Summertime Out and About

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Summertime Out and About

July 16, 2008

The West's Awake by Cormac MacConnell

I’M on my summer meanders again as July takes its deep breaths and marches boldly into the 31 long days allocated to it by God and man. And the first real meander took me this morning to the opening of the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltownmalbay in Clare.

It was not the official opening, mind you, but the unofficial opening created by the early flow of musicians and trad music enthusiasts into the little town that annually hosts what they call Willie Week in honor of the great local piper.

Some of them have been in town for the better part of a week already, and they will still be here for about a week after the official end of the event. It’s a fascinating and elastic affair, 36 years old now and going stronger than ever. Not a spare bed to be found within 20 miles.

I went over to meet the legendary Blonde of Miltown, the famous musical pub called Cleary’s on the Lahinch Road that is central to a lot of the spontaneous music and singing during Willie Week. I wanted to discover, after all these years, why it is commonly known as The Blonde’s.

During Willie Week the place is so crammed there is no room to ask even a small question like that but, by arriving before the real crowds, I have a chat with the woman of the house, Bridie Cleary, and speedily discover that she herself is The Blonde.

Bridie explains to me that in the history of this old family pub there was a period when she and her sister Nancy, as young women, were serving behind the bar at the same time. Nancy was a brunette and Bridie at the time was blonde.

The regulars began to call them The Blonde and The Black, hence the title for the house, of which she and her husband Peter are now the matriarch and patriarch.

The lady now has a head of lovely silvery hair, and the couple’s seven grown children, and their grandchildren, all pitch in to help when the action hots up during Willie Week. She tells me that the fabled piper often played in Cleary’s down the years but normally left his pipes behind and played the tin whistle.

There is a good earthy sense of craic about Miltown always. Ironically, given the start of Willie Week, the topic this morning which was sharing the oral headlines with the summer school, was (please forgive me ye who are sensitive) an incident from the football fields which many thought was connected.

One of the local papers carried a large photograph of two footballers in action in a local derby last weekend. One is bearing down on goals and the other is in hot pursuit as the (female) photographer clicked her shutter.

The pursuer was wearing very short shorts altogether and, sadly, as the photographer made her exposure, so it appears from the shot did he! Totally by accident naturally, but anyway it slipped through the net and dominates one page of the sports section.

Locals gleefully tell me it is already on YouTube! What a world we live in.

On my way home I have to detour via Shannon Airport to pick up a friend of the Dutch Nation. We go to the Creamery bar and restaurant for a light meal before heading home. It was once a posting house for the stagecoaches operated all through the Munster region by the legendary Italian-born entrepreneur Bianconi. There are stories on the radio news about Shannon’s operating problems nowadays (one of the banks closed down its branch at the airport last week) and the cut-price airline Ryanair’s colorful chief Michael O’Leary is pointing out how his costs are rising because of the escalating cost of fuel. Some things never change.

On the back of the Creamery menu there is a potted history of the old stone building, going back to the time when Bianconi was stabling his horses here. They devoured something like 40,000 tons of hay and 4,000 tons of oats annually. Those were the fuel costs of the time and he was cut-price too, providing quick transport at a penny a mile.

But he was astute enough to recognize that the expanding railways of that era were signaling the end of the stagecoaches, and he sold out when the going was good and retired to Tipperary. Wonder what mode will take over from the airlines?

Tomorrow I am heading up to my native county Fermanagh which is currently in a state of very high football excitement because we will be contesting the Ulster final before the month is over. That does not happen very often.

The sad truth is that we have not won even one provincial title, and this is something that only Wicklow shares with us among all the 32 counties.

The last final we reached was back in 1982. Armagh beat us handily enough in that one, and dammit if they are not our opponents again.

Still, our fit and pacey men in green (drawn from just a bare handful of clubs) have been very impressive this season so far. They beat both Monaghan and Derry in the earlier rounds, and Derry are the current league champions.

I have to write a bit for somebody about the anticipation in the Ernelands, and I’m looking forward to that. We used get knocked out always in the first round, but that is not happening any more and it is powerful to still be in the hunt for Sam Maguire in the high summer.

And in a few hours I’m up to Galway and Connemara for Orla’s fourth birthday. Sometimes it is very pleasant to be a grandfather.

Orla is bright as a button and still confuses me with Santa Claus, but sure that is understandable. Connemara is beautiful at this time of year, and Orla’s house looks out on the well-remembered stretches of Galway Bay across to Black Head on the Clare side.

That’s the view that will be in my eyes before this evening is over. And July is the lesser by the length of one long summer day.

Use it or lose it is what I say.

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