There is a scene at the end of Scorsese’s Goodfellas in which Ray Liotta’s character, Henry Hill, an Irish hood mixed up with the Italian mob, is sure that he is being followed by helicopters. He is coked up to the eyeballs on his own drugs by this stage, as paranoid as a Nordie nationalist, and suspects that something is up, that the authorities are out to get him. (Spoiler alert, they are.)
This writer has begun to experience a similar sensation over the the last few months watching hotels that I stayed in being used for asylum seekers/refugees or new direct provision centres being established in areas which this writer knows well.
Bits and pieces keep popping up in the online news, like Newbridge, Co Kildare, where my paternal great grandfather was born and had to leave to find work in Donegal in the late 1880s.
There was another one concerning Loch an Iúir which I knew well and worked in fadó fadó. Loch an Iúir’s biggest claim to fame is that it is where Niall Ó Dónaill, he of dictionary fame, was born. It is not a big place and, apart from the summer college, did not have many facilities when I was there.
If you did not live in Loch an Iúir, you probably just passed through it on the way to Dungloe or Letterkenny. To say it was surprising to hear that this small, tiny out of the way place, was hosting refugees would be an understatement.
Gaoth Dobhair’s Seaview Hotel/Radharc na Mara, featured in Matt Treacy’s work on this site, was also a familiar haunt. It was always good for a feed and a chat. I was a regular visitor and always enjoyed getting a chance to practise my Irish with whatever poor local had to put up with me. The area’s second hotel, Óstán Ghaoth Dobhair, had the only swimming pool in the area but, again, it was a nice place for a drink and a chat long into the evening.
The loss of both hotels was undoubtedly a blow to the area. There is not a lot to do in Gaoth Dobhair if you are not interested in golf or the beach – and that depends on the weather – or drinking. What always struck me about both places were the number of local students who put in long hours to earn some money for uni or emigration, which ever came first.
When I first started going to the Gaeltacht regularly, back in the mid-1980s, many of the local Gaeltacht men were away building the Channel Tunnel and, listening to the locals, enduring living and working conditions that would make a saint faint. But they went because, well, that is what Donegal men are programmed to do.
That, of course, had a knock-on effect on the local women who, without sounding melodramatic, always struck me as being very, very independently minded and capable; not bolshie but not the sort to suffer b.s. either. I am, of course, writing in the context of those I met in Gaeltacht areas, who knew the hardship of raising a family, with little income and for long periods of time, effectively on their own. This is, of course, within living memory and not some sad story from the 1920s or 1930s.
Oh look, another place I knew well – Arklow – has now popped up with a proposed direct provision centre, though those plans seemed to have been withdrawn at the time of writing. Yes, I know Arklow and its surrounds well. My parents found a house to rent a few miles outside of the town back in the mid-1970s and we went back year after year. Those were the days when you went from Belfast to Newry to Dundalk to Drogheda to Swords to Dublin and through the concrete jungle out south towards Wicklow, those bad roads about which John Waters has written so eloquently in his book.
I have been to Mass in Rathdrum, walked around Avondale more times than I want to recall, been to Avoca, Glendalough, Courtown for the amusements, Brittas Bay if it was warm, Enniscorthy on really, really wet days for a really, really long drive and Arklow for the pictures. I saw the original Mad Max, a baby-faced Mel Gibson, in the town’s old cinema at the top of the street, bought books in one of the shops at the bottom of the street and found out that what we in Belfast knew as a “hamburger” was, in fact, a “bunburger” in Arklow: “You have to ask for the bun.”
It was not well developed then, even to someone who was coming from working-class Belfast. But it was peaceful and had no trace of the far-left, you know the sort who were around then, the ones who blew up and shot people for having the wrong political opinions.
I have been back, more than once, with my own family since. This time, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Batman in the new cinema, in the new millenium, situated in the swanky shopping centre. We stayed locally and did the same things that my parents did with us – and yes, that did include a visit to Avondale.
Much like Donegal, it struck me that the good people in Arklow and its hinterland, had been doing exactly the same as the good people in Donegal in the intervening decades, trying to make a living with what little their locales had to offer, surviving despite of the government and not because of it.
The town had not changed much to this casual visitor’s eye; the main street seemed more rundown but that often seems to be the effect a shopping centre has on old traditional commercial areas. I am sure there were other changes but it had certainly not become Monaco cois Mara.
Yes, of course, these are observations, little glances of areas that a casual visitor notes on passing through. I remember Donegal when you would have found it difficult to get a bag of chips on a Friday night. That is not as much a problem now. But work? I don’t see any great sign that there has been a tech bounce for Donegal or, indeed, Arklow.
They are still more the vale of tears than Silicon Valley with the same pram-pushing, anorak-wearing people wondering what is going to happen to them, what the future might bring. Concern, worry, fear, seem to be what is bringing people onto the streets now to protest, not hate.
Indeed, given that there has been so little substantial development in so many areas over the years to ensure that the locals and their off-spring can flourish, can you blame them for being concerned? They have bills to pay and families to raise. It is very clear by this stage that if you live west of the modern moat that is the M50 and are not on a retainer to the lords within the New Pale that you are simply regarded as wood-kerne.
And the D hotel in Drogheda is now gone for public use and is to be repurposed? Yeah, saved up to stay there with the children for a couple of nights as we wanted to show them the town where their maternal grandmother – ar dheis Dé go raibh sí – spent her formative years, and to visit Newgrange: older than the Great Pyramids of Giza and easier to find.
It is that odd sense of intimate – a family connection – and ancient – Oghma before Instagram – that knits the Irish tourist to his own country, isn’t it? You go back to the places where your folks hail from or where your parents took you, a distant county often seeming like a trip to the moon, and you visit areas which are beautiful to look at and that stir your soul a little.
Of course, you pick up memories and spend a bit of money doing it; Irish people giving their wages back to Irish people for a hamburger, sorry, bunburger, or picking up little knick-knacks from the gift shop or one of those little paintings that you find on sale from artists by the roadside. These artefacts build up like cultural sediment on the shelves at home, little pieces all curated with the same care as something in the Guggenheim and all with a story: “I got that in…”
A direct provision centre may not be the only significant change in an area but it is going to be a very significant one and, once there, how long will it be in operation for?
Mosney in Meath must be the grandfather of all these centres by this stage; a former holiday camp that was one of the first to pivot from attracting Irish-paying guests to having the guests paid for by the Irish. It became a refuge back in the year 2000. If you have an empty hotel now, why bother putting up with the worry of high season and low season when you know the State will pay you day and daily for your property, perhaps even for a quarter century?
Why mention it all? I holidayed there as a child when it was Butlin’s Mosney, way back in the 1970s. It was certainly quieter than Belfast but we had to go back after our fortnight.
Helicopters! I hear helicopters!