Articles > Vitali's Ireland: An Irish Village

“Ireland has been mauled by the Celtic Tiger, chewed up by double-digit economic growth – and what’s left is barely recognisable."
The Guardian Weekend Magazine, 4 December 2004

Pints of Guinness were popping up on the bar in front of me like blades of flick-knives, concealed under the counter. It was my first ever night in a “typical” country pub (“The Corner House”) of a “typical” Irish village (Ballinagare in Co Roscommon). I was speedily approaching my personal absolute record in Guinness consumption and thinking of entering it into my own imaginary Book of Guinness Records.

Since my very days in Ireland, I wanted to write a feature on a small and seemingly unremarkable Irish village, for – from what I knew – it was there, and not amidst chaotic urban piles of Dublin, Limerick and Cork, that the “mysterious Irish soul” was dwelling.

Indeed, Celtic Ireland was entirely rural: towns were a fairly recent Irish creation. In my imagination, it was like one huge sprawling village, populated by warriors, druids (or dreamers) and poets. My first evening in Ballinagare, to where I was invited for a weekend, did little to confirm that romantic vision. The Corner House’s ambience was rather reminiscent of a scene from a book by late Pete McCarthy: men drinking at the bar, women reclining on sofas along the wall – a timeless setting. The only reminder of the 21st century was a poster, advertising salsa-dancing classes in the village hall. I felt as if I had known all the patrons for donkey’s years. After the fifth (or was it the sixth?) pint, Dublin, London, elections in Ukraine and the war in Iraq – all receded, blended into distant insignificance – overshadowed by the really important issues: previous week’s closure of the village’s old post-office and a new housing development project, approved by County Council…

“These thirteen new council houses will ruin the village,” a retired teacher, sitting next to me, was saying.
“That’s right! Besides, what are the newcomers going to do here? There are no jobs, no childcare, no public transport and no infrastructure for them,” echoed one of the women from the sofa.
The residents of Ballinagare had been fighting the losing battle against the housing project for several years, their rationale being that one simply could not increase the village population of 72 almost threefold without drastically changing its way of life and its historic architectural pattern. Yet, despite numerous petitions and protests, the construction of new houses was under way: three of them were already in place – a Dublin-style “in-fill development” in miniature…

In-between the pints that seemed to grow from the bar in front of me, I would pop out for a smoke. The tiny village outside was immersed in peaceful slumber. To a hardened city dweller like myself, it resembled a neat little old lady, who had dozed off quietly on a park bench. I thought I could ever hear her snore ever so gently…

Next morning, I was woken up by the deafening silence behind the windows of my room. A pot of steaming coffee looked (and tasted) like a pint of hot Guinness. With Pat, one of my hospitable hosts, we went for a drive around the area. We could have walked of course, but villagers all over the world love their cars.

One of the two settlements of the parish of Kilcorkey, Ballinagare stood on a large Bog. For centuries, this area was the domain of the O’Conors, the famous Gaelic chieftains and landowners. The most prominent of them – historian, poet and manuscripts collector Charles O’Conor – lived in Ballinagare in the mid-18th century and later retired to a secluded farmhouse called the Hermitage. After his death, the house became a “writers’ retreat” and then – a training centre for Irish Free State Army. A listed building, it was now in a deplorable state: roof and chimneys overgrown with grass, gaping eye-sockets of the windows covered with sheets of plastic. Right next to the house, stood a modern cottage, occupied by the Collins’ family – descendants of Charles O’Connor’s herd. A woman, who opened the door of the cottage, told us that they had been trying to maintain the Hermitage on their own money. “It cost us a fortune. For twenty years we have been waiting for some assistance from County Council, but it claims to have no funds for the house’s upkeep…”

Ballinagare’s semi-ruined old church had been turned into a tip, its grounds strewn with rubbish, broken bikes and rusty washing machines. A similar fate befell the historic Old Market House in the neighbouring village of Frenchpark, the only difference being that, unlike the church, it was enclosed by a shabby fence. Once a splendid structure that, among other period features, had indoor toilets – a highly unusual detail for a 17th century Irish interior, it was more recently used for food storage. This brought back associations with communist Russia, where many old churches were turned into vegetable depots. “The Temple of St George on Potatoes” – as Muscovites used to joke uneasily in the mid-1980s.

The USSR, of course, was very poor and spent almost half of its budget on “defence” (read arms race), but how come the powerful and seemingly peaceful “Celtic Tiger” cannot find the means to preserve the country’s heritage?

We drove on to the village of Tulsk (a deceptively Russian-sounding name!) that lay in the midst of what the local tourist brochure called “a unique sacred landscape”, dotted with Bronze Age mounds and ancient burial grounds. Indeed, there was a modern state-of-the-art Visitor Centre in Tulsk. But what did we see next to it? Bulldozers and excavators digging up that very “sacred landscape” for all they were worth to create a modern housing estate! The same brochure obviously got it wrong when it called the people of Tulsk “proud custodians of this unique ritual landscape”. One could see with a naked eye how greed and big business were hastily transforming Ireland from the Emerald Isle into the “Concrete Isle”. Perhaps, Russian associations were not that far-fetched in Tulsk.

To be fair, we did eventually find one old church that was properly, even lovingly, restored by Roscommon County Council. It was Portahard Protestant Church on the edge of Frenchpark. The reason for that was simple: the grave of Dr Douglas Hyde, the first President of Ireland, was in the churchyard, next to the Douglas Hyde “Interpretative Centre”, no doubt. To me, however, this was but a classic case of Soviet-style window-dressing that simply underlined the neglected state of other no-less important historic buildings that could not boast of having a tomb of a prominent Irish statesman on their grounds.

The old graveyard of Ballinagare did not have any “prominent” graves either – just those of “ordinary” Irish village folk – all victims of the Great Famine, Black Tans, “Crown forces” and plain hardship of everyday life. That was probably why the present-day state of it was not just deplorable - it was disastrous. To get to the cemetery, Pat and I had to negotiate rivers of mud and hillocks of cows’ droppings. We had to dive under spires of torn barbed wire – the remains of the enclosure, erected by County Council instead of the promised restoration.

“Dancing” gravestones in different stages of collapse – fallen, semi-fallen and still almost upright – were hardly visible behind thick vegetation, mostly weeds. The ground under our feet was disturbingly bumpy, and every bump signified an abandoned grave. Or rather – a forgotten life. It was like trudging through the necropolis of Irish countryside itself.

It was getting dark. The winter day – bleak and short like the final flash of a dying light bulb – was coming to an end.

Despite this gruesome excursion, I did find a number of signs to support my romantic image of an Irish village in Ballinagare - the place where locals still leave their cars and houses unlocked; where wild pheasants can be seen unhurriedly crossing the “main road”; where Tommy Connor, the oldest resident in his mid-90s and a former devoted Gaelic football player, vividly remembers “how farmers walked their pigs a hundred miles to the nearest terminal, from where they would take them to England”; where people still believe that a child whose father died before he was born can cure thrush by blowing on the sores...

I was delighted to learn that the village – just like the whole of Ireland - had always had a disproportionate number of first-class, if somewhat surrealistic and tongue-in-cheek, amateur poets. “Oh, Ballinagare of fame renowned,/A church without a steeple,/At every door there stands a whore/ To laugh at decent people…” This was written by Frank Browne, a Ballinagare native, who died in 1998. And this is how he described his experience of the “Hill” pub in Tulsk: “Between “Hill” and Hell there is but one letter/ And if “Hill” was in Hell,/Tulsk would be a lot better.”

A similar sparkling poetic wit could be found in the works of two other deceased locals – Bob Loftus and Seamus Dockery (“As I walked into the park one day,/ I could not believe my luck./ I spied upon the river bank a fine bog mallard duck./ I had to scheme a brilliant plan, it was all down to me,/ How could I catch that lovely duck to have it for my tea…”)

Luckily, not all the poets-cum-eccentrics in the area were dead. Sean Browne from neighbouring Castlerea may have never written a single verse, but I was inclined to regard him as a true poet for what he had managed to achieve. A train buff from childhood, he bought a disused Irish Railways A55 locomotive and installed it INSIDE “Hell’s Kitchen” pub that he owned (and still does) in 1996. I saw this diesel-electric “monster”, surrounded with signals, points, badges, conductors’ caps and other railway paraphernalia from all over the world, and as a fellow trainspotter could not help admiring Sean’s ingenuity and stamina (he had to overcome lots of bureaucratic hurdles to purchase the locomotive) in having his dream realised. “I did it purely out of love,” he said to me proudly.

“Pub owner goes loco!” ran a headline in a 1996 Irish tabloid that also quoted one of Sean’s customers as saying that his pub gave a whole new meaning to “suppin’ diesel”. As for me, I was thrilled to see in Sean’s collection a badge of the Kharkov Institute of Railway Engineers from my native Ukrainian city.

Poets and dreamers (read eccentrics) were precisely the types that I had been hoping to find in my imaginary Irish village. So, in this particular respect, my short visit to Ballinagare – a microcosm of the whole of Ireland - was a success. And although, having been born elsewhere, I wouldn’t repeat after John Noone, another home-bred Ballinagare poet, who emigrated to America in 1904: “Ah, Ballinagare I think you are/ The sweetest place on earth./My thoughts do fondly cling to you,/ I’ve loved you from my birth…” – my own thoughts will “fondly cling” to this “unremarkable” Roscommon hamlet, the first “real” Irish village I have visited in my life.

“We all live in the present moment of the past” – I saw these words of TS Eliot on a poster inside Tulsk Visitor Centre. Leaving Roscommon, I was hoping that one day they would be noticed and taken onboard by everyone in the old and once beautiful village called Ireland.

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