Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Life Moves On

My years at the Common’s school went very rapidly, it felt like I was growing up too fast. A boy called Michael Cannon that lived a few doors down from us on St. Cummin’s Hill, but he had always gone to the Common’s school, use to play Transformers and He-Man with me and John-Martin and Ciaran, but at the Common’s he was made fun of for playing with those toys. So even though he was older than I was, I had to stop playing with all the toys that I loved and pretend that I didn’t like them anymore. Michael Cannon joked with me that he would tell people but he never did, I would have died from embarrassment. He-Man was out and girls were in and you couldn’t get them from Matel!

When I was still in fifth class, around age eleven, Lillian the headmistress took a few months off for maternity leave and we had a replacement teacher called Ms. Burke come to us. She was a fierce looking woman, with short cropped hair, terrible dress sense and must have been no more than twenty-five at the time. She was a nasty piece of work and treated us like stupid children. After being respected as an equal by Lillian her treatment of us didn’t go down so well with everybody in the combined room of fifth and sixth class. My brother Derek was in the room and was always giving Ms. Burke a hard time, so in response to that she gave me an even harder time because I was his brother. Guilt through association, fuck.

One morning, she was picking on one of the sixth class boys, Brian “Gizzy” Gillespie and he said to her “Why are you always picking on me?” She was stuck for an answer so Derek shouted out “Because she fancies ya!” In response she just screamed “Derek Vial.” Then burst into tears and ran out of the room and refused to teach for the rest of the day. We were all very happy when she left for good and relieved when Lillian came back, though she did give us a lecture about being mean to Ms. Burke, but she was mean to us first and Lillian understood that.

The big excitement at the Common’s School every year was whether we would go on a school tour or put on a play. Last year when I was in fourth class we put on a play and Lillian wrote a script that managed to include the entire school, all 128 students, in the cast. She combined Little Red Ridding Hood, The Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, The Three Little Pigs, The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine and Grandma We Love You all into one intertwined story. I was a hunter in the Jungle Book scene and had only two lines “You’re not the only one” and “Beats me.” I should have won an Oscar, but I was robbed by the Academy, the bastards. The play was a huge success and we put on three or four show at the Forrester’s Hall and all the other schools came to see us and we did a friends and family show. My costume was little more than a grass skirt and paint on my chubby little belly and I was very conscious of how I looked. Especially when Sinead O’Neill was around, she was a Munchin in the Wizard of Oz section, in which my brother Derek was the Scarecrow, and she looked so cute in her costume, but there I was with my big eleven year olds’ puppy-fat belly for all the world to see. I would have killed for a t-shirt.

Then in an unexpected turn of events it was decided we could also take a school tour that same year to Dublin. An orange juice company was offering a promotion with McDonalds and everybody in the school collected tokens so we could get a two-for-one lunch deal of a Big Mac, Fries and a Coke. Sixty of us bundled onto McBrearty’s bus at six in the morning outside the school and drove to Sligo, where we got the train to Dublin. Hardly any of us were awake; sixty zombies under thirteen years of age and half of us had never been to the capital before or set foot on a train.

My cousin Kenneth had left the town school at the start of the year and had come to the Common’s because he was being bullied, but one of the bullies transferred to the Commons too, (tough life!). At McDonald’s Kenneth ate six Big Macs and everybody was impressed, he was a hit with the girls at the Common’s and left the bullies behind. We went to Madam Tousards Wax Works Museum and Derek had an asthma attack in the tunnels. Then it was to the botanical gardens, which totally blew, the old flora wasn’t too exciting to a bunch of pre-adolescents. We would have rather pulled all the flowers up and thrown them at each other. Next stop was the Viking Exhibition and it was fucking amazing, Dublin was celebrating its Millennium that year (888 AD to 1988 AD) and all the rage was looking for Millennium 50p coins, people were saying they were worth ten pounds each, so we horded them like Viking treasure. They had a Long Ship they pulled out of Quay Street when they were building the new financial center and it was pretty cool. From our history classes we thought of the Vikings as the enemy, because they were always invading monasteries and chasing the monks up into the round towers, so all this celebrating of Viking culture was unusual. It was the first time I made the connection that the Vikings that stayed became Irish and that meant the Irish people were part Viking too.

. We finished the day at the Zoo and I don’t know if the animals were more amazed at all the country kids staring through the glass with snot hanging off the end of their noses or if we were more amazed at them licking their arses. We had a double-decker bus take us all over the city and to any on-looker we must have looked like the biggest pack of culchies ever. Mouths wide open pointing and staring at everything Dubliners just took for granted, like the O’Connell Bridge, The Ha’penny Bridge, Grafton Street and Trinity College. I’m just glad none of us were wearing wellies and chewing on a rush!

We took the train home to Sligo that night from Dublin and the fifth and sixth class boys and girls played dares in their carriage, while the teachers turned a blind eye. It was one of the greatest days in my life at that age and it was amazing that only four teachers were able to look after all sixty of us and not loose any of us.

Anyway, it felt like no time had passed before I too was in sixth class and getting ready for my Confirmation and that meant leaving the security of national school and going to the Tech in Killybegs.

At the Common’s School I was best-friends with Jonathan Gallagher, who was suppose to be with Tricia Whincup on the School tour to Dublin, but I liked her too and it ended up being awkward. He used to live around the Circle, behind St. Cummin’s Hill when we lived up there, but moved out a few years before us. His Dad owned one of the big boats in town and they were very rich. As big as our new house was, theirs was even bigger and it was nice inside too. We still had a lot of work to do on ours. We got into a routine of sleeping over at his house every Saturday night, and the odd time at ours, but he was the oldest in his house and we didn’t have anyone to annoy us at his place, unlike Derek at home.

We were always watching some show on TV like McGyver or Quantum Leap. His parents watched Dallas and The Late, Late Show with Gay Byrne, but I didn’t care much for those. The one that really stands out in my memory is V. The TV show about the aliens who came to Earth to be our friends and it turned out we were their friends the same way cows are our friends.

I watched my first porn video at Jonathan’s house. It was called Naked Came the Stranger and was one of those really bad early 80s pornos with all the big pubic hair and story-lines, like it was suppose to be a real movie, except the main characters took time out to eat pussy, eat cock and fuck! We found it behind his parents VCR and when they were not about we would slip it in the player and sit amazed and disgusted at the same time. Somehow my mother found out, must have overheard us talking about it, and totally flipped. She sat me down and let me know how wrong it was and that love and relationships were not like what we had watched on the video. I promised not to watch it ever again. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

A few years later my little brother Alan called his little brother a Bi-Afran ‘cause he was so skinny and his mother phoned my mother to give-out to her for letting her child use such profanity. Mum said “That Bitch, I really wanted to tell her about the Porno!” but she refrained and let another good Catholic live the lie that was their life.

After watching V and all the other shows we would try to go to sleep, but it never came fast. We would put on the radio and play an Elvis tape Jonathan found on his father’s boat and talk to each other about the girls we liked and whether we wanted a Ferrari F40 or a Porsche 911 or 959 when we got rich. I told Jonathan that I’d get him a car phone for his Porsche when we were older. I lay on the hard floor beside his bed, but it was comfortable and those were the best of times and I fell asleep dreaming about a silver Porsche with a car phone.

Just before Confirmation we were taken into the Tech for informal examinations. Lillian had prepared us well and we were all fairly confident of ourselves, she reminded us to turn over the page to check for more questions. However, we were more interested in seeing who the other students were. I saw Declan Cunnigham, who lived in 62 Conlin Road and was one of my best friends since I was just a baby. I also saw my former associates from the Hill. They pretended not to notice me, so I pretended not to notice them, but something I did notice: they still looked like children! It was as if they had never grown up (not that I was that old, come on I was 12), I didn’t pity them one bit I bet they were still playing with their Transfomers and He-Man toys.

Confirmation itself was no big deal until the moment I was kneeling before the Bishop with my Uncle Aidan behind me as my sponsor. I nearly shit my pants and even have the photo to prove it. The bishop put his hands on me and rolled his Rs as he said my confirmation name “St. Brendan the Voyager.” And then it was all over and I was walking back to my seat in a pew with all my friends.

The build up to the event was a long drawn out one and Father Sharkey must have worn a new road out to our school from the town in his Renault 19. He quizzed us a lot and told us how we should stand in the chapel, not slouch like some sixty year old, and how we should answer the bishop and behave. It was like one of the plays Lillian use to put on, so we went along with the script and everything went well.

One of the most exciting parts about confirmation, alongside all the money you get and the dinner out to some nice place like Castle Murry, was getting your outfit. I guess it was to mark the progression from childhood to adulthood. This Christian ritual is perhaps an adaptation of the ancient tribal ritual Celtic adolescents use to go through when they were introduced to the hunt and made men. But in the modern day and age of the Celtic Island with the giant stag gone and a ban on most al weapons, it’s now a matter of going to a place like Classic Casuals in Donegal Town and getting new clothes; no wild boar were killed in the making of this young man. The main aim, besides leaving your childhood behind, was selecting an outfit that might get you noticed by the girls from the other schools and if they did that was half the battle over even before first day at the Tech started.

When Derek made his confirmation brown leather jackets were all the rage. It had to be the soft velvety kind, not the stiff plastic. However, under pressure and some seriously bad fashion advice Derek went for a leisure suit that would have looked just right on Don Johnson in an episode of Miami Vice! Every time I see a photo of the suit I smile and think to myself “What the hell were they thinking?” Armed with the knowledge of Derek’s big mistake, I decided to play it safe and went very conservative when it came time to choose my clothes, but it sure did get him noticed.

Brown leather jackets were out that year and if your folks were too ignorant to your pleas and went ahead and got you one, sorry but you missed last year’s fashion train. This year it was cardigans, light dressy jackets and chinos. While I was in Classic Casuals getting my cardigan, Declan Cunnigham was in there too and we ended up with near enough the same outfit; that’s how cool we both were, 12 year old culchie trend setters.

Declan and I had always been friends because he lived two doors down from Granny Sharkey’s. We played together as babies and ever since I can remember we have been in touch with each other. On my first day of school in the Niall Mhor, when I was four and a half, I sat beside Declan and the teacher moved us apart right away because we looked too happy or whatever reason the old cow Ms. McGinley decided. Most likely it was because she didn’t have a life and to see two four-year-olds happy in her class was just too damn much.

With Confirmation over and our summer holidays about to start, things were changing again and it was a good change. Jonathan and I got to hang out all summer together and spent most of the time at his house watching Ireland in the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Packie Bonner, the Irish goalkeeper, was from Donegal and that made it all the more special for all of us up in Ireland’s most northern county. We drew with England, then with Egypt, who we should have totally beaten and then drew with the Netherlands. We got out of our group by the skin of our teeth. In the next round we were up against Romania and that game was a nil-nil draw that saw us go through on penalties. The whole country let out a sigh and a cry when Cascarino put us through after the great Packie Bonner save. The Quarter finals saw us against the home team: Italy the bastards. We should have won but Tito Salvatore Schillachi put the ball in the net after a Dodadoni rebound from Bonner. But the best part of the game was off camera when big Mick McCarthy got in a fight with Schillachi and when the camera came back on he had a bit fucking bruise on his face. We’ll be taking the pope home soon! It was sad to see Ireland loose, but we’d never even been to the world cup before and it was our proudest moment. Thanks big Jack.

Gary Rowden and Desmond McGettigan, the veg man’s son, were in our little gang of close friends too. We were the boys from the Common’s School and football was our common bond. Gary was the best player of us all and was the biggest Manchester United fan ever and really wanted to play for them more than anything else in the world. Every year in the parish league people talked about him for days after; natural skill, great goal scorer. Funny thing is, if he had kept on the right path and not strayed he just might have done something with football, but he didn’t. He got older, lost his dream, hung out with the wrong crowd and pissed it all away.

At the beginning of the summer we had the Parish League. It was open to all teams in the Parish of Killybegs and they invited schools from neighboring parishes too. Some schools were either in a parish that was too small to have a football league or they were Protestant areas like Dunkineely and without a catholic church there was no Parish league and that meant no fun! The boys from Dunkineely were a funny breed, very rough around the edges but great football players. That last year in the Common’s saw some of the best Parish league football ever.

For years a kid called Alan Hamilton, a.k.a. Hammy, was the star of every eleven o’clock and lunch break football game at the Common’s National School. He was a few years older than the rest of us, but it wasn’t just that advantage, he could make the ball stick to his feet and literally walk the ball from one end of the field to the other. He was greedy as hell, but when he was making seven or eight goals a game we didn’t really care. Our team breezed through the Parish League and only in the final did we feel any way threatened! It was unbelievable; Dunkineely couldn’t even give us a decent game. Gary was the captain and when we won the trophy he held it up and kissed it like we’d just won the FA Cup at Wembley Stadium.

I don’t know what happened with my soccer skills during that summer, but they improved a hundred fold, it must have been all the practice in Connaghan’s garden and with Jonathan pretending we were members of the Irish team or Man United, he was Mark Huges and I had the big Mick McCarthy Throw. I started first year in the Tech as a mighty player and which was a good thing ‘cause I hadn’t shone very brightly on the field before. I remember one time were at Gaelic football practice with Pat Connaghan out at Fintra and I got the ball and made a great break with the ball and blasted it towards the net, only to put my head up and see that I was running towards the wrong goal! We had set up another set in front of the regular goal and all I heard from some smart arse was “Where ya born in a fucking field?”

I just kept getting better and better. My soccer ability bolstered my self-confidence. Up until then I was a bit of a shy lad, I was grand around the Common’s kids, but my St. Cummin’s Hill origins kept me back when ever I was around the other kids from the town. It made me feel like I was that small runt again, playing in the muck with He-Man figures and living in a council house.

It was in my first year at the Tech that I fell in love and her name was Caroline Gallagher. She was from Bruckless, just out the road from the Five Points where I lived. I’d never seen a beauty like her. Oh, I’d got to know a few girls here and there over the past few years, most of them a year or two older than I was and most surely they had dated my brother Derek before me. I’d been in the Scouts with Johnny and it was there that I had my first French kiss from a girl called Louis Mulroy down the back of the bus on the way to Ardara for a big Scout meeting. She frightened the shit out of me when she tried to stick her tongue all the way down my throat. I didn’t know what was happening and after five seconds I pulled myself away from her in disgust. My next experience was with Terraceta Mullin when the Scouts went to Loch Dan in Co. Wicklow for a week, but none of these girls even compared to Caroline. I found it impossible to tell her how I felt and every time I was around her I got tongue tied and said something stupid. I would stare at her in class, especially my English class with “Gay” Ray Murphy. I had the perfect angle for looking at her without the teacher catching me. More than once I caught her staring at me, but neither of us had the nerve to do anything about it. And sure enough a girl as good looking as that couldn’t stay single for too long.

She started to go out with a fella called Dara McMennigham. He was about as smart as lump of dirt and had the nick name Gonzo due to his looks. He was loud and liked to make fun of himself in school, so that made him cool enough for her to go out with. I was so jealous the whole time they dated. I heard her talking to one of her friends about him and how stupid he was and how he had spelt her name wrong on her Valentine’s Day card. I was also crap at spelling, but I learned to spell her name just incase I ever had to send her a card or a note and I wasn’t about to make that mistake!

When they broke up I made the decision that I would gather all the courage I had and ask her out. Sadly, I was too slow and she had said yes to Declan while I deliberated. I was completely distraught. Declan when he found out I liked her so much, being the perfect gentleman, apologized and broke up with her. Now the cat was out of the bag, she knew I liked her and in the middle of French class I managed to get the words out, with the help of Gary Rowden, and before I knew it I was going out with Caroline Gallagher.

I was so nervous and I couldn’t talk to her at all for the rest of the day. I didn’t know how to behave around her and when school was out for the day, I hung around with her until her bus arrived. All the Bruckless gang was shouting over at us, slagging her about who the boyfriend was this week. I just kept looking at her and all I could focus on was a little piece of green snot hanging from her nose. I kept looking at it, as beautiful as she was; it was all I could see. I went home happy from school that day, very happy. It was April 1991 and I was on top of the world.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Granny and Granda Sharkey

Granny Sharkey was one of the best people in the whole world, everybody loved her. She was always meeting some stranger, taking them home and making them one of the family. She had a guest book where people would sign their name and write some information about themselves and where they came from. There were names from Germany, America, Australia, France, Russia, England, from all over Ireland and tons of places I can’t even remember.

Granny wasn’t originally from Co. Donegal, but from Co. Cavan, one of the other southern counties in Ulster, where they have pigs. She met Granda in Drogheda, Co. Louth, where he was from, I don’t know if they have pigs there, they were married fairly young and when she passed away a few years ago from cancer, there was a very romantic story told about them and here’s my ragged recollection of the story.

They had been seeing each other, going to the pictures and things like that and Granny, Margaret, was hoping, Granda, Paddy was going to ask her to marry him. But her folks had a fella picked out back in Cavan for her and when it looked like Paddy was not going to make a move she made her way back home. When Paddy heard this he found his courage and got the bus to Ballyjamesduff and when he got to the town there was a fair and he had to search for her and when he finally found her he asked her then and there to marry him. The song “She Moves Through the Fair” was sung in their memory at her funeral. Jesus, that’s romantic, I hope I can tell my grandchildren a story half as fantastic as that.

Shad the best looking garden, front and back, in Conlin road and won loads of prizes for it. There was a pear tree out the back and a huge sycamore, gooseberry bushes, copper beaches and a green house too. We use to climb the big trees when we were kids and ate the pears long before they were ripe. Stomachaches and the shits were a great part of my childhood.

She was a great woman for bingo. Every Friday night she would get on the bingo bus outside their house, 64 Conlin Road, and from what I hear she was a great character. She would shed all her womanly-housewife tendencies and become her own person full of obscene jokes and gossip. She won the odd time at bingo, but she didn’t care about the winning, it was all about the society. I went once or twice with her, but didn’t like it too much, Derek on the other hand loved it and won the Snowball once and got ₤400. He used the money to buy himself and me racer bikes and never let me forget it! Anytime we had a fight he’d cut in “but I bought you a bike” and that would end the argument. What could I say to that?

She was the family conscience and every Sunday morning at the eleven-thirty mass you’d find her in the second row from the front, on the left-hand side. We use to go with her when we lived in town and she was so proud when I became an alter boy. That was when I was going through the phase when I thought I wanted to be a priest and never get married. However, I had an ulterior motive for becoming an alter boy and that was to get out of class for an hour with Declan and the boys, but in her eyes I was a great wee fella. I remember thinking it would be great to be a priest: free house, free car, clothes and all that. But when I found out the rest of the job: visiting the sick, going to funerals, no kissing girls, I gave up the idea. After we started living out the Five Points we didn’t go to Mass with her anymore and the other relations sat a little further back in the rows. Until eventually she was the only one in the row and I think that must have hurt her feelings.

My best memory is of her standing in front of the fireplace at her house, fag in mouth, brushing her long dark hair, talking to Derek and myself, telling us some tall tale about when she was a young girl back in Cavan. A portrait of Granda hung behind her, ashes spilled from the fire and onto the teapot that was always stewing there. Everyone said she didn’t get a gray hair till she was at lest sixty-five and she’d been one of the most beautiful women around when she was younger.

When Derek and I started going to the Tech in Killybegs, she made us lunch everyday. Her cheese toasties were great but her stew, Sharkey Special as she called it, was the best. I got the recipe for it once, but I couldn’t get it to taste as good as hers. And it was best of all when she mashed all the potatoes up in a bowl and then mashed the stew into it, oh I can nearly taste it now.

Derek was always her favorite, I didn’t mind ‘cause it was him that spent the most time with her, although she liked me more as a teenager than Derek as he was starting to get into a lot of trouble at school.. However, it is the foundational years that count when talking about the share of one’s love. Granny was mad about antiques and old artifacts and she and Derek were always watching the Antiques Road Show on the BBC together. One year Granny was given a metal-detector for Christmas and after that she and Derek were always out in the fields at the back of the football field or at Fintra beach looking for lost Celtic treasure. Although, all they ever found was some lost change and buried tin cans, but one time a lady lost her diamond ring at the beach and it was Granny and Derek to the rescue and after two days of endless searching they came up with it!

Granny was full of stories about ghosts and UFO’s, she would have made a great writer for the National Inquirer: Headless Ghost Gives Birth to Alien Baby! However, it was Granda who was the real man for stories; he could tell you something that would stay with you forever. He was the Donegal Poet of the year and won an Allingham Poetry award: when he spoke, people listened.

When he wasn’t in his armchair with a cup of tea or eating his dinner, Granda was in his work shop every waking-minute of his life. Though he had the heart of a poet and philosopher, he had the hands of an engineer. He was an innovator in the marine electronics field and it most likely it was his creative edge, rather than his knowledge of mathematical formulas and electronic circuitry, that lead him to his greatest inventions. He served in the RAF during WWII and he put to good use the expertise he learned from working on radar. He often mentioned that he never flew bombing missions, just reconnaissance and the technical side.

The Electric Fisher was his greatest invention that I can remember. It was a tool used to capture fish alive for research without harming them. It worked on a fairly simple process. You put a metal plate in a river pool, the plate was connected to a net you held in your hands, then standing down stream you zapped the fish with small electric currents and they floated down stream to you and hey-presto you had a fish in the net! Universities around the country and the world took an interest in his inventions, but he didn’t patent them and didn’t make much money from his hard labor. He could have been a millionaire ten times over, but he didn’t care about money, he was happier to have the work done and then relax with a pint and a short of whiskey in a pub someplace, telling a story about Sheamy the Leprechaun. A lot of people saw this as a failing in him, but to me it shows greatness of character; man might make the money, but money never makes the man.

People have told me over the years that he was the smartest person they ever met. My respect for him is immeasurable. He was a Renaissance man if ever there was.

Granda was a dog lover and when Granny was out with her metal detector at the beach he was out there with the dogs, throwing a stick into the water for Bruce, Sam, Wilma, Gemma or Marla, to help them get rid of the ticks and fleas as he said. He loved to wear his green body warmer and always looked like he was either going to or coming from a hunt.

Christ, they were both missed when they died. 64 Conlin Road was more than a house it was the entire center of our family’s universe. One day a year, on Christmas Eve, we all gathered to open presents with them and drink tea and eat toast and pate. Apart from a funeral or a wedding, it was the only time when the whole family actually got together. We made a small army with all the aunts and uncles and twenty-six grandchildren. No wonder there was so much for people to talk about. Those were magic days I’ll never forget.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

A New Beginning

In 1987 Dad moved to his own factory in Dunkineely, a small town a few miles east along the coast from Killybegs, and it was a real factory with a canteen for tea breaks. He had been sharing a shed in Ben-Roe with McGettigan, the Vegetable man. This was Dad’s first real factory and even though he never said so, I could tell he was very proud of himself. The new factory had a blast freezer and made C-Fish a competitive business among the other emerging white fish factories. Dad still had his Lit-Ace van, but he also had a lorry and Jimmy. Jimmy was Dad’s right-hand-man and grew with Dad as C-Fish grew. He had a shock of red hair and a mustache and dressed very snazzy, with his brown leather jacket and denim jeans and button down shirt “Right up Jimmy’s Street, Mum would say.” Jimmy was always very kind to Derek, Jenny and me, every Christmas he gave us a great present or a card with money. One year we thought he got us a pinball machine, but it turned out to be a crappy board game and a BROS (Matt and Luke make me Puke) tape, that was the one exception!

In May of 1987 we moved out of St. Cummin’s Hill and bought a house at Aughyvogue, the Five Points. The house was an old school house, Robertson’s National School 1879, (1987 moved around), is what the plaque read when we found it in the garden.

When we moved out of St. Cummin’s Hill I had another brother Alan, born in March 1985. He was the first “planned” baby as Mam and Dad called him. He had a birthmark on his ass and everyone pointed to it and laughed. He was a great baby and quickly became very spoilt. Resentment grew among the siblings, but not much was ever said.

I was sad to be leaving St. Cummin’s Hill, as my best friends were all there: John Martin from number.3, whose house I stayed in at the weekends, Ciaran Boyle lived in number 12 and Patrick Caraban with the crazy red hair lived in number 5 with the English mother. The boys who lived out the Five Points were a totally different breed. First of all, all the families that lived out there were much wealthier than any of the people we grew up around on the hill, except the Kees, McHughs and O’Sheas who lived on the other side of the wall. All the boys out there were several inches taller than any of the town boys of the same age, Derek and I felt tiny. Must have been all the good country living or as Brenden Connaghan said “It’s ‘cause we eat all our porridge!”

Derek was making friends right away, but I was a little shyer and took my time getting to know the neighbors. Besides, nobody was my age, they were either younger or a few years older. I was still clinging on to my old life and friends on the Hill and was not quite ready to let go and fully embrace my new life at the Five Points.

On the upside, the new house was huge. I couldn’t believe we were moving into the biggest house in the neighborhood. It had four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, one of which we turned into a playroom, a big kitchen with a blue tilled floor and yellow cabinets that everyone agreed had to go! There was only one bathroom, and it was tiny, out of proportion to the rest of the house. There was a garage, which Dad turned into an office and utility room. C-Fish was growing all the time.

I had a bedroom all to myself. Derek and I had been sharing a room since we were born and now as we were getting older we really needed our own space. Derek got a bigger room than I did because he was older. His had a red trim cause he like Manchester United and mine had a blue trim, 'cause I liked Everton. Everton were useless, literally the day I started supporting them they stopped winning and became crap, but once you choose to support a team you couldn’t change your mind, you’re stuck with them for better or for worse. Changing teams is just not done, I think the Catholic Church might have had something to do with that.

The house still needed a lot of work, so when we were still living up St. Cummin’s Hill we use to come out after school and help with whatever we could. Mum give me a dinner knife one day and told me to get to work pulling moss and weeds out of the wall and around the side of the house. It was times like that when you didn’t appreciate the size of the house. Derek was a little more useful and climbed into the old stone drain that went under the road to the Connaghan’s field. Dad feed him sewer rods and they unblocked the whole thing, so that when it rained it wouldn’t flood over on to the road.

Work-men, handymen and plumbers were constantly working on the house. One of them was Colm Cunnigham, my friend Declan’s father, I saw him moving a wardrobe from one room to another, he got his hand jammed between the wardrobe and the wall and hit the vein on the top of his hand. It swelled up like nothing I had ever seen before, it looked sore, I couldn’t believe he didn’t cry.

In Killybegs I went to the Niall Mhor National School, up by the Chapel. It was less than a ten-minute walk from our house on the Hill, down Stony Batter, past the Sail Inn and the Bank of Ireland, down the back street past McBrearty’s Taxi, then past the launderette with its nice warm smell, past the wee river beside the fire brigade and then up the hill past the Forester’s Hall; the old Niall Mhor was on the left and the new school was on the right. In third class, I was in the one on the left.. Even after we moved out the Five Points, we still went there for a few more weeks. I was sad to leave.

Dad bought a car, a BMW. The boys out the Five Points were impressed. I was in the Connaghan’s shed playing snooker with Brenden and Ronan, when Michael Burn, from the lower Five Points came in and started talking about the car. At first I didn’t even realize he was talking about my father, I felt embarrassed. Even boys older than me who had never talked to me before, asked me about the car when I was at the swimming pool in Ballyshannon. The BMW gave me a small amount of celebrity and everybody called it the “big BMW” never just BMW. Dad drove the car very fast all the time and smiled as he drove. I loved it when he dropped us off at the Niall Mhor in the car and people stared at us. With the big house and the new car, I was living a life that made me a stranger to myself, but I liked it.

Near the end of May, we started going to the Commons National School. My last day at the Niall Mhor was great. I felt special ‘cause I didn’t have to finish Third Class with all the people I’d been going to school with for the past five years. Everybody knew it was my last day and when three o’clock came I felt a great sigh of relief, but at the same time I was very nervous and afraid of starting at the Commons. I didn’t know anyone there, except for the Connaghan boys who lived up our road.

The first day at the Commons was surreal. Everybody thought Derek and I were twins, even though he was a little bit taller. We had to sit in class that first day and introduce ourselves. There were only about a hundred and fifteen students in the whole school and every room had two classes in it. Third and Fourth class were in one room, that meant Derek and I were in the same room, at least for the rest of May and June till we got our summer holidays. We broke our flask of tea that first day and made a mess. It was in Derek’s bag and all his new copy books and things got soaking wet.

The teacher was called Ms. Ward. She was very short with black hair and looked angry. Ms. Sleven, my teacher in the Niall Mhor who replaced Mrs. Moran when she moved to Athlone, was very good looking and most of the boys had a crush on her, but you could never have a crush on Ms. Ward.

Lillian Holmes was the headmistress and she welcomed Derek and me to her school. I liked her immediately, she knew our mother from when she was younger. She had just been made the headmistress after a man called John Danny left for the Niall Mhor to become the new Headmaster. Everybody talked about him like he was the greatest man in the world. Just before I left the Niall Mhor I heard everyone there talk about how strict he was. Anyway he wasn’t going to affect me and I was happy with Lillian as our headmistress.

The girls at the Commons took a great interest in Derek and me, which was strange because no girls had ever taken any notice of me before, except Dervala Hannigan, who I married when I was five. Notes were passed asking if I liked this girl or that. I liked a girl called Sinead O’Nell. She wore glasses and had make-up on, girls my age at the Niall Mhor never wore make-up, as far as I was concerned, she was the best looking girl I’d ever seen. For the past three years I had been secretly in love with Mairead McGing, but she liked Declan Cunnigham and I had to get over it. She was rich and I often had dreams where I was able to give her everything she wanted and she loved me for it. But Sinead O’Neill seemed more real and I was too shy to talk to Mairead anyway.

I was very disappointed that year on the 21^st June; Bonfire Night. Up Cummin’s Hill we use to have the biggest fire you could imagine, the whole street would help make it over a few weeks: car tires, win bushes, newspapers, old furniture, rubbish, if it wasn’t wanted it went on the fire. As there was only a small number of young people at the Five Points compared to Cummin’s Hill, my new situation was heavily undermanned for collecting flammable material. Our fire was mostly winbushes, they burned bright for a few minutes then quickly burnt themselves down to smoldering embers. But there was an upside to this kind of bonfire.

Since there were no tires or other types of noxious trash, and the fire was a manageable size, we were able to cook over the embers. I hadn’t expected this and Derek and I had to rush back home to get potatoes and tinfoil, sausages and a frying pan that Dad would allow us to put on the open fire.

A few years before the boys from Conlin Road had the biggest Bonfire ever in Killybegs. They had something like a hundred and fifty car tires on the fire and even one giant airplane tire they stole from one of the big boats. I went down there the next day with Declan and the ashes were still very hot, so we fanned a few spots back to life and threw some paper on top of it to get it going. I was rushing back with some newspaper I found in the bushes when I tripped over the wire from inside a burned-out tire. I fell into the little fire we got started and immediately my trousers went up in flames. I started beating out the flames with my hands, but they wouldn’t go out. Declan’s father saw us from his shed and rushed down and got the flames out and carried me up to his house and put me in the sink and ran cool water over my burns. I had to be rushed down to the doctors and I had blisters all over my body and the doctor pulled a huge chunk of my skin away from my knee and said I’d lost three layers of skin. He wrapped it in gauze and Mam had to change the bandages every day for weeks. Mam said if Colm hadn’t got the flames out it could have been a lot worse so I was very thankful he had been there and said a prayer to my guardian angel thanking him for Colm.

We were only at the Common’s School for a few weeks when school got out for the summer holidays at the end of June. Life at the Five Points was a very different from the life I had known on St. Cummins Hill. Even in the few months that I had been living there I felt different from the boys up the Hill. In July I went to spend a weekend with John Martin and all was fine. We went to play over by the O’Shea’s house and for some reason Ciaran, Patrick and John Martin ganged up against me. Told me I thought I was too good for them. I got very upset and went straight over to his house, got all my stuff and walked down to Granny’s house to find some comfort. That was the last time I ever played with them.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

First Memories

When I close me eyes, open my mind and think of my first memory, it is always the same. I am standing by the front window in our house on St. Cummin’s Hill. Looking out the window I can see my brother Derek getting into Constantine’s big, purple Opel Record estate. He is going to school because he is four and I am only three. I remember wanting to get into that car more than anything in the world. But I stayed at home with Mam and my younger sister Jenny.

Our house on the Hill is number 14; Mam’s sister lives in number 13, unlucky for some and proved very unlucky for them. They are the Murphy’s and their Dad, Sean, always looked very angry. Derek, my cousin Paddy, who's the same age as me, and I were terrified of him as children, but my Dad wasn’t and one night when he wouldn’t let Dad use their phone, Dad punched him in the nose and split his face, then turned around and told him to “Fuck off.” Sean Murphy was always shouting at our cousins, I would have hated to have him as a father. He liked to kill animals, especially gray crows that ate the eyes out of baby lambs, he was in the gun club and had a sitting room full of trophies he’d won for marksmanship. Their sitting room was always dark and we learned never to go in there when he was there; “I can’t see the fucking TV,” is what he would say if you opened the door even a crack. Other people hated him because he was the social welfare officer and he pissed a lot of people off with his superior attitude. As kids we feared the name Sean Murphy, as some kids feared the bogeyman.

In all there were 18 houses in a line on St. Cummin’s Hill, with McGuire’s in pole position at the top and the Friels living at the bottom. The Friels were a family of settled tinkers, gypsies, itinerants, knackers, I’m not sure which one is the current acceptable term, but they provided a lot of drama and gossip for the town of Killybegs, almost as much as the Sharkeys. They always had a few greyhounds out the front of the house and a donkey or two tied to an ESB pole. In accordance with the heritage they stemmed from they collected car tires and batteries, pieces of old copper and bicycles out the front of their house. These objects would be rendered into money by some stretch of the imagination, recycling years before it became a cool-yuppie-middle class-save the whales motif. My most noted memory of the Friels is of them collecting periwinkles along the coast around Killybegs. In the summer months they could always be seen with a big sack of ‘winkles over the bar of their bike. A periwinkle looks like a snail, and like escargot is a delicacy in the right market, but around Killybegs people just think of it as a dirty snail from the sea.

Our house had a green door and the paint was flaking, but all the years we lived there were happy years. We were poor, not Frank McCourt poor, but poor enough to be on welfare and having to live half the time at Granny’s house. Dad was fishing and had a hard time controlling the drink. I don’t remember much about his drinking, only that Derek and I use to hang out in Roger’s Hotel and play video games and pool when weren’t even tall enough to see over the top of the table.

He came back from the pub once and he and Mam had an argument and he shouted and she shouted and he got his brown leather suit case out of the hot press and threw clothes into it and threw some of my things in it too. I don’t know where Derek and Jenny were, but only my stuff went in the suitcase. Mum went off to Granny’s house and Dad said we were going to Dublin. We walked down the town and he used the phone box across from the Sail Inn and called Brendan Daily, Derek’s Godfather. He was suppose to come and meet us and take us to Dublin. But he never came and after standing around the town with the big brown leather suitcase I think Dad got tired and we walked back up the hill. I was sad that we were not going to Dublin, but then I didn't understand what was happening. He called one person, he didn’t come, guess Dad didn’t try very hard and went home.

Memories of him on land are what I really remember. In 1984 he bought himself a box of fish and a rusty old Fiat, with holes in the floor and he went In-Through to begin his Fish-Run. In-Through is an area west of Killybegs and there are loads of arguments about where it begins and where it ends. Depending on who you ask they’ll tell you it starts after the next river or road after their house, nobody ever wants to actually own up to living there.

Well, Dad began to sell his fish door to door, getting up early every morning and not getting home till very late in the evening and had to leave again to go to the eight o’clock auctions down the pier. He was always gutting fish at the kitchen sink and soon we had a phone with the number 31497 and Dad had a business called C-Fish. Granda Sharkey helped him convert one of his sheds into his first miniature fish factory and he employed three men from the Hill: Cyril McBrearty from No. 10 and Nigel and John Joe Dowds who lived next door in No. 15.

The Dowds’ were the best people in the world and always helped us out, especially Mrs. Dowds who felt sorry for Mam, being so young and having so many children and not a clue in the world. She made us buns and cups of tea all the time and when Jenny and I painted our hair with black paint, she put us in the bath and showed Mam how to get it out using margarine. The Dowds’ were from the North and Mrs. Dowds and John Joe spoke with a voice that was different from the people of Killybegs. Her’s was a little musical, a soothing voice you’d want to hear when you were up set. John Joe spoke less than Mrs. Dowds, but when he laughed his whole bald head went red. I’m very thankful for having known their whole family: Carol, Emmet and Nigel were like big brothers and sister to us.

Dad bought a cream colored Toyota Lite-Ace van and his fish-run In-Through was official. I went with him a few times and some of the old ladies gave me a pound or two for myself. Derek went more than I did because he was older and made more money too. Dad collected his earnings in a biscuit tin for coins and a S.M.A. baby formula can for cash. I often wonder if he misses that simple system?

The first nine years of my life are a blurred plethora of images: my first day at school, my first holy communion, first family holiday to Galway, best friends, weekends at my cousin Paddy’s. But I’d like to move on to a time in my life when everything changed, when my entire live shed one existence and began another. I don’t want to focus on those years here, as I’m still digging around in that memory box and find that the short story is the perfect fit for those bursts of memories. That can be another journey we take together some time.

Chapter 1

21 Years in Ireland

by

George Vial

Prologue

Where are you? Are you at the airport, waiting, waiting because there’s something wrong with the wing, they’ve overbooked a flight and there’s a storm coming in, and you’ve got to wait another four hours. Perhaps you’re on a crowded bus in the city and your late for work or leaving two hours after you should have shut down the computer and got back to your family and you’re hurt ‘cause they make such a big deal out of being ten minutes late and never give a damn about the extra hours you give at the end of the day? Then again your bus could be completely empty and you have no schedule and it’s rolling across-country and you want to be at your destination, you want to go places, but you don’t want to travel, you’ve a crick in your neck and you can’t sleep and all you have to keep you company is this stupid book that someone gave you for your birthday, Christmas or an out of the blue gift and said they thought you might like it. Maybe you’re at home and you’ve lost someone close to you, your mother died or your husband of fifteen years left you or you left him and because of that you are somewhere else. Often we find ourselves where we don’t want to be and we wish and wish we could be in that other place, the place where we were last happy and if we could go back there we’d freeze time, we’d make it stop completely and choose to live out those moments as the rest of our lives, ‘cause they’re safe, we know them and we never have to face the bad change. Then again, you could be somewhere I could never imagine and that is fine too, but no matter where you are I ask that you let me come along and I will be company. I will try to make you laugh, make you mad, confuse you, clarify you and when nobody is looking we can cry together.

I’m going to tell you my story, feel free to interrupt me, I’ve been know to talk too much and when we are all done, if you feel like, if you are in the mood, you can tell me your story or we can take another voyage together, we can go to sacred places, places where the wind is silent and natures beautiful colors roar in significance and we lay upon soft ground and feel a faint warmth of a fading sun. Come on, grab your hat, we’re already late to go nowhere.

Chapter 1

Origin of the Species

Before we get too lost in my story let me give you a few basic bites of information that are important to me, think of it as the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to My Life: but you won’t need a towel or a privet bush. It’s just a few bursts of information I feel everybody should know about the little island of Ireland. You see, that’s where I come from and too many people have tried to force this round peg into the shamrock shaped hole. It rubs me the wrong way and I always like to be rubbed the right way. So let me bore you, or thrill you, it’s up to you how you take it, and listen to my rant.

Ireland, the Island of saints and scholars, shamrocks and leprechauns, Guinness and whiskey, a country with thousands of years of history that have all been reduced to a handful of obnoxious stereotypes. When I walk into a bookstore I see shelves stuffed with books on Ireland. They have scenic pictures of green beauty, pubs to visit, songs to sing and histories to read. There are the tales about how poor the Irish are and have nothing to eat but potatoes and dirt. Books that blame the English for all her ills, even after eighty years and more of independence and not a mention of the self-serving crooked Irish politicians that have tried their hardest to choke the life out of the island. Have you ever noticed that if you take a map of England and Ireland and flip it sideways, it looks like a collie dog fucking a terrier? Geographic predestined antagonism between the two islands if you ask me.

Then there is the poetry; modern day Celtic bards, not an original thought in their own heads, but reproductions of a time that is gilded and lost. They are filling away at their own craft making it fit the shamrock shaped hole – cookie cutter literature.

A few years ago I read a book by an Irish author, it was a great book, you’d be hard pushed to find even one of my complaints between the covers. It was a story of ordinary people and the ordinary tragedies that befall us all whether we’re Irish, Norwegian, American, Russian, English or Mexican. In point, it was a universal book, like the poetry of Thomas Kinsella. You read it and realize it could have been penned by anyone from anywhere. Then after putting it down you’re proud that such universality exists and emanates from the little island that is intellectually chained by her clichés.

Rather than complain and moan and talk about it with a pint in my hand (which doesn’t sound half bad), I hope to open up that world to you, if you’ll listen. I want to take the typical Irish poor-mouth, Celtic winged, song singing, happy-beer-drinking-green-leprechaun with his crock of gold story and make it dissolve in the light of reality, but you’ll have to forgive me for putting on the Quiet Man and running around the place like a mad lunatic on March 17^th 1998.

Even if some of the stereotypes appear in these pages, I want you to recognize that they do make up part of the Irish character, but there is far more to the beast. An American is not just a cheeseburger and coke, a Mexican is not just tequila and beans and a German is not just beer and sauerkraut (well, actually…just kidding)! The soul is an individual creature, more than the sum of its parts and should never be taken for granted. As the old Indian said “You cannot know a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins,” or something very close to that.

Now here’s the history lesson and there will be an open book test at the end! The Irish are an amalgamated people, mongrels of the best sort (a cross between a collie and a terrier you might say). A pure Irish person is a myth, a figment of the imagination. The history books tell us since we are an island out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we’ve been subjected to many invasions. The Celts, contrary to popular thought, were one of the late invaders, we’d already been quite shaken up by the time they came along, all manner of Cro-Magnon man and all that. We’ve got monuments older than the Great Pyramids, but it’s hard to get the tourists without the sun and sand – Board Failte (our tourism board) need to get on that a little more – imagine ‘Newgrange: The Egypt of Ireland!’

The Romans touched the island for a brief moment, but decided not to stay. I imagine the day their tour bus came it was a wet and windy, wintry Tuesday afternoon, they took one look around the place: a piss-poor climate with primal men running around in loincloths and decided to leave it alone. If only they’d taken their raincoats with them, the Vatican City might be in Ireland today! At least we’d have given Avignon a run for its money – come on Board Failte get on it – ‘Athlone: The Rome of Ireland!’ Chateauneuf de Pape would have a whole new meaning.

The Vikings planted their seed among the soils of Ireland when they gave us our capital city in 988 AD, adding a little Norse aggression to the blood of the Celtic warrior and setting Dublin up for a great Gaelige Football team; Jason Sherlock pure fucking Viking. However, the mix was not thick enough because around 1171 AD the Normans (soon to be known as the English) arrived by invitation and never left. They turned a little sour under King Henry VIII and his split with Rome (told you we should have had the Vatican). Then we became the famous persecuted Irish. Gaining control again of the island was going to take a very long time.

The Spanish, the good Catholics they are, helped us out with little effect, but added a nice little bit of Mediterranean blood to the race, giving us the Black Irish. Then we went through all the tough years of Penal Law, Emigration and Famine. In the early part of the 19^th Century the population of Ireland sat around 8 million smiling Paddies; then came Pytotopthora the bastard, the catalyst for the potato famine. Bad years such as Black ’47 drove the number down to around two million depressed and bitter souls, fueling generations of poets, novelists and musicians with-hard-done-by inspiration, the kind of inspiration you just can’t receive from magnetic poetry. Finally in the 1920’s we gained something that looked like independence. The Irish Free State was created, minus six counties in the North of the island up in Ulster. Counties Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan escaped the annexation, retaining a little of Ulster for the Irish and that was the beginning of a whole bunch of new troubles.

In 1959 a New Zealander by the name of Dr. Vivian Vial came to rest on the shores of Ireland. His invasion went pretty much unnoticed by the general population. Only the few folks in the Department of Agriculture who hired him to teach genetics to the church-made-stupid scientists of Ireland noticed him come quietly in.

His expedition to Ireland came via British Honduras in Central America, where his first son Bill was born and Northumberland in England, where my Dad, Charlie was born in 1956. Along with his wife Nessie, they settled in Blackrock, an emerging suburb on the South Side of Dublin. Then a daughter, Jane, was born completing one of Ireland’s newest families.

All seemed to be going well, until Vivian remembered he didn’t come alone to Ireland and he actually had a family. Ten years or so had passed by this time and a divorce through the bottom of a beer glass made my Grandparents very bitter towards each other. Charlie, after a very rebellious teenage life went north to Greencastle in County Donegal to become a fisherman, when he was only sixteen. Bill followed him soon and Nessie and Jane went back to New Zealand. Granda stayed on in Dublin and began his new career drinking for Ireland.

In Greencastle there’s a fisheries school where Charlie learned his trade and earned his Skipper’s Ticket. The course involved spending a lot of time in Killybegs in the south of Donegal. Killybegs at the time was emerging as Ireland’s premier fishing port, but it was here Dad learned to drink like a man and met my mother Noelle Sharkey.

She was the daughter of Peggy and Paddy Sharkey, relative new comers to Donegal, having grown up in Cavan and Louth respectively. There were seven children in the Sharkey clan and Noelle was the third youngest and a dreamer like her father.

The Sharkeys stood out from the rest of the Killybegs locals for a few reasons. Paddy was a self employed inventor with the look of a mad scientist, a shock of white hair, stained yellow from cigarette smoke sweeping across his face as he worked on electric-fish-catchers in his work shop out the back of the house. Peggy, Mrs. Sharkey or Granny Sharkey as most people knew her, was the matriarch of the family and a noted figure in the community of Killybegs. Her garden was the envy of the town, a place filled with fruit trees and flowers, natural rock birdbaths and nests. It was a little paradise and people complained when she wouldn’t give up ten feet at the end of it to make way for a wider road. She loved her garden and many of my memories of her are of her sitting out there feeding the birds and pulling weeds, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.

They also had a black child, Kevin, adopted as a baby and reared as one of the family. Due to the cool climate in Donegal, Ireland’s not that far from the Iceland on the scale of things, it is racially one of the whitest places on earth and their adopted son really set the Sharkeys apart from the crowd of sallow skinned red and brown headed families, Kevin would be of the later type of Black Irish. They were the kind of family that when dinner conversation ran out in other homes, they could always turn to the Sharkeys for good gossip and pass their mealtime without having to look at themselves.

It was Paddy who met Dad first. He literally found Charlie down the town in a pub and brought him home to get something to eat. My mother instantly fell in love with him, even though she was only thirteen and he three years her senior. At first he didn’t notice her, because she had many older and just as beautiful sisters, but by 1976 there had been courtship and a pregnancy and in June of that year they were married in St. Mary’s church, The Chapel.

There had been some argument about the wedding between Granny and the Church. The two of them being so young, the state of the bride and the fact that Charlie was a Protestant and Noelle and the rest of Killybegs were Catholic. Peggy would have none of it and caused such a ruckus that the Parish Priest could do nothing for fear of her and they were married in the main church and not in the vestry. However the bride wasn’t allowed to wear white and my mother was married in a primrose colored dress.

My brother Derek was born on the 20^th of October 1976, the first of a new generation on the island: half-New Zealander and half-Irish. He had dark hair like both the parents but like Dad he had the dark Spanish skin of his Vial heritage. The Vials were from the Basque region in Spain. Miners by trade that went to Cornwall to take part in the tin mining and when Her Majesty’s Empire ear marked New Zealand for colonization and found Gold, they went there to try their luck at a potentially prosperous style of mining. The gold was scarce and they became sheep farmers. My Great Grandfather became the head of the largest meat factory in New Zealand turning over $35 million a year, that’s a lot of lambs to the slaughter.

A year later I was born on the 29^th of December 1977, four days after my Mother’s eighteenth birthday. I was a small baby, not a full six pounds, if I had been a salmon I’d have been thrown back. My uncle bill remembers driving over to Letterkenny in the snow to pick me up in an old Volkswagen Beatle, I however have no recollection of the event. I was Christened Charles George Vial after my Dad, but very soon Charlie George was dropped down to just George to avoid confusion.

It’s bad enough growing up in a small Irish catholic town with a Spanish surname, but a first name like George, takes the biscuit. It’s not very Irish, in fact it’s totally English and I had the piss taken out of me all the time when I was in school… “Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie…” You would think I’d have been given a name like Patrick, Michael, Seamus, Mathew, Mark, Luke or John, at least a name that sounded like an apostle or saint, anything but Charles George. The namesake of an English King, actually two lines of Kings! It must have been a subconscious compromise between my parents, since I was raised Catholic and only had to bear the burden of a Protestant name.

When I was five or six I was so upset about my name, the older boys kept making fun of me, that I ran into the kitchen crying and asked Mam why couldn’t she have called me Peter or Patrick. So she picked me up, leaned me over the sink, splashed some water on my head and re-christened me Patrick Vial. It didn’t stick though, and an hour later I was still Charles George Vial as it said on my silver christening mug.

Off all the counties in Ireland, Donegal is the most remote. Not just because it’s geographically the most northern part of the island and almost as close to Iceland as it is to Cork. But because it’s bordered by Northern Ireland for the most part and only connected to the rest of Ireland by the few miles of Leitrim it touches. A local band, The Goats Don’t Shave, once sang a song saying that they “Should build a wall around Donegal and legalize ‘em all, Las Vegas in the Hills of Donegal.” The wall is already there psychologically and that is what makes Donegal such a great place. We talk like Northerners, but we’re Southern Irish: We live in the North of Ireland, but we’re not Northern Irish. We’re fecked up that’s what we are.

Well anyway, Killybegs is in Donegal and that is where I grew up. As I said Killybegs is Ireland’s biggest fishing port and is of great importance to the rest of Ireland and Europe for that fact alone. Killybegs is a very deep harbor and many foreign freighters land in there because there is nowhere else in Ireland fit enough to birth them. All this coming and going of foreigners gives a very international air to life in Killybegs. A young Irish lad growing up in the midlands might meet a few tourists here and there and maybe even go on a foreign holiday themselves, but besides that they live in a very Irish world. In Killybegs the young folks get used to sharing their space with Spaniards, Frenchmen, Nigerians, and many, many other nationalities. A Nigerian boat broke down in the harbor in the late eighties and a couple of hundred men from that country had to near enough seek political asylum in Killybegs for over a year and a half. They added a great bit of color to the life around the town in more ways than one and even helped the local soccer team get a bit of skill.

Besides all that, Killybegs is a beautiful place. It sits under the Caledonian fold mountain of Conerad and from the water it appears as if the mountain itself rises almost vertically up out of the sea like a Norwegian Fjord. The bay itself is well sheltered with St. John’s Point on one side, stretching six brave miles out into the Atlantic Ocean and the Donegal coastline on the other side offering a little protection from natures worst advances.

The area is littered with beaches and coves for many miles, but none surpasses the beauty of Fintra beach. Of all the golden stretches of sand I’ve seen in the world, there has never come one to equal her. Perhaps I am biased, but if you are ever there on a warm day in July or any other day of the year, go and visit it and make your own decision. The hinterland of Killybegs is rough and rugged, but an abundance of rivers, lakes and forestry make up in beauty what it looses in practical matters as far as land is concerned. If you want a flat piece of ground, you have to make it yourself. John B. Kean could have written many sequels using Donegal if he was so inclined.

Killybegs is a four-hour drive from Dublin (depending how fast you drive), but only a thirty-minute drive from Slieve League, the highest sea cliffs in all of Europe. They drop 1972 feet straight down into the Atlantic and every year some brave German or Australian tries to scale it without a rope or harness and a few hours later the cliff and rescue service is scooping their remains out of the water with a bucket. They are one of the most beautiful sights you’ll ever see. Everyone goes on and on about the Cliff’s of Moher down in County Clare, but they’ve got nothing on Slieve League.

Killybegs, Na Cealla Beaga the Irish name for the town means “The Little Cells,” a name earned from the beehive cells used by the monks who were the first to settle there, the monks knew what they were doing when they chose the well sheltered bay. Killybegs is a little bit of paradise, as long as you’re not passing the fishmeal plant at low tide. Killybegs has a smell all to itself and the locals learn to live with it, ‘cause they tell themselves “It’s the smell of money.” That may be true for a few in the town, but not for the majority who toil all year round in the factories and boats, loosing limbs and lives for a dream that often never comes. I heard a statistic once that Killybegs had more millionaires per head of population than anywhere else in the country and the town was nicknamed the home of the “Mackerel Millionaires,” in the 80’s. You’re as likely to see a brand new BMW parked beside a 1983 Ford Escort with a bail of hay in the back seat and a collie dog in the front seat, eyeing up a terrier tied up outside a local pub.

If you are up on a hill, looking down over the town at night, it appears small and insignificant to the expanse of the ocean around it. Then you look further across the bay and you can see the town of Bundoran, twinkling like fairy lights and you are reminded that the whole of mankind is insignificant to the awesome size and power of nature and we are all merely here at her discretion. For this you must offer her respect and even though the people of Killybegs make their livelihood from her sea – they do not own it – they are merely tenant farmers on the oceans of the world.