Here’s to our fairs and festivals
Few of the country’s modern festivals and events have the consistency of golden oldies like the Rose of Tralee, or the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, which have been going for 60 years and become Ireland’s way of going off the rails every summer. Amid the
OLD Johnny Dunne, a man of varied accomplishments including expertise at the threecard trick, would disappear from town in early June and arrive back in late October having spent the intervening months travelling the roads of Ireland setting out his stall at horse fairs, race meetings and festivals.
Mostly these events were like the funeral of a well-known local figure... without a corpse.
There was a mixture of laughter and tears, music and lots of friends meeting up to swap stories, reignite old disputes and talk late into the night over a drink or two.
In the years since, summer schools and literary festivals have also become an integral part of the Irish summer, attracting eclectic gatherings of politicians, backroom apparatchiks, academics, self-styled controversialists and journalists in search of convivial company and stories with an edge of intellectual importance.
As new festivals sprung up others disappeared, few having the consistency of the grandmother of all festivals, the Rose of Tralee, or the highbrow content of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, both of which have been going for the past 60 years.
Does anyone now even remember the Frog Swallowing in Ballycumber, Co Offaly, in the early 1970s? Whoever thought that was a good idea?
There was a beer festival in Kilkenny, jazz in Cork, oyster festivals in Galway, mussels and strawberry festivals in Wexford, horse fairs in Muff and Ballinasloe, and music festivals of different genres in almost every town.
It has become Ireland’s way of going off the rails every summer, and, of course, the camp followers of carnivals: burger and chip vans, con-artists and purveyors of merchandise — usually shoddy — added a raucous chorus to the general merriment.
The Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, Co Antrim, is often credited with being Ireland’s oldest festival, but the famed Donnybrook Fair, in the improbable surroundings of Dublin 4, banned in 1855, remains the most disreputable, with its reputation for fighting, drinking and fornication. It has been immortalised in Erskine Nicol’s famous painting in the National Gallery and is enshrined in American English where a good melee is still referred to as ‘a donnybrook’.
Certain fairs and festivals were held on a specific day, the most famous being the Fair of Spancil Hill on June 23, “where Ireland’s sons and daughters and friends assembled there”, according to the local ballad singer Michael Considine, with a little poetic licence.
My own first experience of this phenomenon was the Mullingar Steak Festival in the early 1970s where “beef to the heels like a Mullingar heifer” (referring to young females of the bovine and other species) was celebrated with lashings of drink, dancing on platforms in the Market Square and music in the pubs, which stayed open half the night.
Because these events were mainly funded by the town’s publicans, the first item on the festival committee’s agenda was to apply for bar extensions to 2am, but usually liberally interpreted and lasting longer.
On court day, these would provoke a fierce debate with opposition from more conservative groups about the previous year’s licentious behaviour and the “state of the town” when the revellers had left for wherever they came from.
Another phenomenon with Irish festivals was ‘the split’ or a neat piece of mimicry when one town realised that another town was ‘on to a good thing’.
So the Rose of Tralee spawned the Mary of Dungloe Festival in Donegal and any amount of other ‘lovely girl’ competitions immortalised in Father Ted. The Galway Oyster Festival, probably the most exclusive of the foodie festivals (Champagne was de rigueur), spawned the nearby oyster festival in Clarinbridge, the Listowel Writers’ Week was challenged by the Kerry International Summer School (KISS), and competing Harp Festivals celebrating Turlough O’Carolan were held in Keadue, Co Roscommon, and Granard, Co Longford.
I have always had a fondness for Granard, on account of nights spent at Granard Town Commissioner meetings and later in the Greville Arms in the company of commissioners and characters. I once, mistakenly, tried to impress a Dublin girlfriend by taking her there for the Harp Festival. We enjoyed the music and atmosphere until some time after midnight, in a scene reminiscent of The Quiet Man, a large crowd of men and women spilled out of the Butter Market fighting and brawling as they proceeded down the Main Street, followed by a howling crowd urging them on.
My memory of the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival, which encouraged matrimony and at least one murder, is serious hangovers dispelled by a morning swim in Doolin, followed by elegant afternoon ‘tea dances’. I can’t remember which was worse, my dancing or the foul smell of the sulphur-infused waters of the spa.
Galway Races was perhaps my most enjoyable ‘festival’ over the years. I took the advice of a Dublin high-roller who was there for a good time not gambling, enjoying the low life of nights in the pubs on Shop Street and seeing how the other half lived over dinner with Albert Reynolds in the rooftop restaurant of the Great Southern, where the high-rollers liked to play, far from the prying eyes of the proletariat.
On my last visit, as the Celtic Tiger was about to crash and burn, I saw the serried ranks of helicopters lining up over Ballybrit to drop ego-inflated developers and their favourite bank executives for a day of Champagne and shaking hands with government ministers in the Fianna Fail tent.
Later in the Radisson, I couldn’t get an invite to the party of the week, hosted by Bernard McNamara and Gerry O’Reilly. So I went looking for a place to sleep. But there wasn’t a bed to be had, literally for love nor money.
Back to the Radisson, thinking I’d have to bed down in the back of the car, I was greeted by a Dublin businessman with the usual question: where are you staying? “No worries, you get me to my hotel and I’ll get you fixed up,” he said after my tale of woe.
It was past 3am when we approached the front desk of the Galway Bay Country Club, near Oranmore. He gave his name and was handed a key, and, turning to me, said: “Say you’re Bill Cullen,” and walked away.
I did, slurring my words. I was handed a key. Shaken, I joined him for a last pint, pointing out that I assumed it was a joke and he would give me the spare bed in his room. “No chance,” he said.
But what if Bill is there, I asked? “He can’t be, you’ve got the key. He books the suite for the week and only comes the odd day or two.”
To my eternal shame, drink and tiredness took over and I had a fitful sleep infused with nightmares of waking up to find Bill and Jackie at the end of the bed.
Kerry seems to be imbued with festivals, with Puck Fair in August one of the oldest, and in some ways, most rooted in history and the countryside. It is supposed to go back to Cromwellian times and the ritual ‘crowning’ of the goat is almost pagan in its ritualistic simplicity.
An idea of the work and dedication that goes into organising an Irish festival is illustrated in a talk that the writer and priest J Anthony Gaughan planned to give this year in Listowel.
In Some Reflections on Writers Week, he recalls its foundation in 1971 with Ben Kiely as its “most popular visitor”, Bryan MacMahon who “made a major contribution to its continuing success” and John B Keane, “so committed that he practically made it his own”.
One of the “bumps in the road” that make such occasions what they are was the clash of Dublin writers Ulick O’Connor and Hugh Leonard, who differed on almost everything from politics to literary taste.
One year they made the town a battleground in their long-running literary feud.
“The programme for this year’s festival — the 50th — records that it will be officially opened by Colm Toibin and Dominic West and that one of the lectures during the week will be given by Bob Geldof,” said Gaughan.
But, of course, like other summer events around the county, it has fallen to the plague.
Maybe the impromptu revelry and organised chaos will resume and a lot of lives will be all the healthier for the enforced abstinence.
‘Donnybrook Fair remains the most disreputable due to its reputation for fighting and fornication’