisted. 'It's a sorry time for me. My daughter disgraced me, and now she's dead.'

'Aye, and it's the disgrace you're sorry about, not her death,' the grave-digger said shortly. 'You weren't even at the burial. I won't drink with you, Luke.'

Langan pulled a handful of coins from his pocket, some glinting gold. He slammed them on the counter. 'Give everybody a drink from me,' he shouted. 'I can pay for it.'

'I'll not give anyone a drink from you, Luke,' Brigid said quietly. 'They don't want it from you. And I'll thank you to take yourself and your money out of this bar. It's well your daughter's rid of you, poor child . . . the pity is she thought she had only the one way to escape.'

For a moment it seemed Langan would cross the counter, but then he saw some of the men getting up. He picked up his money and staggered out.

'Now I'll have a whiskey, Brigid,' Jack Kinlay said heavily. He spat in the sawdust on the floor. 'I've a foul taste in my mouth.'

•••

The big house was dark save for the flicker of gaslight in the first-floor study window. A late full moon played hide and seek with fast-moving broken clouds, occasionally lighting the island below, the blasted tree-trunk starkly pale. In the study the Kilbride father and son snored in drunken disharmony.

A swaying figure came through the door and gazed on them. Like a deep sleeper waking at a nightsound, young Thomas blearily opened an eye. For just a moment he thought he saw a familiar figure, at a distance as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Then the liquor in his blood pushed him back to oblivion.

Luke Langan looked at the sleeping pair for another few moments, then grunted and left the room.

•••

It was just short of eleven o'clock when Mickey Flynn ran into McKeady's.

'The big house is afire,' he shouted. The bar cleared in moments. Outside, a red glow could be seen against the night clouds.

Within minutes many of the townspeople were on the front lawn of the house. They watched as fingers of flame licked their way from the ground floor to the next, and soon the whole interior glowed red. There were sudden cries as a figure appeared in a first floor window, starkly silhouetted against a blazing room.

'Help me!' shrieked Thomas Kilbride. 'Help me! Save me . . . someone, for God's sake, help me!'

Nobody moved.

With a roar the roof caved in and the house and his blazing figure disappeared in a roaring mass of flames that lit every watcher's face.

•••

The Canon gave the eulogy. The congregation included members of the gentry from around the county, and even from Dublin. The Kilbrides' money had been held in esteem by their kind. Last respects had to be paid.

'Dear friends, we are gathered here on an infinitely sad occasion. The recent tragedy took two of the best-known members of this parish. We are grieved by their loss, which is all the sadder because they were the last of their family . . .'

His homily was punctuated by the chink of coins as the collection salvers were passed around, and though his face remained grave, the Canon smiled in his heart.

Afterwards the two coffins were buried in the Kilbride plot, railed off from the common folk in the graveyard.

As prayers were being said at their graveside, Luke Langan stood on the island beside the pitiful mound of his daughter's grave. His face was stubbled and dirty and his eyes bright and feverish. He stared up at the still-smoking hulk of the big house, then turned and threw a fistful of coins the length of the little island.

'Mary!' he cried. 'Mary! Forgive me-'

•••

They found him hanging from the blasted tree. The gold coins lay scattered on the ground, some of them on his daughter's grave.

Nobody touched them.

---

©1984/1993 Brian Byrne.

The Final Sin is from the collection Mariseo's House and other stories, published by The Kestrel's Nest, 1993, under my pseudonym William Trapman.

This was my first short story, and my first one to be published, in Woman's Way magazine in 1984. As such, it has a place of special affection in my memory.

A risky childhood

2007-06-19T22:40:00.001+01:00

Once the trigger on nostalgia is pulled, there’s no knowing where the bullet will end up. Such as the phrase ‘Gordon Bennett!’, which I’ve only recently learned is an exclamation for Australians like we’d say ‘Jesus!’ when surprised.

But Gordon Bennett in Kildare is related completely to the 1903 race sponsored by the New York newspaper publisher of the same name. And the direct Kilcullen Gordon Bennett connection is Bardon’s, now a thriving pub but in those days an hotel where a number of the international contestants stayed. A Visitors Book with their signatures still exists.

Bardon’s in my memory, however, is a place where the Byrne kids’ best friends lived, and where we played together a lot, mostly whenever they weren’t playing at our house. It’s the kind of scenario where the youngsters in a family got to know each others’ homes intimately. Maybe it doesn’t happen so much today, because games are played on consoles and computers instead of in yards, gardens, barns and sheds.

Bardon’s was full of imaginative possibilities. As well as being a pub, grocery and draper’s shop it was a place of history and mystery. The latter because there were rooms which were closed and not used. The yard at the back was surrounded by outbuildings, including a coach house and various stores for the pub. There was a magnificent vegetable garden further out, where Mr Bardon spent all his spare time. It was his retreat from the pressures of the world, and a place we children were discouraged from going to. The property also included a paddock with an open hay barn. Between it and the main yard there was also a loft, originally used for storing dry goods such as sacks of flour.

A lane from the yard led down to Bardon's Field, which connected to the Liffey and bridged the space between what was then Nugent’s field and the cattle mart field bordering Castlemartin Woods.

All that suggests the extent to which we children could play and wander, depending on the weather, the humour of adults, and what we figured amongst ourselves we wanted to be doing anyway.

There were certain prescriptions. For instance, if we Byrne children wanted to play with the Bardons after tea, it was mandatory that we took part in the praying of the Rosary in the living room, now the section of the pub to the left as you walk in, where there’s a real fire in the winter. Picture the children of two families kneeling against chairs around the wall, reciting a decade apiece as quickly as was decently possible so that we could get about our real interests.

The kitchen which was at the back of the house has its own memories, not least of an Esse cooker that provided localised heat and hot water to the Bardon family as well as its cooking facilities. A large wooden table in the same room was where meals were taken. It may seem strange to today’s youngsters that there was a time of no central heating, where families effectively lived in a couple of rooms in winter even if they had a big house. Ours at home was similar.

The yard was a summer place of play where we often copied cricket in afternoons and evenings, usually with a tennis racquet for a bat and a bucket for the wicket. There was a tree halfway along which registered a six if the ball got caught in it. The ground was cobbled and couldn’t be predicted in how a ball might bounce. Windows had to be watched when batting; Mr Bardon had a gruff response to accidents.

He kept his car in the original coach house, today an apartment. He drove it just once a week doing home deliveries from the grocery. A Ford Consul of the ‘fifties’ square variety, it was very off limits to us kids, as was, less effectively, the coach house itself.

The upper end of the yard, where was also located the bar’s outside toilet, was always stacked with boxes of empty bottles. These had to be sorted, which work was sometimes a source of pocket money for the children of both families, alternating between the Bardon and the Byrne pub businesses. Pennies were important then.

We also had the chance in both places to label the bottles for money. This involved spreading a board with glue, on which we stuck the folded labels before plastering them on the bottles. The rate might have been -- memory gets hazy -- a penny per two dozen. But when my Dad bought a labelling machine it finished the children’s cooperative movement.

In the barn up by the paddock we used bales of hay to build ‘houses’, though now I know they were quite dangerous play practices. Still, on a rainy day it was fun to look out on the poor weather from the comfort of our individual ‘homes’.

That previously mentioned loft was the other play location on such days. Despite being warned off by the Bardon parents, we used to tread not so carefully around the gaps in the floor, often by swinging between the rafters above. It was the kind of thing today’s kids only experience in a computerised virtual world. And the consequences of a slip for them are only virtual too, not like it could have been for us.

But we survived. We got through the mandatory Rosary, the clambering into the tree in the yard to regain a ‘sixed’ tennis ball, the potential catastrophes of tumbling straw bales, rotten floors, and scratching Mr Bardon’s Consul.

And we had a full childhood based in real experience. As much as were the lives of the racers who came to Ireland and Kilcullen in 1903 to compete against each other on a course that bore no relation to what a friend of mine describes as the ‘sterile ultra-safe confines of a modern motor racing circuit’ contested by today’s Formula One ‘heroes’.

I take some relatively minor risks today as a motoring and travel writer. But aren’t I so lucky to have been a child when oftentimes the real risk was at play?

Gordon Bennett, yes!

Radio Nation

2007-06-16T19:55:00.002+01:00

A remark today from a friend about having to do an essay on broadcasting prompted me to some recollection about the evolution of Radio Eireann to Radio One from the time I was a young listener.

She is too young to remember, for instance, that Radio Eireann until 1968 used to close down in the morning after the nine o'clock news and there was dead air until five to one when the weather forecast presaged the news and then a lunchtime of sponsored programmes. The station then closed again at two-thirty until five o'clock.

There was no Gay Byrne Hour, no Liveline. No Derek Mooney Show. And nothing like them. Just nothing, like the universe before the Big Bang.

Indeed, it wasn't until the Liam Nolan Hour arrived on the airwaves that there was something to listen to in the mid-mornings. That programme -- which actually became an hour and a half long -- was the first which was titled by the name of its presenter. A change which eventually allowed people like Gay Byrne and many others to become celebrity presenters.

Names we still listen to today came from that mid-morning slot, including Rodney Rice and John Bowman. Marian Finucane also began her radio career in that era with a programme called Women Today, a first in Irish broadcasting to have a programme devoted to women and women's issues. It subsequently morphed into Liveline, which Marian developed and maintained as her own until jumping ship back to morning radio in 1999. Now, of course, she is a weekend mainstay and, along with Rodney Rice, is possibly the longest serving current affairs broadcaster still working on RTE.

It is worth considering a particular aspect of radio which developed alongside these changes. Public access to the airwaves.

Until named radio presenters began pushing issues which were related to listeners' lives, the only direct interaction with the public was in the form of written requests for some music programmes, such as Hospitals Requests. There was also a programme based on readers' letters, Dear Sir or Madam. It was relatively harmless, consisting mainly of listeners' impressions about particular programmes.

But the Liam Nolan Hour and its successors discussed subjects which prompted responses from listeners of much more thoughtful content. True, the writers had to wait until the following day to hear their views broadcast, but their efforts did add a reactive dimension beyond the Letters to the Editor in the national papers.

Subsequently it became possible to get a telephone message directly to the presenter while on air, which added a whole new element of immediacy to the thing. When the Gay Byrne Hour arrived and a brash new presenter with an innovative production team got into their act, they made the most of this.

And when Women Today became Liveline, where callers became the real presenters, Ireland truly had arrived at being a radio nation talking to itself.

Of course, it was only a partial nation, and predominantly a middle class one, as taking part required access to a telephone, and that was still not a given in a large proportion of homes. It also required having the time to make the calls, and this was not a period when employers would feel positive about their people making calls to a radio station from the workplace.

Gradually both the technology and the attitudes shifted. Phones effectively arrived in almost every home. And even employers were often happy to allow their workers to call Liveline from their desks once they got the free plug of their business name on the airways.

Live phone calls on air have caused their problems to the broadcasters. The legal remedies to defamation have been eagerly employed following slanderous words written on the wind, whether inadvertantly or otherwise. The recent absence for a few days of Joe Duffy was because he had to appear in the High Court due to a case taken by somebody mentioned by a caller. As it happened, it was also an expensive few days for the station.

Today the mobile communications revolution means that even young children have personal phones, and direct audience response to anything said on air can be instant and often explosive.

It is a time when nobody speaking on radio can expect to be able to leave the studio before knowing just what the people listening feel about their views.

For a presenter, who has a screen on which the comments are coming in real time, it makes it really easy to ask the questions which the country is asking.

And the person who has elicited those comments must find it increasingly difficult to waffle his or her way out of their preferred position, if it is so shown to be tenuous.

More than any other medium, radio today has become the forum for true democracy. And though there are challengers for the title in new media areas such as the blogosphere of the internet, it will likely long remain the main battleground for the common people trying to have their say.

It is also in my view, the better medium against television. Because, as a little listener is said to have once replied when asked to express her preference, 'it has better pictures'.

In a tiny way, I made my own difference to Irish radio when I joined RTE for a decade at the beginning of the eighties.

As a young listener hearing It Says in the Papers being an exact recorded copy after the eight o'clock and nine o'clock news, I'd be annoyed for some odd reason.

At the time I never dreamed that twenty years later I'd actually be a writer/presenter of that small but very popular slot. When I did, though, I insisted that I would broadcast both slots live, and I made it a habit to change the script in a number of ways between the two broadcasts.

Listeners liked that, and said it, and for many years after I stopped doing it in 1991, it was suggested to the other presenters that at least the ending should be different each time.

Small victories are often the sweetest.

Marching with the Saints

2007-06-09T14:40:00.001+01:00

Mags pulled at her breakfast gasper. 'I'd like a jazz band.'

That stopped me mid-way through a crunch of cornflakes. Mags hadn't shown any interest in music since our courting dances at the parish marquee. And the bands which had played us into eventual matrimony had been more Jim Reeves than jazz.

'D'you mean a record?' I asked when I'd managed to move the cornflakes on.

She sucked on the fag again, pinching her cheeks into shadows. Her dressing-gown was old and speckled with little balls, and she hadn't put on any make-up. But after nearly thirty years everyone's entitled to be comfortable, and besides, I was no Cary Grant to have to stay beautiful for.

She shook her head, tossing a curler into free-fall. 'No. Not a record, a real band,' she said.

'You want to buy a band?.'

'I don't want to buy one, dopus. I want one to play me down.'

She yawned and stretched and the dressing gown slipped a bit to reveal nothing much. God, I loved her.

'I want a jazz band to lead me like in that film last night.'

I understood then. It was the James Bond film where some New Orleans corpse was getting the local send-off and they had danced in front of the funeral, clapping hands and laughing and singing. There'd been trumpets and stuff, too.

'Oh yeah, sure.' I spooned more cornflakes. 'They don't do that here. It's probably sacrilegious or something.'

'It shows they're proud of their dead, though, doesn't it?'

She didn't mention it again.

***

A year later the gaspers finally got her, but thankfully it was a quick cancer. And I remembered the conversation the day I went to see the undertaker. Mags had stayed with me for thirty years, and I was proud of her.

***

'I've never, well, done that before.'

Curran the undertaker had whiskey veins spotting his cheeks like little burgundy birthmarks. His eyeballs wandered uneasily around my request, then came together for one short moment of brightness.

'I've hired a singer before. A good local girl. She's cheap, too-'

I shook my head. 'A jazz band, Mr Curran. That's what she said.'

He sighed, then took a blank In Memoriam card from a pile on his desk and scribbled a note. 'Leave it with me, Mr Hennessy. I'll ask around. Somebody will know one, I'm sure.'

His tone wasn't hopeful. I didn't know whether it was because he was afraid someone wouldn't know, or because they would.

***

'That is a monstrous and profane thought!'

I found that the Canon was negative about music. I heard afterwards that he had personally cleared the altar with an ashplant when one of his curates organised a Folk Mass without telling him. His jowls bounced when I told him what I wanted for Mags's funeral.

'A proper Catholic funeral is what she'll get from this church. There'll be no sinful music here.'

As a couple we hadn't been much into religion. We didn't really need this.

'You can stuff your Catholic funeral then, Canon,' I said pleasantly, rising from my chair and holding out my hand. 'I'm sorry I took up your time.'

He sat there as if I'd slapped him. I don't think he even saw my hand, so I dropped it and left.

Nobody would notice if Mags didn't have a church funeral. Neither of us had any family left, and nobody else really knew Mags. She wasn't a joiner of groups, and because we had no kids she'd not gotten involved in the usual social life of mothers. Girl friends from her early years had disappeared, and she'd retreated quite happily into interests fed mostly by romantic novels and the television. The town we lived in had been big enough for blow-ins like ourselves to maintain our anonymity.

It sounds as if we were dull and colourless and that was true. I still am. Working in the civil service at a level of no responsibility makes it very easy and very comfortable to be that way. But Mags had wished for one bit of colour, just one.

***

She was at peace, unlike sometimes during the last weeks when the pain-killers hadn't always worked. But the yellow pallor of liver failure was still there, now mixed with the greys and purples of a skin that no longer held the fluids of life. She looked like she really needed a last fag.

I touched her cheek, then turned and nodded to the undertaker waiting quietly by the door, the coffin lid propped against the wall beside him. 'You can close it now.'

He'd made no comment when I'd told him that there'd be no trip to the church, no service, just an overnight in his funeral parlour and then direct to the graveyard the following morning. But he'd managed to get a promise of music.

'A trumpeter from the army band. He'll be here at eleven. He said he'd try and get a couple of his friends to come.'

There were five other people in the room, four of them men hired by Curran to carry the coffin. I'd asked him not to use a hearse, because they hadn't in the film. The other person was a woman I didn't know, but her face was strained as if she'd been crying most of the night. Her lips spoke silently as a rosary shuffled through her fingers. Mags was getting some prayers anyway.

'She comes to every funeral, even people she doesn't know,' Curran said when I asked, in case she was one of Mags's disappeared friends. 'They're kind of an outing for her.'

The door opened and a little man came in quietly, carrying a small case. Going by his size, he must have sneaked in under the army recruiting officer's door, but he did have the bearing which everybody gets from a stint in the military. He snapped a half-salute when Curran brought him over.

'McAuley, sur. Joseph, Corporal. I'm sorry, sur. About your missus.'.

'Thanks. You do play jazz?'

'Yes, sur. I jam in a club at weekends. There's four of us, the Creole Three.'

'Are the others coming?'

'Don't know, sur. I left word for' em.' He fiddled with his case and took out the most polished brass trumpet I'd ever seen. 'Anyways, I can give it a good blast meself. Did you want anything special?'

I shrugged. 'I don't know anything special, McAuley. Whatever you think yourself But make it happy.'

He caressed the trumpet. 'The missus, sur - did she like jazz?'

'I don't know.'

He gave his half-salute. 'I'll wait outside, sur.'

***

Curran opened the double doors and nodded to the pall-bearers, all of them dressed in identical navy suits, all as shabby as his.

'OK lads,' one murmured. 'On 'three', lift. One, two, three - hup!' and Mags's coffin was hoisted on four strong shoulders. The undertaker took a last look around, then led the way out.

The four men found their pace fluidly and marched slowly after him. I followed, and the woman came out behind me.

I hadn't bothered with death notices and there was only McAuley outside. His friends hadn't turned up, but he was now garbed in a bright green jacket with matching bow-tie, and had put on a straw boater. Curran winced only once before he recovered his professional solemnity.

McAuley lifted his trumpet and raised an eyebrow at me. I nodded, and he moved ahead of the undertaker as we turned into the main street of the town.

It was a quiet Tuesday morning with hardly anyone around, but a couple of women turned from their conversation on the footpath. A coffin being carried throug.h the street was unusual - one being preceded by a funny little man in a green outfit was a gossip-stopper.

A child with them also looked at us, obviously bored with having to hang around grown-ups' chatter. She went back to playing with her doll.

McAuley put his instrument to his lips, filled his cheeks with air, and blew. The note was as clear as the sky into which it soared, shaking two blackbirds from their complacent perches on the roof of Hynes hardware shop. For about four paces he held the tone straight and beatless, then slipped into a melody that pattered along the shop-fronts.

The child let her doll dangle and smiled. Funerals might be fun. The two women gawped.

Shop doorways began to fill. Old Jack Hynes walked out through his, looked on for a few moments, then his teeth came smiling our from under his whiskers.

At Dowling's coffee-shop two teenaged lads and a waitress came out, their feet tapping. Up front, the little trumpeter was skipping to his own beat, and I wondered how long Curran and his men would hold their gravitas.

A car passed, then scrabbled to a stop up the street. Two men jumped out, one with a saxophone, the other carrying a banjo. Both wore similar outfits to McAuley's, and as they waited for our procession they donned straw hats of their own.

The trumpeter opened a new tune in greeting. The deep tones of the saxophone answered a counterpoint and the banjo plucked into a tonky harmony. The merging of the musicians finally broke the discipline of the pall-bearers and the coffin began to sway as their shoulders and feet took up the beat. My own fingers were quietly snapping.

I turned at a new sound behind me to see that the woman who liked mourning outings was clapping quietly and had a definite dance in her step. The little girl was skipping beside her. She smiled and I smiled back, and behind her old Jack Hynes led a rank of people who had left whatever business they'd been conducting as we passed the main street shops. Several heads nodded to the rhythm of the music. There were probably more people with us than Mags had met in the last thirty years.

We turned into Church Lane. Ten o'clock mass was just over and some of the worshippers were standing on the steps of the church, among them the Canon. McAuley and his lads had decent instincts, and eased the music to a simple and low melodic beat as we came abreast.

The Canon tapped a man on the shoulder and whispered something, and a few moments afterwards a bell began to toll funeral peals. Its rhythm was death, but by the time we got to the graveyard beyond the church our living band had well outdone the bellsound. When I looked back again I saw faces from the church steps. Everybody looked happy.

There was a young priest inside the graveyard gate, which surprised me. 'Joe Harris,' he said, smiling and holding out a hand. 'I'm the local curate. I heard about your problem with the Canon; I hope you don't mind my coming along?'

I shook my head and his hand. 'No, Father. You're very welcome. Everyone is. I hope you don't mind the music?'

'I love it,' he said, and he walked beside me as Curran's pallbearers shimmied along the narrow path to the graveside. There we found the fourth member of the Creole Three, his drums set up on a convenient plinth. He added a gentle contribution as McAuley and the others switched to a quieter number while the funeral party encircled the grave.

Curran directed the pall-bearers to lay the coffin on a green mat beside the opening, and when they'd done so all five stepped back discreetly.

'Shall I?' the young priest asked.

I shrugged and nodded, and as he stepped forward McAuley stopped the music.

He looked at the coffin, then at the crowd. 'It's an unusual occasion, my friends, so I won't say the usual prayers,' he said. 'I think we've all been praying for Mrs Hennessy in a special way for the last little while.' He smiled. 'I didn't know her at all, I have to say. And I kind of think many of you here didn't either. But I'm sure now that none of us will ever forget her.' Then he blessed the coffin.

'Amen,' came the response from half a hundred throats. The pall-bearers stepped forward, ran the webs under the box and began to lower it into the grave.

The drummer hammered a roll on his snare-drum and added a bass rhythm as Mags went down, and when the coffin reached the bottom he skillfully wove other tones into the pattern.

Curran and one of his men lifted a board to cover the opening. I stopped them. 'No. Fill it in now.' He was surprised but signalled to two gravediggers who had been standing outside the proceedings. On his instruction they began shovelling.

The first clatter of gravel on timber was outsounded by a long flourish of cymbals. Then McAuley's trumpet joined the poem of tones, leading the saxophone and the banjo to the heavens in a rendition of the first piece in their whole performance which I knew.

'Oh when the saints, go marching in ...' I whispered under the melody, and finally let my tears go when everybody in the graveyard took up the beat and clapped as Mags danced home.

[This story was published in 1993 under my pseudonym of William Trapman, as part of a collection 'Mariseo's House & Other Stories'. ©1993 Brian Byrne.]

A postcard from Genoa

2007-04-17T18:16:00.000+01:00

Sorry for not posting for so long. Been very busy, and still doing a lot of travelling. I'm in Genoa, Italy, just now, and couldn't help but take this picture of a piazza close to my hotel today.

A memory of Tom

2007-01-24T07:25:00.000Z

For those who work today in what was Kilcullen's first 'business park', or who have their own lives because their parents did or benefited in some peripheral way from the provision of the 'advance factory' space it provided, is part of my late Uncle Tom's legacy to Kilcullen.

The property from which King Coil operates, and several other businesses including Renley, came about because he 'took the ball on the run' and bought 40 acres of farmland in the early 60s from the late Ned Chamney for £6,000.

"He wouldn't have had the money himself at the time," local man Jim Collins recalls. "But he handed over the cheque, and went to a meeting of the Kilcullen Development Association, of which he was a member, and told them that if they wouldn't cover it for the community he would do it himself. That was in 1962, and they did, and the rest is history."

History moved on, and the scheme which KDA pioneered was later adopted nationally by the IDA. Later the KDA under the leadership of the late Paddy Nugent developed Moanbane Park and Bishop Rogan Park on part of the property as 'affordable housing' for people who wanted to live in Kilcullen. Another 'first' for Kilcullen that eventually was adopted as national policy.

Except that some would say that Kilcullen actually made the ideas work?

When knees are no-no

2007-01-22T03:19:00.000Z

Raffles Hotel in Singapore has become just the second member of my 'St Peter's Club'; it is so far only the second place in the world where I've been refused admission because of my knees. Or, more precisely, because I was wearing shorts.

"Are you returning to your room, sir?" this little guy in immaculate white uniform asked as he held the door open.

"No, I'm meeting someone."

"Ah, sir ... I'm afraid, for the gentlemen, it is long trousers only in the foyer."

He led me from the doorway and back outside towards a wicker chair set under shade well out of any offensive view by the properly dressed patrons. "You may sit here, sir."

So I did. Mind you, if it hadn't been for the fact that I was meeting somebody, I'd have had the same attitude to the place as when I was turned away from St Peter's Basilica; if God doesn't want me in His house dressed like this, do I really want to be in His house? Then I figured it wasn't God who ran the place, but His minions.

And God doesn't run Raffles either, but somebody's minions do. Funny thing, when I was here the other day, I got into the foyer in the same dress without a problem, but then it was through a back door. Maybe Heaven works the same way?

Anyhow, even if I couldn't get to have a drink at the Writers Bar, off the foyer, I did have a bit of lunch in the Courtyard, and did a little bit of work (including this piece), which was very nice.

A sobering piece on energy politics

2007-01-21T09:52:00.001Z

If anyone thinks that a change in the leadership of the United States will mean a less dangerous world than the one Mr Bush has helped to achieve, there's a sobering article worth reading here: Behold the Rise of Energy-based Fascism.

It is by Michael T Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass, and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.

Postcard from Paris: Musee d'Orsay

2006-12-26T09:55:00.001Z

I suppose it was apt that a hiccup in long-distance travel arrangements should bring us to see the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, because for a generation it was one of the key travel places in the French capital city.

Now, of course, it is a museum, and it was as such that we went to see it. A recommendation from our son that proved to be a really worthwhile experience.

Everybody knows about the Louvre; probably many also know about the Musee d'Orsay, but it doesn't have the same international recognition, despite housing key works from some of the most important old and modern masters.

More, it is a wonderful example of how to turn an architectural masterpiece into a repositary for masterpieces of other kinds.

The actual site was formerly where a palace built before the French Revolution housed the functionaries and bosses of the royal Court of Accounts and the State Council. It was destroyed along with the whole block in the 'Paris Commune' in 1871.

Thirty years later the Orleans Railroad Company was given the site and built a new railway terminus that is famous for being the first in Paris with electricity. Designed by architect Victor Laloux, it was opened for the 1900 World Fair held in the French capital.

The station included 16 separate tracks, elevators for those using the multi-story building, and an integrated hotel on the grand style for customers who used the rails for long-distance travel on the south-western network.

Victor Laloux's creation was also exactly what had been required in aesthetic terms, a building to the scale and style that fitted in with the grandeur of the section of Paris where it was located.

Paradoxically, while it was at the leading edge of the electricity revolution when it was built, less than four decades later the Gare d'Orsay lost its place as the main station of the network because the beginning electrification of the French railway system enouraged longer trains, which didn't fit in the limitations of the platforms of the station's Great Hall.

The station's downgraded status as a suburban terminus didn't even survive much beyond WW II. It was used for a variety of commercial purposes, but none of them properly reflected the scale or grand nature of the premises. Though its use as the set for part of the film of Kafka's 'The Trial', produced by Orson Welles, might have come close.

And the use of the grand Salle des Fetes in the hotel by Charles de Gaulle, to announce his return to political power, was an historic moment.

The hotel itself finally closed its doors in 1973, and plans were mooted to tear the building down and put up a large modern replacement. This plot was thwarted by the intervention of the French national museum authorities, who wanted to locate there a facility dedicated to the art of the second half of the nineteenth century. The matter was also helped by the listing of the building as an historical monument.

In late 1986 it was reopened as the museum that it is today. The development used the Great Hall as the main area, with galleries and terraces on either side and on several levels. The original glass end wall with its magnificent clock remains a centerpiece.

Turning the main rail station hall into a space with the kind of human proportions so different from that needed for large puffing steam locomotives wasn't an easy job. But they did it quite briliantly, partly by providing different floor levels under the vast curved roof, as well as installing a coherent stone flooring surface with a matching surface on the walls.

The magnificent ceilings in the Dining Hall and Salle des Fetes were also retained, and provide a sense of splendour that truly recalls a France proud of itself at the height of its colonial state. The Dining Hall is now the museum's Restaurant, and the Salle is an exhibition area.

With permanent collections of the works of artists like Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Whistler, and Degas, the Musee d'Orsay is a must-visit for anyone seriously interested in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artistic eras. Other masters whose works are on display include Delacroix, Manet, Renoir, Rodin, Seurat, Sisley, Pissarro, Gauguin, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many, many others.

In addition, there are many examples of modern artists' works, a number of them showing homage to the old masters, and therefore in a fitting place to do so.

For this writer, the sculpture works were the most interesting, and displayed as they are in the centre section of the Great Hall, they have the light and the space to be viewed at their best.

All in all, a technical fault in a plane at Dublin Airport which caused us to miss our connection onwards to Singapore and therefore left a day to kill in Paris proved to be a singular boon. If you look for it, there's always another side to down.

The Mariseo Destiny

2006-12-10T13:30:00.000Z

Here's a bit of an experiment.

As some of you know, I published a novel The Mariseo Legacy in 1996, which had grown from a short story I wrote in the early nineties, Mariseo's House. These were published under the pseudonym William Trapman.

I subsequently wrote a sequel to that novel, called The Mariseo Destiny. Though I reached 'The End' of the second draft some years ago, I haven't found the time to do the final rewrites.

I've now started those rewrites, or at least the penultimate ones, and plan to publish them as I go, on a blog, The Mariseo Destiny. This is as much an exercise to encourage me to continue the project as anything else.

I'm not promising to complete it, but there's a better chance that I will if I know there are people out there waiting for the next chapter. In the nature of such things, it won't be perfect, and may even be in places incoherent. But eventually I'll sort these out (in the next rewrite level).

So this is an invitation to be a part of this experiment. Feel free to make any comments by email as we go along. I hope you enjoy it.

[LATER: For copyright reasons, I've made The Mariseo Destiny a closed blog. Anybody who wants access just needs to email me.]

How Close to Catastrophe?

2006-11-05T20:59:00.000Z

Several author/scientists are currently writing about technological innovations and the need for radical lifestyle overhaul in the race against time to save the planet.

James Lovelock is among them ... best known for the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism struggling to keep itself stable. It's known as the Gaia theory.

Lovelock estimates various things are now ready to tip the earth into a catastrophically hotter state over the course of a very few decades, and that heat will in turn make life as we know it nearly impossible in many places.

In interviews during his book tour, Lovelock has predicted that about 200 million people, or about one thirtieth of the current world population, will survive if competent leaders make a new home for us near the present-day Arctic.

There may also be other survivable spots, like the British Isles, though he notes that rising sea levels will render them more an archipelago.

The foregoing is extracted, and mildly edited, from a very thought-provoking article in the New York Review of Books.

Read it and think. That's really what we all have to do.

'Arming America'

2006-10-30T10:32:00.000Z

There has been a spate of publicity around Dan Donnelly's Arm, the famous artifact that was synonymous with The Hideout during all the years my family ran it, because of its recent loan to an exhibition in New York. This memoir of Dan and the event was written by my brother Fergus in a recent edition of The Marshwood Vale, which he publishes from Dorset, England.

A nearly 8,000-mile round-trip to attend a private view in a small Arts Centre in New York may seem excessive to some, but to me, travelling to New York to view the mummified arm of a 19th century pugilist was more than just following a wacky story.

The right arm of ‘Sir’ Dan Donnelly, a famous Irish bare-fisted boxer, who died in 1820, has been a feature in my family since it arrived at our home in 1953 – in fact it has featured in the family even longer than I have!

A gruesome sport to many, the art of boxing is something that has gripped the imagination of young boys for centuries. ‘Heavyweight champion of the world’ we would cry – little boys imitating the antics of Muhammad Ali. More than a hundred years before Ali, young lads had cheered heroes like Tom Cribb, George Cooper and Tom Hall, who fought vicious battles before the Marquis of Queensbery rules took the knuckle out of the sport. Prior to that, as young Dan Donnelly was avoiding school, hard men fought under the Broughton rules, which did not forbid head butting, eye gouging, hair pulling or wrestling. In fact it was Jack Broughton who invented the boxing glove, though it was only for use in sparring and exhibitions. For the real thing, the gloves came off.

Like many stories from the era, the tale of Dan Donnelly has likely been slightly embellished in the telling over the years, and is perhaps all the better for that. Born the ninth child of a family of seventeen, including four sets of twins, Dan was by all accounts a sturdy child who survived in a time when many didn’t. Little is known of his youth, although the inevitable stories of his humility, bravery and care for others, help to create the image of a lad any mother could be proud of. One story tells of how, after coming to the rescue of a young girl being attacked, he was so badly beaten that a surgeon suggested his arm would have to be amputated. Thankfully, Dr Abraham Colles, later to give his name to the Colles Fracture, was to save Donnelly’s arm and make this story possible.

Several versions of how Donnelly’s prowess in the ring was discovered have been written down over the years, but the favoured account is that he came to the aid of his elderly father who was being bullied by a giant sailor in a bar. Apparently word spread of his bravery and a local champion, jealous of his reputation, threw down a challenge, which Donnelly reluctantly accepted. He dispensed with the challenger in the 16th round and found himself the subject of much admiration. He was taken on by a trainer and manager, one of whom was Robert Barclay Allardice, a personal friend of William Pitt ‘the Younger’ and Earl of Monteith and Airth.

Donnelly was taught the rudiments of bare-fisted fighting and groomed for a bout with prominent English pugilist Tom Hall. On September 14th, 1814, an estimated twenty-thousand people gathered in a natural amphitheatre in the Curragh in County Kildare, Ireland, to watch the bout. Donnelly defeated Hall and the location was later named ‘Donnelly’s Hollow’.

Fifteen months later, Donnelly was to fight the Staffordshire ‘Bargeman’, George Cooper, at the same spot. Known as a courageous, ‘first-rate ringman’, Cooper gave Donnelly and his fans plenty of cause for concern, as a hard fought battle lasted until the 11th round when Donnelly felled Cooper and broke his jaw. As Donnelly left the ring and strode up to the edge of the Hollow there were scenes of incredible jubilation. Borne on the shoulders of his fans, as his mother led a procession of cheering crowds back to his home that evening, it is said that she frequently slapped her naked bosom exclaiming “That’s the breast that suckled him; that’s the breast that suckled him!” What greater pride could a mother show?! To this day the holes dug to mark his footsteps where he strode to the top of ‘Donnelly's Hollow’ are gleefully walked in by picnicking families on the Curragh plains.

Like many that have tasted fame, Donnelly fell victim to what is known as, the ‘demon drink’. His attempts to retire and run a pub led to increasing debts, and he left his family to raise money through exhibition bouts. He had one more ‘famous’ battle to complete, however, before finally retiring. On July 21st, 1819, Donnelly battled with ‘The Battersea Gardener’, Tom Oliver, at Crawley Downs in Sussex. Eventually winning with a dramatic right hand in the 34th round, legend has it that he was subsequently knighted by the Prince Regent (later King George IV).

‘Sir’ Dan Donnelly died the following year at the age of 32. Obituaries and comment flowed poetically throughout Britain, and, though he died penniless, funds were raised from public donations to create a memorial to him. Ironically his corpse was worth more then he was. Six days after his death, his grave was robbed and the body sold to a surgeon.

Following a public outcry the surgeon returned the body – minus the famous right arm. It was coated with preservative and used by students in Edinburgh University for many years, before touring Britain in a travelling circus. In 1953 it was presented to my father (above) and took pride of place in the family pub. Throughout my life thousands of people came to see it, and when my late brother Des (below) sold the business ten years ago, he hoped to take the arm on tour again one day. Sadly, he died before that wish came true, and last month the arm was brought to America to be exhibited in, ‘A Celebration of the Celtic Warrior’.

Eleven members of my family made the journey to New York to represent my brother, and ‘Sir’ Dan, and of the many tributes I read, one seemed most poignant. It was spoken, with tears in his eyes, by Donnelly’s close friend Richard Dowden on March 22nd, 1820: “He, who but a few short days ago was the glory of our land; he, whose intellectual and corporal energies were the theme of every tongue; he, who basked in all the sunshine of prosperity; he, who in all the pride of conscious dignity stood on the loftiest pinnacle of fame and honour; he, whose virtues were as the refreshing dews of Heaven; he – is gone!”

But the arm lives on...

Fergus Byrne.

The 'Bottled Water Lie'

2006-10-29T08:58:00.000Z

It's only a little more than two decades since this country went from drinking ordinary tap water to spending a bunch of money every week on bottled water instead. As a business model, the success of Ballygowan rivals that of Ryanair, and has been lauded for that.

And as we all know, practically every county in Ireland now has a producer of bottled 'spring' water that claims to be better than everyone else's, and certainly better than the tap water.

But why did we bother? I certainly don't recall any great demand to get away from putting a glass under the tap. On health or any other grounds.

Answer: because we were 'marketed' into it. I just came across this piece on the similar situation in the United States which is real food for thought (Yep, remember that water is the most essential 'food' for life).

And another thought to ponder: how come everybody feels they can't leave home without a bottle of water clutched in their fists, certainly in the city? They seem to need to take a gulp every hundred metres along the footpath. Their parents never did, and again I've no recollection of anyone out for an afternoon's shopping in those days dying of drought. Though at the price charged for a third of a litre of the bottled stuff, or a cup of tea in some of our fancy cafe-bars, there might be a point.

Hmmm ... I remember as a youngster playing in the woods around Castlemartin being able to drink from Pinkeen stream whenever our cowboys and indians exertions made us thirsty. Given the obvious effluent in there now, I'd not recommend it. But I'd have no qualms quaffing from a mountain stream.

Left outside

2006-10-22T22:26:00.000+01:00

"I should be in there at the General Assembly," the well-dressed Latin woman bubbled as she stood against the barricade, waiting for President Bush's motorcade to traverse the closed off 42nd Street on his way from the UN.

"I was there last March. My husband tried to get me in this time, but the security is too tight."

She was a complete look- and sound-alike for the character in that movie where the New York cop won the lottery and insisted on sharing his winnings with a waitress who'd given him a coffee when he had no money with him. The wife character, Latin too, and insisting on her right to live the high life.

But that's unfair. Our barrier companion already does. Her husband is in the diplomatic business, and for the last eighteen years they have lived in various parts of Europe. Currently in Rome, but formerly in postings like Switzerland, it seems.

"All the hotels are booked, and expensive, and we're stuck in this one." She jabbed a finger down the street. The New York Helmsley. 'Stuck' might not be my description. But it all depends what you're used to, I suppose.

Besides, I've found that they've closed the Plaza up at the south end of Central Park. As famous for being a movie location as its legendary customer service, it seems that it just became too valuable as a property and was sold. The new owners are building very expensive residences behind the famous facade.

I'm told there will also be a hotel there when the job is finished. But it can't be the same, can it?

Earwigging

2006-10-14T22:28:00.000+01:00

"He thinks that just because he has lived so long, he's above the law."

One of the two men walking behind me on Lexington Avenue was concerned about his father.

"I asked him about all the tax evasion, and that the trial is coming up. But he just laughed and said, 'live life'. My mother is trying to get him to face up to it, but he just doesn't seem to care."

And then I had reached my destination, and the fascinating conversation passed me by.

Is the father somebody big? Will we be reading about him? Or is he just a small guy who is being squeezed by the IRS?

Oh yes, there's yet another real life story out there. Wish I had walked further along with it.

As Time goes By

2006-09-19T00:42:00.000+01:00

"You need a watch?"

He was old, a little stooped, his pants and shirt clean and well pressed. I lifted my wrist. "From my kids on my fiftieth."

Murphy's bar on 2nd Avenue. Outside, the constant wail of sirens because President Bush was in town along with the heads of state of more than a hundred other countries. The UN General Assembly opening session. And much of the East Side closed.

He lifted his own wrist. "I'm the Watch Man. I got thinner ones than this."

"I just don't need a watch."

"Then buy your wife one?"

"She has one."

"I'm eighty-nine. What age are you?"

"Sixty-two."

He shook his head. "You're just a boy still." He lifted his day pack and turned away. He walked to the open door and stood there.

A black woman came by. They seemed to know each other. He touched her braceleted but unwatched wrist, and stepped backwards into the bar. In a corner they bargained. Fox News was too loud until she chuckled loudly. "You're a clever man, you know that?"

She came out of the corner and tried to set the watch.

"I don't cheat people," he said from the corner.

"I know you don't, I already bought."

She turned to me: "You got the time?"

"Five past three," I told her, holding out my fiftieth birthday wrist.

She turned back to the Watch Man. "This one's going to Atlanta. I want another for myself. You be here Friday when I get paid?"

"Sure."

Then they both left.

About an hour later, still in Murphys, I was interrupted from some writing.

"You still here?"

I looked up. "Yep."

"You need a watch?"

"No. But I'd really like to talk to you."

He shrugged. "I just need to sell watches."

I gave in. "How much?"

He opened his day pack and took out a timepiece. "Phillipe Patek. Seventy-five dollars. You can have it for twenty-five. Where else you get such a deal?"

He saw my resistance, reached in again and came out with something similar, smaller. "For your wife, or you could give it a present to someone else. Twenty dollars."

I picked up my money roll and flicked it. "I give you that, I won't have enough for another drink. I could give you ten?"

He shrugged, so I offered him the ten. He took it. Then I gave him back the watch. "I just don't need it."

"So, it's my first sale today." He must have forgotten about the black woman.

"Tell me about yourself."

He rested the day pack on a bar stool, but didn't sit.

His name is Jack. Jack Levy. He was in the Israeli army, but came to America when his daughter, already living in New York, married.

"What did you do when you came here?"

He touched the day pack. "I sold watches. I still sell watches. The Government looks after me now, and this doesn't make me a living any more, but it keeps me alive. It gets me out. I'm eighty-nine, what age are you?"

"I'm sixty-two."

"You're just a boy."

I told him I was a writer, from Ireland.

"I only deal with the Irish." The black woman must have been from Drimnagh, then. Though she'd lost the accent.

He stood up. "I got to go meet my wife."

"Can I take your picture?"

He shook his head. "Nah, I just need to sell watches."

Even when he stood outside the open door of the bar, looking for his bus, I could have snapped a really good one. But I didn't.

He only needs to sell watches, to stay alive. Not to live.

Keep on tickin', Jack. I know you don't need the money. Just the business of life.

Postcard from Boston

2006-08-07T00:12:00.000+01:00

Whenever I walk around a city I'm as much fascinated by the built environment as I am by the people or the entertainments there.

These are some pictures I took in Boston while on a too-short weekend visit there earlier this year.

Lighting up the world

2006-08-04T07:47:00.000+01:00

The house was made of adobe mud, the land around it high altitude Bolivian desert. From all I'd seen in previous days, the owner likely eked out a very subsistence existence.

But on a pole poking out of the roof I could see a photovoltaic solar panel.

To say I was surprised is an understatement. I'd been driving for several days with the Land Rover G4 Challenge up to the poorest and most remote parts of this country, and by now I was accustomed to the vast gap between the high-tech cars we were in and the general level of development of the areas we had passed through after leaving the more modern towns.

Like many emerging countries, the cities and main towns of Bolivia are very into the 21st century. But it doesn't take too many kilometres to travel back hundreds of years in terms of living standards and quality of life.

After spotting that first solar cell, I came across a village where at least every other house had a similar installation.

Clearly such cells couldn't provide anything more than small levels of electricity. I learned that they actually charged batteries during the day to power lights when night fell.

What I didn't find out until I returned to Ireland was that I'd stumbled across the results of an idea which one man had while trekking in Nepal in 1997.

Many of us are hit by ideas in various circumstances, but Dr Dave Irvine-Halliday had the vision, the expertise, and the conviction to see his through.

As a result, more than 100,000 people through the poorest parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America now have light in their homes today.

Affordable light. Light that doesn't pollute the environment. And light that helps give families a chance to study their way out of poverty.

Irvine-Halliday's moment of truth happened at a small school in Nepal, which had a sign outside asking foreign travellers to come in and teach something.

As a teacher of Electrical Engineering at the University of Calgary, it was a sign he couldn't ignore.

But he was immediately struck by how dark it was inside the school. He realised that any education provided there was going to be drastically limited by the availability of lighting.

However generated, energy for light costs money. In most places outside the electricity grid, it comes expensively from fuels like kerosene, either in smelly and flickering individual lights or for powering generators to light electric bulbs.

And the poverty paradox is that those who have to spend the most on power and light are always the ones who can least afford it.

Irvine-Halliday's speciality was in light technology, particularly in how it can be used in measurement systems in healthcare and geology. But after he returned to Calgary he used his spare time, all his family savings, and reportedly maxed his credit cards, to develop an affordable lighting system using white light emitting diodes (WLEDs) and a pedal-operated charger to power their batteries.

In 1999 he and his wife Jenny and their son Gregor went back to Nepal to install the first trial units. A year later four full villages were equipped with the systems.

Today, through the Light Up The World Foundation he set up, Irvine-Halliday's dream has already been realised in 26 countries and at least 14,000 third world homes.

A full village can have lighting for the same amount of electric power required to run a standard 100W bulb in the western world.

The running costs of a typical WLED setup are seventy times cheaper than those of a single kerosene lamp, and provide illumination that is seven times better. And it doesn't have the kerosene downsides of smell, health dangers, and global warming considerations.

The systems are powered in eco-friendly ways. The original 'people pedal power' generators have been joined by small locally-built microhydroelectric and wind power options, as well as the electrical solar cells I came across in Bolivia.

The use of LED technology is as yet untapped for most lighting needs in the west, so the Canadian professor's idea has reversed the normal thrust of technology implementation.

In one way that makes sense. The LUTW concept doesn't envisage 'a light in every room' as we're used to in the developed world. Illumination of one main living room is usually adequate in the small homes of the areas where LUTW is concentrating.

Sometimes they come up trumps in emergency situations. LUTW provided 2,000 WLED lighting systems to Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 tsunami disaster.

And as the idea develops at an ever accelerating rate, it means that less power stations need to be built to meet the growing demand for light in developing countries. Fewer power stations to build means financial resources available for more pressing needs. And also trims the global warming emissions from those growing countries.

Eventually, that concept brought back to the western world could mean that some of our most polluting power stations could be shut down altogether.

LUTW's efforts are supported by various individuals, NGOs, and corporations, including manufacturers of WLEDs. The organisation is also a member of the UN Global Village Energy Programme.

The cost of providing a typical WLED light system under the programme is now as little as $60 per home. Still not an inconsiderate amount in countries where the annual per capita income might be as little as $300. And it is estimated that a third of the world's population has no access to adequate and affordable light systems.

But it is part of the organisation's mission to facilitate the production of the systems in the countries where they are used. Thus sustainable jobs are provided as well as light.

In recent years Professor Dave Irvine-Halliday has been given numerous awards to mark what his dream has achieved. These include a 2002 Rolex Laureate which was worth $100,000 and which was used to restructure LUTW. He was also the Canadian Hero of the Year award recipient from the 'Reader's Digest' in 2004.

But just now maybe he's happy to be able to use his personal credit cards again.

Dan Donnelly, 1788-1820: The Short Story

2006-07-06T07:34:00.000+01:00

Born into a Dublin of the 18th century where there was a wide gap between rich and poor, the son of a carpenter, Dan learned to fight early in the tough part of the city where he was raised.

But he was said to be a quiet man as he grew up, following the same carpentry trade as his father. Still, when his dad was insulted by a sailor in a pub one evening, he eventually had to fight the other man to get an apology. Locally he became a hero.

However, the 'gunslinger syndrome' set in then, and he found himself at the receiving end of challenges from various 'wannabee' champion fighters. Eventually he had beaten the best, and Dan was regarded as the Champion of Dublin.

A Captain William Kelly, one of 'the Fancy' -- as the aristcratic pugilism enthusiasts were known -- heard about Donnelly and knew that there was money to be made if he could be promoted as the Champion of Ireland. He persuaded Dan to work with one of the best fight trainers of the day, a Captain Barclay of Calverstown, near Kilcullen and close to the Curragh where there was a natural ampitheatre which was regularly used for fights.

This was Belcher's Hollow, and there on September 14 1814 Dan beat English pugilist Tom Hall in a fight that lasted 15 rounds. It was an unexpected defeat from the perspective of the Englishman's followers, and now Captain Kelly's dream of his man having an international reputation was accomplished.

This resulted, on December 13 1815, in a match with the fighter then regarded as the English champion, George Cooper. Again it was in Belcher's Hollow, and after a gruelling 22 minutes of often brutal combat, Donnelly was declared the winner.

He walked to the top of the hollow to acknowledge the cheers from the crowd, which according to contemporary reports numbered some 20,000 people. To this day, his footprints are cut into the grass, maintained there by the thousands of people who walk in them each year when they picnic at what has ever since the victory been known as Donnelly's Hollow.

Now a national hero, especially in his native Dublin, Dan went into the pub business in the city, but was a signal failure. Mainly because he was himself too fond of the drink he sold. Broke, he eventually went on tour in England, and succeeded in beating George Cooper's successor as champion of England, Tom Oliver. He died suddenly in Dublin on February 18 1820, while yet again trying to regain his fortunes in the pub business.

Poor he may have been, but he got a rich man's funeral according to accounts from the time. They report how an 'immense crowd' vied to pull his hearse, ahead of which were carried on a cushion his gloves.

He was buried in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, though there is nothing there today that marks his grave. But a few days after he was buried, grave-robbers dug up his body and brought it to a Surgeon Hall, who bought such cadavers for study.

Hall is said to have recognised the body, being a member of 'the Fancy' himself, and ordered it to be returned. But not before taking off the right arm as a keepsake. The arm, suitably preserved and lacquered, subsequently spent time in the medical college of Edinburgh University, where it was used in anatomy lessons. Eventually in 1904, after a period when it was part of a travelling show of curiosities, it was bought by Belfast bookmaker and publican 'Texas' McAlevey for display in his Duncairn Arms.

It disappeared for a time after that, apparently into the McAlevey family's attic, before being bought by a wine merchant named Donnelly who presented it to Kilcullen publican Jim Byrne in the early fifties, in recognition of the local connection. For four decades it occupied pride of place over the mantlepiece in the Hideout, becoming an internationally-known attraction in the sleepy little village.

Jim's son Des and his wife Josephine retired from the business a decade ago, but retained the arm as a family heirloom. Des always had a plan to bring it to America for exhibition, as there had always been tremendous interest in it from across the Atlantic. Unfortunately Des passed away last December.

The arrival of the arm for temporary exhibition in the Irish Arts Centre is due to the good offices of Jim Houlihan, a realty adviser in New York. The relic is one of a number of exhibits which will comprise the 'Fighting Irishmen: a celebration of the Celtic Warrior' event, due to be opened officially on September 19 2006 by the actor Liam Neeson.

Dan Donnelly was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1960.

— Brian Byrne.

NOTE: Here's a link to my memories of the An Tostal Donnelly's Hollow pageants of the early fifties.

Postcard from the World Cup

2006-06-19T21:47:00.000+01:00

I've never been to a proper soccer match in my life. Come to think of it, I don't think I've been at a football match of any kind since I was about twenty-five, and still going to the occasional rugby international.

So today I've been to my first soccer match. Not locally, not even in Dublin. I was thrown in at the deepest end, the World Cup Switzerland/Togo game in Dortmund, Germany.

There were five of us went over, courtesy of Continental, the German tyre and automotive ride control giant. It was just a day trip, though I didn't go home with the group because I have a car launch to get to tomorrow in Austria. Another story altogether.

Before talking about the match at all, there are other things to be said, especially against a background of Irish Rail and the constant complaints we hear about their poor service to customers trying to get to and from major matches.

The Dortmund gig required getting off an Aer Lingus plane at Dusseldorf, taking a ten-minute trip on a shuttle bus to the airport station, and from there picking up a train to Dortmund, a journey of some 40 minutes.

It just gives me the opportunity to say once again how well the continental Europeans, and Germany in particular, run their public transport services. The trains are on time, there are plenty of them, and they bring you to places without charging the proverbial arm and leg. They are real alternatives to cars, and, in the medium distances, to airplanes.

So we got to Dortmund, taxied to a location to pick up our tickets, and walked ten minutes to get to the stadium.

This was where things fell apart just a little. Everybody going in was body searched, and any of us with bags or rucksacks had to open them too. It was a slow process getting to the gate and through, but it was all in the cause of security, or so we thought.

Actually, they were really looking for anyone bringing in cans of beer or containers of wine, or even plastic bottles of water. They were also checking that none of the garb worn by the matchgoers might be used as an 'ambush marketing' ploy.

The drinks ban was simple. All beverages consumed inside the stadium had to be bought inside, and they were limited to Coke, Budweiser, or water -- that last non-branded but it came in a Coke plastic glass.

These are the sponsors, you see. And they dictate what is allowed inside any of the arenas or official fan clubs where World Cup events are held.

On the same basis, MasterCard is the only credit card you can use to buy official World Cup merchandise (I came across a similar situation in the Athens Olympics, where only Visa cars could be used). Because MasterCard paid to be the sole sponsor.

I personally think this is a crazy situation, and will in some future time prove to be an undoing of such events. But back to the searches at the gate, and the fears about 'ambush marketing'.

A bunch of Switzerland supporters ahead of us had fancy hats in the national red-and-white colours, but obviously provided by Carlsberg, because their decoration also included green material bands with that beer's name on them.

Very quickly they found that their hats were verboten. The searchers made that clear in no uncertain terms. Just in case a stray camera shot onto a group of spectators might transmit the offending beer brand's name worldwide.

There was a level of pragmatism to be seen, though, prompted by a searcher. One by one the Swiss guys and gals turned their green bands inside out, so the Carlsberg name couldn't be seen, and they were all able to wear their hats in.

I heard today that some Dutch supporters at a match recently weren't so lucky. They were wearing shorts with Heineken written on them, and were told they could not enter the particular stadium so clad. To a man -- and maybe woman, I didn't hear -- they took off the shorts and threw them away, and watched the match in their underwear!

But let's go inside. The stadium in Dortmund we had seen on television over recent weeks. It is a really fine place, certainly to one like me not familiar with being in any kind of stadium.

Everybody has their allocated seats. Everybody gets a clear view. And in case you're momentarily unsighted, there's also a big screen in the opposite corner showing the TV closeup of the action.

There are beer and soft drinks -- sorry, Budweiser and Coke -- sales outlets all over the place. As well as frankfurter concessions which don't appear to be any particular brand. And just in case you get caught short of a Coke or a Magnum ice cream while on the edge of your seat during a particularly exciting moment, there are guys going up and down the aisles to make sure you don't suffer.

The stadium had about 95 percent Switzerland to 5 percent Togo supporters. We five Irish decided that we'd become the official Ireland Togo Supporters Club and so we shouted for them throughout.

Have to say, too, that the minority Togoan real supporters did their team proud too, with multiple drumming from a small corner of the stadium being a constant undertone throughout the whole match.

Being a tyro soccer game spectator, I came to some immediate quick conclusions when the whole thing got underway. One, the pitch seems an awful lot smaller than it looks on even big television. Two, the players look an awful lot bigger, and even across the field you can make out their faces and expressions. Three, they don't do multiple replays of the scores and near-scores on the field. Four, you don't get commentary.

For someone who only looks up occasionally in the pub when things sound exciting, the live game was actually very entertaining. Indeed, really entertaining.

OK, our guys didn't win. Actually, they lost 2-0 in the end. But they gave a real good account of themselves, and opened up many opportunities to score, many more than did the Swiss. The difference was that the Togo guys couldn't close the sale. The Swiss goals, when they happened, were superbly finished opportunities.

Nevertheless we had been at a good game for another reason too. The Swiss almost-absolute-majority fans were extremely good sports, and applauded strongly the many good attacks their team's opponents mounted, even when they failed.

We walked back to Dortmund Hauptbanhoff afterwards, taking around forty minutes to do so. It was a very pleasant journey, not only because the way was excellently signposted but also it gave us the opportunity to see how Dortmund was making all its World Cup visitors welcome.

OK, it is a German tourism authority policy that the World Cup 2006 should be used to show a very 'user-friendly' Germany. And so the closure of roads by police to allow us to walk down town from the stadium, and the many musical and food-oriented attractions along the way, which would require major planning exemptions in Ireland, are all part of that.

But I don't know if it is even necessary. Because I had to stay over here in Dusseldorf as I go to Salzburg tomorrow morning, I got a chance to experience -- again -- how user-friendly Germany actually is anyhow.

I've written this on a street corner, at a table outside a bar/restaurant which is a typical German city 'pub' away from the tourist areas. Around me all evening have been ordinary local Germans out for a few beers and a chat, sometimes for something to eat. I chose it just because it was that. And even though I have no German, I've been entertained by all that has been happening around me.

I left my camera in the hotel -- which is one I booked on the internet and for the first time that I've done that it is bad value -- so you have to read the word pictures.

I've had a typical local dish for food, schnitzel with veg and salad and chips. That cost me €7. And a half-litre of Greek red wine for €5.45.

And when he cleared away the food plates, my waiter brought me out a free glass of ouzo, which is a liquorice-based grappa or schnapps equivalent.

It is now dark, and still warm, and I'm out in the real cafe society, which doesn't do a Celtic Tiger screw-the-customer operation.

I like Germany and I've always found its people to be exceptionally friendly, and they often seem to be much more genuine people than we believe ourselves to be.

Remember the empires?

2006-05-31T18:46:00.000+01:00

A woman met her man friend for a Sunday summer brunch at a chic Bostone sidewalk cafe. When she lifted her Louis Vitton basket, colour-keyed to her expensive green top and skimpy shorts, he went all gooey over the tiny rat of a chihuahua dog inside. Later, as they wait for their seats, he took out the dog and kissed it.

Two blocks away a line of men and women shuffled towards a handout of soup and sandwiches from some group with a slogan based on a 'feed the hungry' line from the Bible. Most carried plastic bags with their belongings and salvaged bottles and cans with a redemption value.

Boston's shops and offices, its newspapers and TV shows, and its various churches all called for Memorial Day honour for the soldiers 'who have died that we may be free'. In a small local paper where she has been donated a piece of free editorial space, a woman tabulated the names and ages of the American soldiers killed in Iraq in the past week. She also totalled the soldier dead since the invasion. Now closing on 2,500.

A man maybe in his 30s held up a sign to the passing traffic: 'Homeless war vet. Clean and sober. I need some help'.

In the city's Prudential Center shopping mall the beginning of America's summer brought out the long-legged and tanned young women, the fat and bejewelled matrons and their men, and the young people carefully monitored by the centre's security. All was good in their insulated world.

Meanwhile across America the number of people without health insurance continued to rise as the average cost headed towards $600 a month for single contributors. Only those earning below the notional poverty line of $18,000 a year qualify for some minimal free medical care. Anybody else has to have insurance or be in a position to accept a massive debt to a hospital that might take them in for treatment.

In an address at a military academy George Bush likened his War on Terror to the defence of the West in the Cold War. The same day the 'Boston Globe' revealed that Dick Cheyney has used his vice-presidential position in an unprecedented fashion to ensure that any legislation coming for George W's signature has been checked and, if necessary, amended to consolidate even further the power which his administration wields over the nation, its constituent states, and its individual citizenery.

Americans beginning the summer 'driving season' found themselves once again paying even higher prices for gasoline, now at an average of $3 a gallon. Soon they may be paying the same as we Europeans do. Except that the extra cost to them is not, as in Europe, taxation with the dual purpose of discouraging waste and paying a social charge. It is instead massively adding to the coffers of the oil companies, with whom coincidentally the current power holders have long-standing links.

On this latest trip to America, my first for three years, I several times experienced again the wonderful and generous people whom ordinary Americans are. In their daily lives, in their spiritual and social beliefs, in the uncomplicated way many of them can live under a comfort blanket of being the most powerful nation in the world. Which is why the 911 catastrophe hit them so hard.

George W gave them external scapegoats for that, killers and fanatics outside their borders who threatened their 'American way'. And that provided some kind of place to focus while they rebuilt their psyche.

From privileged backgrounds Bush or Cheyney et al never had to stand in a soup handout line. Heve never had to worry about what would happen if they got sick. Never had to come back from fighting a war and look for 'a little help'. Never had to be concerned about digging deeper into their pockets to drive on their vacations.

Nor have they ever acknowledged individually the young men and women who have died for their government's adventuring in Iraq. They are unlikely to do so for others who may die in similar situations in Iran if equivalent invasions are instigated before the unfettered power to do so disappears into a newly elected administration.

They won't have to worry about the legacy of the massive financial deficit they have left for their citizens and future generations to repay, having turned around a healthy economy into a seven trillion dollar accounting red line.

They are unlikely to worry about the fact that, far from Osama bin Laden and his like being the biggest enemy of the 'American way', they have helped create a much more formidable enemy within.

The people in the soup line. The woman quietly keeping faith with every soldier who is killed in Iraq. The veteran on the corner with his 'help me' sign. The father whose son died of an operable condition because he wasn't poor enough to get him 'free' medical care. The families who eventually realise that it is not the Arab nations sitting on the oil reserves who are doubling and tripling their gasoline costs, but the oil companies with their creaming off of windfall profits.

But when each of these individuals finally says 'enough' it will be too late. Because George and Dick and all their pals in the Haliburton and oil businesses will have long gone to their rewards. Not the eternal ones, though. The remaining days of the people who have used their position to pillage their own people will be comfortable and easy, if spent mostly behind security gates.

Meantime the woman with her Louis Vitton dog-basket will have gone back to Florida, her man friend now smooching somebody else's rat-dog. He looked like that kind.

The long-legged and tanned will still be doing their rounds in the Prudential Center mall, because voting for a government has never been their priority. The bejewelled obese will simply continue to make their political donations and buy the government that suits them.

I'm an optimist. But remember the Greeks. And the Romans. And the golden periods of the Middle Ages.

It has always been arrogance of leaders that ended golden eras. Leaving those they were supposed to serve to pick up the pieces. If there were any left to pick up.

Bagging the tea and other memories

2006-04-18T08:04:00.000+01:00

Some of you might have read my recent piece on the drapery and hardware shop belonging to my grandfather which was on part of the site now occupied by the supermarket.

Well, there was another shop too, this one owned by a pair of women whom I knew as my aunties Peg and Nora.

They weren't direct aunts, but I've forgotten the actual relationship. All I do remember is that this was the business which my great-grandfather came into Kilcullen to help out with and which established him here as a carpenter and builder. And coffin maker, which led to the family's long involvement in funeral undertaking until recently.

But I still have vivid childhood memories of that shop, and the residence attached to it. There were really several ground floor sections: a grecery shop, a bar, a back store and a parlour and kitchen where my aunts lived, as well as two bedrooms upstairs. Access to the whole complex was by one open entrance way, with a door on the left into the parlour and one straight on into the grocery shop.

The shop was of the real old kind, with a scrubbed wooden floor, a varnished hardwood counter, and wooden shelves behind on which stock was stacked. In these days of supermarkets and convenience stores it might seem strange that people would queue up to be served by somebody behind a counter, rather than helping themselves and then queuing to pay. But that's how it was then.

Beyond the shop was the bar, divided by a partition and a door with frosted glass and a brass handle. Its own counter was an extension of the shop's one, though access to behind both counters was from the back end of the shop between them.

Peg and Nora would do their stints behind the counter, but the real important person was the man who worked for them, name of Pat Quinn. He was barman, storeman, shop assistant. And polisher of the brass pole which supported the ceiling, and operator and cleaner of the slicer which was used to cut the sides of bacon into rashers, and the cooked hams into thin slices.

The slicer was an awesome thing to a youngster, all stainless steel and deep red enamel. It was totally mechanical and an amazing piece of engineering, using the weight of a flywheel to spin the cutting disc, a bright and frightening sight, especially when watching Pat Quinn's fingers getting dangerously close to it as he pushed the side of bacon in and out during the cutting. The slices slipped out the other side onto another shiny stainless steel flat piece, from which they'd be picked up and placed on greaseproof paper on a scales, to be checked for price.

Apart from the speed at which Pat Quinn could do this, the other amazing thing to me was how accurate the weight asked for ('a half-pound of rashers, please, Mr Quinn') would be produced. Part of that was, of course, experience. But also there was the brass adjuster, with numbers which dictated the thickness of the rasher, and later I realised that Pat would know how many rashers of any preferred thickness made up a half-pound, or a pound weight. That adjuster had its own fascination, though, I suppose because it represented control.

As kids related to the shop, we used to love to swing around the brass pole, much to the chagrin of Pat Quinn who had earlier polished it to an exquisite shine. If he was in really bad humour, he'd make us polish our handprints off it. Most times, though, we got away with it.

There were other chores which were more interesting. Such as filling the pound bags of tea, sugar, sultanas, raisins, and candied peel at Christmas.

These bags were of a heavyish paper, and in a variety of dullish colours, blue, brown, grey and dark green. The colour denoted the contents, which came to the shop in bulk and had to be bagged with the aid of wooden-handled metal scoops.

We kids felt privileged to be allowed do some of this work. Not least because there was always a treat of chocolate or boiled sweets at the end of the afternoon's work.

The tea came in large plywood boxes, tea chests sealed with foil that was sharp-edged but much prized for playing with after the chests were opened. The actual plywood lids of the boxes were dangerous too, with what seemed like dozens of small sharp nails sticking out of them, and the square of wood had to be carefully put out of harm's way while we were around.

The sugar came in a sack, and the sultanas, raisins and candied peel were, to the best of my memory, in boxes not as big as the tea-chests.

The bagging was a straightforward thing. Take the appropriate colour bag in one hand and with the other open it out so it sat comfortable in the hand (they came folded flat). Then put the scoop in the tea, or whatever was being packaged that day, and pour what was picked up into the bag. The open bag was placed on a simple balance scale with a brass weight on the other side, and any extra needed was poured in until the scale tipped. We got really expert at not needing to add anything to the bag.

The next skill was folding the top of the bag closed. There was no Sellotape or other glue system. It was just a neat fold, and the nature of the bag's material was that it stayed closed if this was properly done.

We enjoyed particularly bagging the sultanas and raisins, because we could pop the odd handfull into our mouths. Thus, as an aside, making our mother's ritual with Syrup of Figs unnecessary that night.

The bags were then stacked on the shelves at the back of the shop, ready for the customers. It all looked very neat, and unlike these days when such staples are carefully sealed in their plastic bags and boxes, the paper bags allowed the various aromas to leak around the shop, mixing to give that very special smell which the old shops still have in the memories of those of us lucky enough to have been there.

Other smells came from the fresh vegetables which were on sale each day, and among these which I remember with most affection are the baskets of peas in their pods. There's something even today about pea pods which is extraordinarily inviting, a smell of particular sweetness. When my mother would bring a basket of them home, there was no problem in getting us to help 'shell' the peas from the pods. The real problem was making sure that we didn't eat all the raw peas as we did so, and the only way she could make sure that enough were left to be cooked was to allow us chew the empty pods afterwards. I'll still do that today when the opportunity arises, and though you can't actually eat them because they're too stringy, there's still a great sweetness when they're chewed. If you've been raised on frozen peas, you really have missed out, guys.

Other smells also made up the scent of the shop. Like the fresh bread that came up each morning and evening from O'Connell's bakery down the town. There's really nothing like it today, and especially engaging was the batch loaf which was the most popular in my family's house.

I'm probably not the only boy in town who was sent to get the bread, which was wrapped loosely in thin 'bread paper', and by the time I got home I had eaten inroads into both 'white' sides of the loaf. Especially when, as it was most times, it was still warm from the oven down town.

The aroma of stale Guinness was also a part of the whole environment in the shop, because that was the only draught drink in the bar at the back. I've written elsewhere about my memories of this, especially how there was a copper basin under the hand-pump that took the beer from the barrel, where the overspills went, and a copper jug was used to scoop this up and top off the pints for the customers. This was how it was, and nobody minded.

There was a glass six-shooter in the bar, part of an advertisement for some special drink and mounted on a mirror. It fascinated me as a child, and later it ended up as one of the artifacts in the family pub, The Hideout. When my late brother sold the pub several years ago, he asked me if there was anything I'd like to have. I chose the gun, which is now somewhere in my attic and not nearly as interesting as it appeared to me as a young child.

Other memories from the shop are the rack of biscuit tins, at a later date gaining glass lids so you could see inside. But in those earlier times we depended on the label to know what was inside, and it took some special deftness to remove the lids without doing damage to fingers.

My aunts' residential part of the premises is most in my memory for the kitchen, which lofted high to a rooflight that gave it an unusual brightness all through the day. There was a range, but I don't remember the make. And a kitchen table of the old solid wood type, with an oilcloth covering which was what you did with a wooden kitchen table in the days before plastic materials.

There were tiled walls too, and always a welcome for the child relations who needed somewhere to stop off on the way home to inevitable chores or, worse, homework.

In truth, I really only have vague recollections of Peg and Nora, though Nora also sticks in my mind because she was the first person that I recall seeing dead, laid out in her small bedroom upstairs. I don't remember it being a shock, or even sad, but I suspect that as children we deal with such basics of life much better than we do later as adults.

I can still see too the parlour which was where my aunts probably entertained officially. My memory is that it was quite comfortable, in a fussy kind of way which is likely when it was the living room of a pair of maidens. What stands out in my mind is the mirror over the mantlepiece, a circular thing that almost belonged in a funfair hall of mirrors because it gave a wide-angle view of the room and didn't show anybody in it in a natural way.

My aunts died. I grew up. And eventually Uncle Tom turned the shop and bar into Kilcullen's first 'supermarket'.

My own personal end to the memory is when that supermarket went on fire one summer evening. I was then a young man, and with several other people I ran into the burning building to save what I could, and quite a lot of stock ended up stacked on the footpath outside.

It has to be said that it didn't remain stacked there long. But what the heck, Uncle Tom's insurance company paid for the windfalls on many tables that week and Lord knows he'd paid enough premiums over the years to fund it.

My own abiding memory of that night is the damage done to my jumper, and to my hair, by what I later discovered was melting lead from the gutter between the shop and the former living quarters of the premises.

And of providing suitable refreshment for the members of the Fire Brigade who had managed to save the structure of the building that night, and a great degree of the liquor stock, in the then roofless kitchen where I had so many times as a youngster delayed my going home after school, to child's chores and schoolwork.

Postcard from Sylt

2006-04-15T09:19:00.000+01:00

It started off a quarter of a century ago as an unofficial kiosk in the sand dunes, selling ice creams and soft drinks.

Today, the Sansibar restaurant on the island of Sylt in northern Germany is one of the trendiest places in the region, with some 35,000 bottles of wine for sale on the premises, and around 1,400 different names.

If you want to book a table, it doesn't matter whether you're a film star or a cabinet minister, or just a plain ordinary person, you'll have to make your reservation three months in advance in the season.

That said, there are outside tables around the place where it is first come, first served, and the food you get is the same inside or out.

"We serve up to 3,000 guests a day in the season," says Michael Hamann, one of the partners who own the business. "We'll sell maybe 700 bottles of wine, and we have 30 cooks amongst our 100 employees."

Sansibar isn't cheap, but neither is it overly expensive, despite the fact that it is located on the most expensive part of Germany. Sylt is where you go to live when you've made real money ... and that's just for a summer home.

"The business developed from the kiosk because people wanted more," says Michael, who wasn't there originally but was asked to get involved by Herbert Seckler, to whom he used to sell wine. "Twenty-five years ago there weren't a lot of rules on the island, you couldn't develop anything like this here starting today."

The attraction of the island of Sylt is mainly the environment, and since it started to become fashionable in the 60s when husband of Brigitte Bardot Gunther Sachs began to bring friends there, it is now the celebrity place to be in summer.

It has some of the most expensive real estate in Germany, with houses in its more desireable spots going for anything between €4m-€10m.

And we travelled across to it on a train that carries cars and vans, built on a causeway across the sound separating the island from the mainland.

"The normal population is 25,000, but in summer we have an additional 125,000," Michael Hamann says. "Nature is the most important reason people come on the island, and it is very important that we keep it so."

And as for Sansibar itself, though it is a haunt of the rich and famous, it is equally a place where those rich and famous can rub shoulders together, because the proprietors and their staff treat all customers equally.

That's probably a throwback to its roots as a simple kiosk in the dunes.

A Zoo memory

2006-04-14T07:31:00.000+01:00

Driving past the Dublin Zoo the other day, I was reminded of a story about my Dad, Jim Byrne.

Himself and the late PV Boland, founder of the solicitor firm in Newbridge, were good friends growing up.

Indeed, the friendship must have been sound, because it endured even after Dad 'wiped PV's eye' one September in Lisdoonvarna, stealing the girl PV was chatting up in the Post Office during a wartime outing to the famous matchmaking town in Clare.

As it happened, Dad and PV eventually got engaged on the same day, Dad to that same girl who was to be my mother, and to celebrate they decided the foursome would go for a day at the Zoo.

The only thing was, they had the price of just two tickets with them, apart from the essential money for celebration drinks. So the two lads sent the girls through with the tickets, and went down around the corner and climbed in over the fence themselves.

Trying anything like that in the Phoenix Park these days would likely have armed gardai rushing in to prevent a possible attack by animal rights protestors!

Yesterdays behind today's facade

2006-04-02T08:08:00.000+01:00

Looking at the sign on the supermarket promising a 'new way of shopping' soon, reminds me of how that particular shop once was.

When I was growing up, there were two separate shops on the site. One was a combination drapery/hardware, owned by my grandfather. The other was a grocery and pub owned by a pair of aunts of ours, Peg and Nora.

Each of which, to a small boy growing up in the early fifties, had enormous attractions.

The most important to me, in those very early memories, was the glass office that divided the drapery and the hardware shop, in which Grandad's book-keeper Miss Young was the real boss.

Every purchase in either part of the premises had a handwritten docket, which was presented to Miss Young with payment before the customer left the shop (unless they had the credit status to have their purchase 'put down in the book').

There were many attractions for me in going down to the shop, not least of which Miss Young apparently had a soft spot for me. Every day when I'd go in after school, she would slip me half a Milk Flake, twisted back into its original wrapper. I never wondered what happened to the other half, but in retrospect can only assume she ate it herself, because my piece had all the wrapper ...

It was a place of textures and smells, and on the hardware side -- overseen by the late Tom Keegan -- there were many wonderful things.

Such as the shining copper wire rabbit snares, hung from a nail on one of the posts that held up the mezzanine balcony above where stocks of all kinds were stored, accessed by a stairs that even today is strong in my memory as being exceptionally steep.

Those snares were simple things, a little stake of wood with a loop of copper wire noose. They worked when a rabbit would catch a leg in one set along a 'run' by those who knew how the little things fed at night, and when the noose tightened, there was no way they could be freed. The next morning, the setter of the snares would check them, armed with a stick to kill any that hadn't already died of fright.

OK, it may seem cruel today, but I know families whose parents and grandparents were absolutely dependent on the snared rabbits to feed their families. The tough times of little work and no social welfare safety net are not a long time back from the Celtic Tiger comforts.

Then there were the clay pipes, which were also strung together on wires. For those who still smoked them, they were important. For us children, they were great for blowing bubbles using a soapy water mixture. The strength of the soap was important, too much or too little didn't work, because this was before the detergents which rather later made bubbles much easier to achieve.

There was an aluminium 'cap' available for the pipe with holes in it that increased the smoking time, but with some skill on our part it also allowed the blowing of multiple joined bubbles.

The smells of the hardware were myriad. The cardboard boxes of nails and screws behind the counter had their own particular essence, and this mixed further towards the back of the shop with the taint of the iron oxide coating on slightly rusting 'loose' nails in boxes in the 'back store', accessible by one step up through an arch beyond the end of the counter.

In that store, things became much more pungent, mainly from the barrels of paraffin from which smaller containers were filled for customers whose lighting and heating, out in the country, depended on that fuel. Their radios also depended on the acid in glass containers in the same store, from which the 'wet cells' were refilled weekly so that they could listen in to Radio Eireann, and very importantly the commentaries on the weekend football games. The acid had its own stringent scent, which I fancy I can still 'nose twitch' today.

There was a large metal lever-balance scales just inside the archway into the back store, primarily used for weighing out sacks of seed and other stuff. We youngsters used to delight in weighing ourselves from time to time, in the process upsetting the calibration and Tom Keegan at the same time. But we were 'the Boss's' grandchildren, and fairly untouchable.

The back store had a door out onto the 'back lane', and across that were two open shed areas, in which was stored more bulky stuff behind the iron gates that protected them. These included long lengths of various-diametered steel, and angle-iron, and there was also a coal store and a closed in place where coffins were stored ... my great-grandfather was a carpenter who made coffins as well as buildings, and that was the start of the family's involvement in funeral undertaking. A business that has only recently ceased with the untimely death of my brother Des.

Back inside, the drapery side of the business was operated by the Misses Mayne and Duffy, and probably wasn't that much of interest to us youngsters. Except at Christmas.

That was when the toys came out, and I still have vivid memories of the big display in the drapery-side window, and the even bigger one in the shop itself.

It was a time when travelling even to Dublin was a major thing, and only by bus for most people. There were no shopping centres, and no specialist toy shops. Several shops in town did the Christmas toys thing, but the main one was Byrnes drapery, and to a child of the time the shop was a magical place.

To us Byrne children it was even more magical, because we took the chances to play with many of the things on offer, to the regular consternation of the Misses Mayne and Duffy (who were lovely people, by the way) who had to tidy things up afterwards.

But outside Christmas, a drapery business in a town like Kilcullen was important for the same reasons as was the toys business ... it was a more major operation to go to Dublin, or even Naas and Newbridge, at the time than it is today. For shirts, jumpers, shoes, jackets and coats, and work clothes too, everybody shopped locally. That the town supported so many drapery establishments -- Byrnes, Kennys, Bardons, Maloneys come immediately to mind -- is a reflection of that.

And I particularly recall a wide selection of Wellington boots ... how many people ever wear wellies today (and at that time all of them were black, made by Dunlop I think).

Accessories were important stock too ... ribbons came as rolls of many widths and colours, and I have recollections of rooting through drawers filled with buttons on cards, and similarly carded hair slides. Not because I needed them, just because they were there. There were also shelves of caps and berets, in various colours and sizes.

The shoes section had none of the designer stuff we're familiar with today, no Addidas or Nike trainers. Strong brogue shoes for men and women and children, and, in summer, sandals for children. All stacked in their cardboard boxes with a picture of the contents on the end.

The availability of shoes didn't mean that everyone could afford them. When I started in school, the barefoot pupil was no longer an issue, but I do remember friends with holes in the soles of their shoes. Heck, I remember when I got holes in my shoes, but I was lucky that my parents could afford to get them repaired.

I started this piece on the basis of a small observation. As I wrote it, memories I had forgotten came flooding back. That doesn't surprise me, because as a writer I know that every word written generates another, or two or three. And words are the vehicles on which memories are maintained.

But it is time to stop, and I've only dealt with one of the shops that were on the site of the current supermarket.

I'll come back to the other one, owned by the aforementioned aunts Peg and Nora. Believe me, it is fascinating. Well, to me, at least.

And as a result of this post, there came from my beloved cousin Marella Fyffe (Uncle Tom's daughter), a copy of the old Byrne & Co letterheading (above), and the following memories of her own:

"One thing I remember about Tom Keegan as a little girl, that he could make the most wonderful brown paper packages, containing exciting of things, tied up carefully with brown string that hung from the roof of the hardware, and that he was actually able to break it without using a scissors. No matter how I practised the technique I was never able to do it.

"Do you remember the long white candles, and the pile of potatoes in the back store that had to be weighed, or the way they were able to cut glass, like magic to a five-year-old. Do you remember the squeak of the wooden boards and the heavy black folding irongate that had to be pushed open everyday? Do you remember? Do you remember?"

Indeed I do. BB

One hand giveth ...

2006-03-18T21:03:00.000Z

Tánaiste and Minister for Health Mary Harney has urged some beneficiaries of the €1 billion nursing home rebates to consider donating the money for improved health services for the elderly and the disabled.

The option of donating the money was included in legislation published yesterday providing for compensation for 80,000 elderly people who were illegally charged for beds in public nursing homes. Irish Times, March 17.

Hmm ... call me cranky, but isn't that a little like a thief asking for the money he or she stole to be donated for building better prisons?

I know that many people would be thinking of making such donations anyhow, but asking for them is a bit rich ... especially in a week when many old people in state nursing homes have just been given big backdated bills for their care since the controversy blew up, and the homes stopped accepting payments until they could be legalised.

And the care bills are now four times what they used to be before all this happened ...

Ms Harney was speaking from South Africa, where she was representing the country on St Patrick's Day. With practically every Government minister out of the country for the occasion except 'hands up' Willie O'Dea, one even as far as New Zealand, it would be interesting to know how much all this gallivanting cost? What good that money could have done in the public nursing homes, providing a few more resources for the wonderful people who look after the elderly in them.

Besides, don't we have ambassadors in all those countries to represent us?

The depressing thing about Kilcullen

2006-02-26T15:13:00.001Z

I took one of my regular early morning walks through Kilcullen today.

God, it was depressing.

The town was filthy. Vomit, spit, gum and litter.

Well, it was Sunday morning. As if that makes it alright ...

Truth is, the place is a kip every morning. And not just the main street. From February on I'm in the habit of getting in a walk every day as early as the daylight allows, around a number of routes that enable me to clock up close to five kilometres on a session.

A couple are town walks, taken partly because some of the country routes are a bit dangerous for walkers when people are driving to work. But I do stride around Sunnyhill, sometimes Old Kilcullen, more often down the old Carlow Road and then back down along McGarry's Lane and in by the New Abbey Road to the town.

Come next month, because I'll be out early enough to beat the traffic, I'll probably add a Mile Mill loop to those latter.

Thing is, all of those routes will be more or less filthy with the detritus dropped by my fellow Kilcullenites, or by people passing through.

Sometimes in cars, I suspect. Otherise, for example, how can a McDonalds Big Mac box and its related bag and serviette wrappings appear on the verge footpath in from New Abbey?

And along Sunnyhill, how can so much concentrated rubbish stuff find itself under the winter-bared hedgegrows of that high-traffic road?

I don't think that those locals who walk my routes are the kind of people who bring their plastic bags of garbage to dump while they get their excercise.

But ...

Yes, but. But most of what is dumped on the streets and sidewalks of Kilcullen itself has to be from those who walk those sidewalks. Ergo, local.

The stuff is often recognisable for source, sometimes specifically like the boxes and occasionally parts of their contents from the take-away food providers in Kilcullen itself. Or the crisps bags, sweets wrappers, soft drinks cans and plastic bottles from the several shops which cater to those who 'graze on the hoof'.

In no way do I complain about the providers of those foods and snacks. They are not the people who dump. Those who do so are their customers, and you can't blame the seller for what the buyers do.

We're just a filthy race.

I say that with some knowledge of other countries, especially across Europe.

Not all of those others are pristine. Nordic countries, certainly, are very conscious of their living environment and treat it accordingly. Germans too, of course ... they even provide litter bins with three compartments, to recyle even more. The Austrians too. The Swiss, in some parts, surprisingly aren't great in the litter stakes ... Geneva can be scruffy. The Spanish are less than good. And parts of Italy where I've been are, at best, bad.

But nobody seems to be as generally filthy as we are, certainly in what is now described as the Greater Dublin area. I say that because I've found that the villages and towns of the midlands, and of the middle south, are quite seriously clean.

This last Sunday morning I cleaned up the litter on the bottom end of the small road where I live. It came to around half a plastic sack. Which wasn't bad: my neighbours did it two weeks ago and took a sack and a half. Thing is, none of it was from the residents of our road.

But we've not had the Cross & Passion College kids up the road for the past week, during mid-term break. They're back now, and I expect the situation will go rapidly downhill again.

This has been a long-running problem, with -- a very small number of, admittedly -- CPC students spending their lunch hour smoking, snacking, and dropping the related rubbish on the footpath, in the foliage, and sometimes tossed over the nearby hedges.

What gets me is the attitude. The CPC kids are a microcosm of a macro situation that is a national disgrace. Why do they, and those others locally and nationally, feel they can, or have to, drop litter in public places?

Back to the CPCs again: because of who they are, they are deemed intelligent, are being educated at second level, and so presumably are already part-educated, and come from families where, presumably, parents have some level of pride about where they live.

All of us have problems with our kids at home in terms of tidiness; I expect that this is a rite of passage, that our children's rooms are disaster areas at some point in their growing up.

But I don't know of any parents in my circle of friends, over the years that we raised our kids, who didn't discourage them from littering outside their rooms.

I'm still the kind of person who looks at the half-full glass of wine with anticipation rather than seeing it half-empty. So I presume that most parents don't want their kids to litter. and train them so.

Thing is, again, most of the litter that I see in my walks through the town, especially on weekend mornings, is not the fault of kids still at school. It is their parents, aunts, uncles, and maybe older siblings, all on their way home from the pubs and takeaways.

And then, as I said earlier, there are those throw-outs from cars, which in general teenagers in Ireland don't get to drive. I have to believe that it is parent-level people who do the throwing into the ditches.

So, where's the fault? Who is responsible for our national attempt at turning the whole country into an unlicenced landfill?

It's not as if the state isn't trying, God knows. That gardener guy, Gavin whoever, is doing his best in the 'reuse, recycle' ads.

Maybe though, they should have teenagers in a positive role in those ads? The pleasant but mature 'I'm saving myself for you, Gavin' lady character isn't exactly a role model for the CPCers.

I actually think we'll never, at this stage, win the generation which does the night-time litterbug thing.

But maybe the effort should be centred on making it cool for the kids to be keeping the ground around them clean?

It has been done before: young people who eventually get driving these days don't generally take their cars to the pub if they want to have a drink themselves. They've grown up with the idea that they use taxis to and from the pub.

Maybe we can't fix the litter thing for now. But we could fix tomorrow if we go about it the right way.

In my own personal experience, no parent has ever been able to instill a 'cool' attitude in their children. The notion is an impossibility.

But outside influences, especially peer pressures, can result in changes. And that's where we have to work at it.

I don't expect that I'll still be walking through Kilcullen when the change occurs. But it is nice to think that my grandchildren might.

Postcard from 41,000 feet

2006-02-07T16:11:00.000Z

A group of us were booked Business Class on Gulf Air to Bahrain/Dubai recently, but for some reason three of us didn't get put there. We were bumped up to First Class instead!

There were just eight seats/beds with all mod cons in the section, including our own chef and cabin crew, more of them than the three of us.

Service and food was great, including 'Wicklow' lamb and 'Clare' salmon, obviously a choice of menu taking into account the growing importance of the Emirates as a destination from Ireland. Indeed, they even had an Irish cabin crew member who added to the Arabic and English 'Welcome to Bahrain' spiel with her own version in Irish.

I've travelled a fair bit in Business Class, but never before in First Class. I'm not likely to do so again, without a happy accident like this last weekend. Because I know I'd blanche if somebody told me what people pay to be up there.

But it was a great experience. And because I travel a lot on business, aeroplanes are to me an extension of my office. This was the nicest office I've ever flown in. And it worked, because, rather than having to nod off a couple of times to handle the seven-hour flight, I worked all the way through, apart from time out for breakfast and lunch.

It was also interesting to cross new ground, if only watching it on the moving map on the screen at the other end of my seat 'pod'. From Dublin we flew over London, Paris, Vienna and then down through what used to be Yugoslavia over the Black Sea to Turkey, from there across Lebanon into Saudi, taking a bit of a dogleg to avoid Iraqui airspace for probably obvious reasons.

The other item of interest was also on the moving map, when every now and again it would put up a direction arrow towards Mecca in relation to the airplane. Obviously for the benefit of Muslims on board, and this was brought home to me when, wandering back towards colleagues in Business Class, I noticed a member of the cabin crew unrolling his prayer mat and kneeling to say his prayers in the appropriate direction.

Postcard from Mafra

2006-02-03T06:18:00.001Z

It may well be one of the ultimate monuments to ego, but the National Palace of Mafra in the small town of the same name in Portugal is one extraordinary edifice.

It is, I believe, the largest national monument in Portugal. The basilica around which it is built also has a number of 'bigs', including one of the largest church domes in the world, no less than six massive baroque organs, and a library with some 40,000 books, some dating back to the 15th century.

You come on it quite suddenly after a drive of less than an hour from Lisbon, through some very pretty hilly landscape. And it totally dominates the town. I'd seen it before, last year during a coffee stop on a run through the area, but this time it merited a visit, even a short one.

There's a large basilica, as I said. It sits centre front, and from it are large frontages on either side which are one side of the square construction that sets out the palace and the former monasteries.

The palace came about, according to one story, because Portuguese king Dom Joao V wanted to fulfil a vow made when he was desperate to have his wife bear him an heir. Or, to be rescued from some unnamed health affliction. Or, to atone for his sexual excesses. Put the last two together, and there's maybe a conclusion to be made.

It wasn't meant to be so big. Apparently the vow involved setting up a monastery for a dozen or so Franciscan friars. But Joao lost the head a bit on the project, and by the time it was dedicated on his 41st birthday in 1730, it was a full-blown royal palace, a basilica, and enough monastery space for over 300 friars.

More than 50,000 men had been employed in its construction, most of them indentured and reputedly kept on the job by some 7,000 soldiers.

The place was decorated in the best of marble, and artworks commissioned from the best of Italian and local sculptors and painters. The two carillons, totalling 92 bells were brought in from Flanders, and at the time were the largest such ensemble ever assembled.

Indentured workmen or not, the project was costing real money. In a real big way. And in ordinary times, the doubloons just woldn't have been there. Indeed, there's a report on record from the French ambassador to Portugal that 'all the money in Iberia' wouldn't pay for the project.

But the 'Portuguese Tiger' was in full roar at the time, thanks to the discoveries of Vasco da Gama and his seafaring contemporaries. Gold and diamonds in particular were crossing from Brazil in ships loaded to the gunwhales with the precious metal. Often they sank under the weight, or were looted by pirates, but enough got through to satisfy the avarice of the royal-sponsered commerce of the day.

It was such looted riches that built the National Palace of Mafra, and funded many other excesses on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain had a big interest in the Americas, too).

But the old saw that 'you'll never have luck' from bad deeds held true once more. The Portuguese royal family had to flee to Brazil in 1807 when Napoleon invaded the country. Less than three decades later, the monastery was abandoned when all religious orders in the country were dissolved.

The royals eventually returned to Portugal, but had to flee again in 1910 when a Republic was proclaimed, and the Mafra palace was then abandoned.

Today it is a major tourist attraction, and, depending on the guide you get, has 600, 800, or 1,200 rooms. Fortunately only a small few are part of the tour.

I didn't have time to do the tour, but I did take a good look at the basilica, which is why all the pictures with this piece are from the church.

A bit of culture never goes astray.