A beer, a barbie and a song to bring you home

It may seem like we buried our souls in the boom, but there’s nothing like music and a chargrilled steak to reconnect with the soil

IT’S BARBECUE time again. We lit the first one on Saturday evening, under the chestnut trees. The horses watched us from the field where the barley was harvested last summer.

After the barley was gone, the pigeons feasted on the roadside for a few days, from what spilled off the trucks, and the barley fermented in their gullets and made them drunk, so they couldn’t fly home and a lot of them met their deaths under the wheels of oncoming traffic.

The barbecue began with traditional music: two musicians sipped beer before they started to play, an unshaven man with a cap and an accordion, and a fiddle player, tall and dark, with joined eyebrows. They smoked leisurely, and discussed what age Mrs Hughes was when she died last week.

“I think she was near 90,” the old man said.

Bridie Hughes played accordion in the Dinny Hughes Band many years ago. In the early days she and Dinny cycled to the venues, he on the saddle and Mrs Hughes, sometimes pregnant, on the carrier seat, with an accordion strapped on her back.

“She was playing the piano in the house up until a few weeks ago,” one of them said.

“She was fond of the bingo too,” the other one added.

Then they went over to the patio and started tuning up, and everyone gathered around the smoke and plucked sausages from the grill. There were fillets of steak for the important people and slices of shark for the vegetarian nurse, and the teenagers took the burgers, and everyone spilled salad dressing on their skirts and frocks and blouses and pants.

“Where are you from?” the fiddler asked me.

“Arigna,” I said. “But I was born in Cavan. In truth I don’t know where I’m from. I am reasonably at home in Mullingar.”

“Arigna,” the old musician said, “is a lovely spot for the music. Isn’t O’Carolan buried somewhere up there?”

“He lies in Ballyfarnon,” I said, “beside the lake.”

When O’Carolan was dying he made a final journey around the places he loved, calling at some of the houses he had filled with music over the years. At last he came to Mrs McDermottroe’s door, in Ballyfarnon.

“I have come home to die,” he declared.

McDermottroe had cherished him as a child, and he now returned like a salmon, just in time to compose A Farewell To Music, and be buried in the land he loved. He wasn't the only artist who loved the place he was born. Liam O'Flaherty returned to Aran as an old man and kicked a big rock, and said "Athniom thú", an Irish phrase that singularly expresses the mindfulness of one person towards another person; he was addressing the Earth as a soul friend.

For the first few years in Westmeath I felt displaced. In comparison to the wounded hills of Leitrim, the streets of Mullingar seemed unnaturally jolly, and closer to Krakow than ancient Ireland. But after four years here I can feel the lovely tug of the island's umbilical chord, when I walk up the hill of Uisneach, or listen for ghosts whispering in the sound of named land: Kilbeggan, Kinnegad, Ballynacarrigy. Those villages may be unimportant in the great sweep of history, but as places to call home they are no less beautiful than anywhere on earth. The great novelist Kazanstakis was born in a village in Crete, where he played under the olive trees and watched cherries burst with juice in dark wooden buckets of brown water. And when he left home he carried a handful of clay in his pocket, just like the Irish carry The Old Bog Roadand other songs in their heads, to the ends of the earth.

I worry sometimes that Ireland may have buried its soul on the day a motorway was laid in cement through the hills of Tara, and certainly some villages in Westmeath were almost buried in cement during the boom.

But the young people at the barbecue didn’t care about Tara, or cement, or new houses; they did a lot of hugging and kissing, because a few of them were heading for Australia on the morrow.

As the evening closed in, the old people dissolved into shadows, the musicians put away their instruments, and the young ones on the patio set up amplifiers and monitors, and got ready to dance the night away, one last time.