Midlife Irish (11 page)

The period usually called the Dark Ages, the time from the fall of Rome to the crowning of Charlemagne, is, for many, Ireland’s
Golden Age. Ireland was arguably the intellectual center of the world in the seventh and eighth centuries.

It is a long time since the days of
gavelkind
, but today’s Ireland also seems, in a way, much more civilized than America. If George Bush the first went to the West of
Ireland, he would see a “kinder and gentler” place.

Civilization in Northern Ireland is, of course, always on the verge of complete collapse. In the rest of Ireland (which is
the only real “Ireland”), things are very peaceful. The crime rate is very low, much lower than in America. The Irish people
I met in Atlanta all shared one common reaction to America: It’s amazingly violent in the land of the free!

In the rural parts of Ireland crime seems almost absent, but I became aware of one social problem. There is a whole disenfranchised
group of people in Ireland that exist almost completely outside the law. One of the puzzling problems of western Ireland is,
it seems, “the tinkers.” When first introduced to the term, Paulette and I, Yanks that we are, did not know what a tinker
was. We both thought a “tinker” was a guy who fixed small things. That is the origin of the term “tinker,” but in Ireland
it now means something much darker.

Bridie Levins, one of our many landladies, told us that she usually keeps her front door open.

“Unless, of course,” she told me with some gravity, “the tinkers are coming.”

I nodded as if I understood.

“And of course, I have to take the flowers in,” she said without any further explanation, as if everyone in his right mind
would know why you had to bring in the flowers when the tinkers were about.

All through our stay in the west, the tinkers were alluded to. People would say things like, “Be sure you’re out of there
by four. I hear there are some tinkers coming in around four.” And, “Don’t park your car there, a bunch of tinkers are going
to be passing by.” And, “You don’t want to be going to that place. That’s a tinker hangout.”

But no one told me what the hell the tinkers were, and why I should be so wary of them. Were they the Irish equivalent of
the Hells Angels? The Celtic Crips? One afternoon, I had my chance to find out.

It was a cold, overcast day in Moat, a little village near the middle of Ireland. I was in a pub when I got the word. Some
tinkers were about to arrive. I noticed the streets seemed emptier than usual. It was like high noon. Soon, I thought, these
tinkers will come riding in. Although I still did not know what the tinkers were, I did not feel very Gary Cooperish.

The town clock tolled twelve times.

Tinker time.

There were two large cops (whom Irish people refer to as “the guard”) standing at a corner, and I decided to ask them straight
up about the tinkers. If they didn’t know, who would?

“Excuse me, Officer,” I asked. “What’s the deal with the tinkers?”

“I wouldn’t worry about them, sir,” he said. “We’ll be having two other guards down here in an hour. And we’ve been in touch
with some other guard in the area, so I don’t think we’ll have any trouble at all.”

With that, he crossed the street. A boy with his arm in a
sling had overheard what I had asked the cop, and he offered an opinion.

“The tinkers,” he said, “I wouldn’t fook with them.”

I went back into the pub. There were two people there, a bartender and a youngish guy in a sort of rugby shirt and slacks.
I sat down and ordered a Guinness and listened to their conversation. They were both local people. The young man, Kevin, commuted
to Dublin, where he worked in construction. The old bartender’s name was Sean. They were talking about the tinkers. Like so
many other Irish people I’d met, they let me slip seamlessly into their conversation. I asked them who the tinkers were.

“They’re outsiders,” said Sean. “They’ve never really caught on.”

“They don’t have a home,” Kevin said. “That’s the big thing with them. They don’t have a place. They take everything with
them. Because they don’t have a place, they don’t respect anybody else’s place.”

I felt sorry for the tinkers, but I could see that sympathy wasn’t the correct reaction.

Sean was proud to say that he never served tinkers. He said that a tinker once offered him a hundred pounds, but he still
refused to serve him. Kevin found that difficult to believe.

“You’d serve a fucking monkey if he had a hundred pounds.”

“Monkeys,” said Sean, shaking his bald head, “but not tinkers.”

But the tinkers were coming and it was time to shut down. Kevin said goodbye and left in a hurry. I walked to the door with
Sean, who locked the pub door and stood outside, watching the street. Outside every store and pub, there was a man standing.

I walked up the street to Bridie Levins’s place. I noticed I was walking pretty fast. I passed the boy with the sling. He
looked at me.

“Don’t fook with them,” he said. I went home. Gary Cooper didn’t have to deal with tinkers.

The tinkers are sometimes called “travelers.” They are a very small minority in Ireland. No one knows for certain just how
many tinkers exist in Ireland, but there are about twenty-five thousand. They are not just a loosely organized group of disenfranchised
people. They have a language (sometimes called Gammon, Shelta, or simply “the Cant”) and a distinct culture, and they have
been around a long time, since the twelfth century, according to some sources.

“Tinkering” itself, repairing metal things like spoons and wheels, is not something you can make a living at in Ireland, so
they do other things to get by. A lot of people, like the pub owner I talked to, don’t even like to talk to tinkers. Ireland
is one of the friendliest places on earth, but the tinker is a true pariah.

No one knows how exactly the tinkers started living the way they live. Some people told me that the tinkers are the descendants
of people who lost their land during the potato famine.

They live on the road in encampments. There is no plumbing or electricity, of course, and most of them are constantly on the
move. They are not above applying for public assistance, although some people told me that the government relief agencies
have certain “tinker hours” when they will see these people. Even Irish people on the dole, it seems, don’t like to be in
the same room with tinkers.

This is, as you might figure, a very rough existence. It is estimated that 80 percent of the tinkers are less than twenty-five
years of age.

I finally saw some tinkers when I was in Ireland. They were passing through on a country road outside Athlone and someone
pointed them out to me. They looked very sad to me. There were a lot of children and one or two old men with white beards.
I said, aloud, to no one in particular, “I feel
sorry for them.” The man I was standing next to looked shocked at my sentiments.

“Don’t be sorry for them,” he said. “They’re the wrong ones for that.”

Because Ireland has been “owned” by somebody else for much of its history, it may be that the unfortunate human quality of
hating the oppressed group has never had a chance to get started. Whatever the cause, the Irish people as a whole are the
friendliest people I’ve ever encountered.

I speak from a severely limited context. I grew up around Philadelphia, “The City of Brotherly Love.” I have never had a moment
in my life where I felt for even a nanosecond that “The City of Brotherly Love” didn’t begin and end with quotation marks.

Because the first impressions of life form the background for what is to follow, I have always felt that I could say, no matter
where I was, “This place is friendlier than Philadelphia.”

Everyone has heard of Philadelphia’s storied crabbiness. These stories are not apocryphal. When they had an Easter Egg hunt
between games at a Phillies doubleheader, people really did boo the little kids who didn’t find eggs. Mike Schmidt’s nine-year-old
son was, after the discovery of his identity, actually booed by the other kids at the schoolbus stop when his dad came to
get him on a rainy day. A guy dressed like the Atlanta Falcons mascot was beaten senseless at a Monday night football game
(afterward, an onlooker said, memorably, “He was asking for it”).

I have my own minor horror stories. I asked a waiter for catsup and was asked “Why?” I once asked a guy at a Philly food stand,
“Can I get a Coke?” I was told, “If you have money and you give it to me, yes, you can have a Coke.”

Since my first impressions of the world were formed in the Philadelphia area, I tend to think,
These people are nicer than
the people I’m used to
. No matter where I am (if, of course, I’m not in the greater Philadelphia area), I think that.

All of the time we were in Ireland we never saw any good old American rudeness. I saw a couple of loud drunken arguments,
and they were curt with the tinkers, but, in general, everybody seemed to obey the rules of decency.

That’s why it’s too bad about England.

SEVEN

Unfortunately England

We drove south from the Cliffs of Moher and came upon a little town named Milltown Malbay. We decided to stop there because
we wanted to get something to eat.

Milltown Malbay looks like a typical small Irish town (after we had seen our twentieth Irish town we realized that, on the
surface, almost all little Irish towns look pretty similar). The stores are all freshly painted. (That is an actual local
ordinance in many of the towns. If you own a little store you have to paint it every year.)

There is, in every little Irish town, the following: a pub, a drugstore, a grocery store, a couple of bed and breakfasts,
and a Catholic church. The church is by far the most impressive building in the town.

We walked up and down the street and finally decided to visit the pub. This is an easy thing to decide in Ireland. We ordered
two Guinnesses. I took a sip and was startled by how good it was. I buy Guinness in America once in a while, but I now realized
that the brew doesn’t make it across the ocean in its full glory.

I took another sip. Again, fabulous. I could see why Guinness had its position in Irish culture. It deserved it. But while
I was in Ireland I discovered the dark side of the lovely brown liquid. I normally weigh a little over two hundred pounds.
I’m a pretty big guy. I’m sixty-two and I weighed 190 in high school. I weighed myself the day before I left for Ireland.
I
weighed 200. With my Doctor Atkins Guinness diet, I gained a pound and a half every day. I discovered that I weighed 225 after
seventeen days there. If I stayed in Ireland for six months straight, I could begin a new career in sumo.

When we were back in America we had planned to go down to the mouth of the Shannon and see Loop Head. It had a cool name,
and there is supposed to be a legendary city there under the water. But if we went north we would be driving along Galway
Bay, and we were told that was beautiful. So, we decided that we would just continue whichever way we were facing. This is
a good method of Irish decision-making. Saint Patrick was supposedly buried at the spot a horse chose to stop. We didn’t have
a horse, so we went with the “whichever way we’re facing” method, got into the Punta, and drove out of Milltown Malbay.

After about ten minutes we figured out that we were going north.

We looked at our map and decided that we should spend the night in a little coastal town named Clifden. The drive there was
amazing. Galway Bay is one of the most beautiful areas in Ireland: mountains, streams, sheep, and cattle, and here and there,
a guy cutting turf. It’s like the Platonic ideal of “Irish.” Every time we rounded a curve there was another painting in front
of us. We just kept taking pictures, because the scenery became more and more amazing as we approached the town.

We were pretty beat, so we decided to spend the night outside Clifden. We parked at a bed and breakfast. There are many, many
bed and breakfasts in Ireland, so many that there are several organizations and a rating system. Kathleen and Michael Conneely
owned the one we stayed at. They were so friendly it seemed as if we were staying with a family instead of renting a room.
This is the way to see Ireland. At the end of our trip, when we stayed in a Hilton in Dublin, it seemed as if we were back
in America.