Swallows Go, Poteen Arrives

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Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Swallows Go, Poteen Arrives

October 10, 2007

By Cormac MacConnell

THE swallows are gone away. How many times have I written that sentence for ye down the years I wonder? I have a scattered head maybe 20 times now? Close enough anyway.

Because when it happens, when the skies go empty of their beautiful fast flitting, then I write it. Anyway they are gone again and those skies, as if to compensate for their loss, are treating us every shortening evening with all the orangely sunshot hues of the most visually striking season of the year.

The Ballinasloe Horse Fair was on recently. And how many times have I written that?

It matters not at all because the advent of the greatest horse fair in Europe is as ritualized down the centuries as the departure of the swallows. I climbed into the car and went up to Gort and turned right through the falling leaves for Ballinasloe. It is something I will always do.

And it was the same as ever, except that this was one of the most beautiful October Mondays –- October 1, to be precise — that I can remember.

The Fairgreen on the Galway side was maybe even more crammed than I’ve ever seen it, every horse glossified and gleaming like gold in the early morning light, the same wild traveler youths riding bareback through the thick of it, the same milling crowds, the same acrid equine aromas, the same travelers’ caravans clustered around the fringes, the stalls, the fortune tellers, the dealers and tanglers and blockers, this year’s clutch of those astonishingly beautiful young tinker girls giggling and glittering in their finery at the heart of it, the other fillies of the fair.

And I recalled the Galway traveler who told me years ago how his match was made for him one year back in the fifties on this very Fairgreen.

The two fathers made the match in a downtown pub and the couple married a week later in the Mountbellew Chapel, on a midweek afternoon, and there was a campfire party that night, a little drink, a gramophone, the boys dancing with the boys, the girls with the girls, and that night his new bride slept with her own family.

And in the morning she came down to him with just a single saucepan in her hand as her dowry. And his father gave him a pony and a spring cart and a tarp for their home.

“And she was a great wife to me,” is what he said.

Looking at the glistening young girls in their tight short skirts and bright tops on Monday, showing themselves off as gracefully as any of the hunters In the background, I wondered how many matches were being made for them by their parents downtown. Because those matches are still being routinely made in Ballinasloe by the elders of an extremely moral community.

And there was a sad enough sub-thought as well. Because hundreds of traveler families are still on the Irish roads, some by choice, many out of need. And their housing conditions and sites in many regions are still extremely poor and unsanitary.

And the birthrate is as high as the general Irish rate used to be. And the winters are harsh and wet. And all the social and economic environment — and nomadic lifestyle — contributes to a poignant reality that robs the young women of their beauty in less than a decade.

By the time they are 25 almost all of them look middle-aged. It is a harsh truth far removed from the carefree display of youth and real beauty every October on the Fairgreen of Ballinasloe. One sighs at things like that.

I met a few old friends as I wandered through it all. Prices for good quality horses were sky high and, remarkably, you’d have to fork out nearly 2,000 of your dollars for a good ass!

That’s incredible to me. I remember when you could hardly give them away; when you could buy two of them for £5. Now they are all the rage, especially the breeding mares. A lot of them are exported to the continent.

You could buy anything under the sun almost in the stalls, from hunting prints of the hounds in full flight to water pistols to pots and pans and spanners to walking sticks with horse-head handles all the way from China.

Me? I met a couple of Connemara men I knew from way back, and we had a chat in the carpark.

I came home with the best bottle of poteen I’ve ever tasted, an elegant wild stallion of a poteen tasting of its illicity and spring water and mountain heather. It cost me only about $13 in your money.

It has such a kick in it that it will be used for medicinal purposes only, and prudently. I will sail serenely through the storms of winter and spring and, for sure, will be sitting behind this keyboard next April writing, “The swallows arrived again this morning!”

That’s what I call a bargain!

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