Real Ireland

I left Dublin at a leisurely pace, taking a late-morning train to Greystones, a seaside town at the far end of the DART line, and hitchhiking from there. My goal for the day was Wexford, a cool town in the southeast corner of the country. But my goal for the present moment was to watch the Ireland-France Euro game in a proper Irish pub. I had time to get maybe one lift south before the game.

It was a bit of a walk from the train station to the main highway, but once I was there I got a lift in no time from David, a young dude heading to Newcastle, a few towns south. He talked about how if Ireland were to beat France (unlikely, but Ireland wasn’t supposed to beat Italy either) then he was going to sell his car and use the money to travel out to support the team. He could always get another car, he said.

David dropped me off at a classy little pub that was almost full, brimming with Irishpeople of every generation – unlike bars in America, pubs can be a wholesome little community gathering place. We don’t really have anything like that – a shared living room for the town. I ate a fancy little lunch and watched Ireland score a triumphant goal in the first two minutes, elevating the hopeful tension in the room until the second half, when France finally got aggressive and won decisively, knocking Ireland out of the tournament. People were disappointed but hardly surprised. Ireland was never supposed to do this well, so their grief was tempered by pride that the game had happened at all.

I walked south from Newcastle after the game, hoping to get another lift quickly, but the road wasn’t the main thoroughfare in the area. It got narrow and rural, and soon I was walking on the gently curving pavement, changing lanes to avoid cars when I heard them coming. It was a bad road for me, with no sidewalk and no shoulder for cars to pull onto, and cars came one per minute, if that. But eventually a blue sedan stopped for me. The driver’s name was Karen, and she was actually driving home from the pub I’d just been at. She was a cook there – when I told her what I’d ordered, she confirmed that she had indeed prepared it. She went a bit out of her way to drop me off by the highway on-ramp by Rathnew.

This road was also pretty quiet on a late Sunday afternoon, so I hiked up to the highway and put my thumb out there. I don’t prefer doing it that way, as cars are going way faster and it’s more likely to be illegal, but there are always shoulders to pull onto, and steady traffic beats no traffic. John from Romania (Transylvania specifically) was my next driver. He works for a private security firm, and he took me to the far side of Arklow, right on the edge of Wexford County. He wanted to hear me play banjo, so I sang him a song on the side of the road before he headed back into town. It was evening now, but I was getting close.

Until this moment I’d never been picked up by a bus before, but that’s what happened. But this was no public-transit bus. The driver welcomed me in and I stepped into a laughing, shouting bunch of young Irish folks all wearing matching red shirts from the adventure run they’d completed that day. The thing is called Hell and Back, and these people were all coworkers in New Ross, a town none of them seemed proud to call home. They were all drinking and being adventurous goofs, picking up a hitchhiker was a natural extension of their day. They asked to hear some songs, so I played a bunch of songs, to which they were a fantastic audience. I liked them. They confirmed that if I stuck around with them for the night someone would make sure I had a place to stay, so I decided to do that.

The first bar we went to in this dumpy little working town was very divey, with a profoundly local crowd. The town is small enough that most people know each other. because this is Ireland, there was live music, but of a distinctly New Ross variety – one older dude with a guitar singing over backing tracks of popular songs. I don’t know how many people realized that the guitar he was halfheartedly strumming wasn’t even plugged in – it certainly wasn’t stopping the room full of tipsy middle-agers from dancing. It was a nice prop, at least. After a couple hours of Guinness and generally good craic, the group thinned and a few of us moved on to a pub with a younger clientele. It was close to closing time, but when people noticed my banjo, they wouldn’t let me go without a song, so we figured out songs they could sing to and I put on a little show. More on this later, but the Irish love to sing in their pubs – after I put the banjo away, the revelers continued on persistently with proud, shambling rounds of the Irish soccer team’s fight song, interspersed with bits of other folk songs that everyone knew. It felt like Ireland.

Disco Dave was what the bus crew jokingly called the guy who had offered to take me in for the night, but his friend at the last pub of the night called him Cha. Some people just attract nicknames. The place was closed, but after persistent texting and banging on the door, we were allowed into the lock-in, which is a thing they do over there where the pub technically closes its doors but everyone already inside canstay and drink into the wee hours. The place was busy on a late Sunday night, bustling with locals over the age of 50. People were immediately into my banjo, so at their request I pulled it out again and played some songs. They were interested in the kind of old-time Americana that I like to play, so I did some of that in addition to the Johnny Cash songs that are brilliant crowd pleasers in those parts. Where the younger crowd sang raucously with the music as an accessory, this audience listened attentively, and when I was finished a couple of them quietly slipped me cash with their encouraging words.

A burly guy with a thick grey beard a bare dome was chatting with us, and he pointed out a guy further down the bar, a slim older man with a tidy brown suit and matching hat, as the best tin whistle player in southeast Ireland. Of course Terry had a tin whistle on him and wanted to play with me. It was quickly understood that we didn’t have a lot of common ground in our repertoires, but he was happy to figure it out on the fly, so we did. He would play an Irish folk melody, all chipper and whimsical, and I would fumble around until I had some working chords to throw down. Then I would play some American folk and he would jam over it. After a few songs he was laughing and shaking my hand with thanks. Even with all its variations and dialects, music really is a universal tongue.

Dave and his friend were pretty insistent that I drink hard with them, and at first I was keeping pace just fine – they were paying, after all, and I was still present enough to play banjo, which is a pretty good measure of whether you’re okay. Dave’s friend was espousing the most typical of small-town bar stories – “I could have been a soccer star, but instead I chose drinking. Ha ha! Great choice.” On the topic of Wexford town, my abandoned goal for the day’s travels, Dave said it was nice but a little stuffy – in his exact drunken words, “a cesspit of arrogance and delusion.” (Immediately after he said that a big smile appeared on his face. He was so proud of that line.) But eventually it was 3:30 and we and the bartender were the only ones left. I put my foot down on more drinks, but I didn’t want to push too hard about going to sleep. I was a guest, after all. But I was getting cranky, trying to at least mix it with good humor before manifesting it.

But we made it at last to what they called The Shed, a little second-floor flat above the garage at Dave’s friend’s house. Picture a dirty room covered in junk and knickknacks, existing only to be a drinking venue or a crash zone, littered with evidence of good times and abandoned dignity. The two guys shared a bed in the house and I slept peacefully in the early daylight before heading back into town to eat a delicious egg-and-bacony breakfast and begin the westward leg of my hitch journey, towards Cork.