Golden Age passes as Cavan man denied Áras

Cavan civilization had enjoyed two great peaks; the All-Ireland final victory over Kerry in 1947, and the arrival of the All-Ireland Fleadh in August of last year

I KNOW THAT duck shooting, and pheasant shooting, and even pigeon shooting are common entertainments in rural Ireland, but in Leitrim last week, I was alarmed to see several signs that said, “No Tourist Shooting,” so I mentioned it to a man at the bar in Ballinamore.

“Am I to suppose,” I wondered, “that this is not the season for shooting tourists?” He said, “You’re a quare smart alec. You’re deliberately misreading the sign. It’s easy knowing you’re from Cavan.” In the old days, to be accused of being from Cavan was a shaming put down; but not anymore. Cavan has risen to take her place among the great nations. The turning point came when the county town hosted the All-Ireland Fleadh for the first time in 2010. Just as China has enjoyed two great peaks in it’s history, the period of the Tang Dynasty, and the post-Mao period, so too Cavan civilization has enjoyed two great peaks; the first being the day of the All-Ireland final in 1947 when the county played Kerry and won, and the second being the arrival of the All-Ireland Fleadh to the town in August of last year. The days of hiding behind the door while comedians made jokes about Cavan were over.

I remember being ashamed as a child, every time a funny man appeared on the Late Late Showwith anecdotes about ignorant Cavan farmers who would whip the smile off a horny bull's a*** by strapping him to a plough. The punch line – "I'll teach you that there's more to life than romance," – invariably delivered in an exaggerated Cavan accent, would draw peals of laughter. A friend from London who was with me at a show one night in a hotel where the same funny man was doing a gig, remarked that if Cavan people were an ethnic group in England they might have a case against the comedian under the Race Relations Act.

Nowadays, Cavan people feel good about themselves. And I suspect that last week there were probably a few who thought that the sense of wellbeing in the county would be crowned by having a Cavan man in the Áras. A young man, a smooth man, and a Ballyhaise man who learned his Latin as a student from the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh himself. The hopes were high, but alas, it was not to be.

“Are you disappointed?” the Leitrim man at the bar asked. “Of course not,” I said, “I’m a Higgins man to the backbone.” We sipped our pints in silence and listened to the clock. “You’re very glum,” he said. “The old black dog of depression still follows me around,” I explained.

Although Dracula might be a better metaphor for the unbearable sadness that still attends me; a phantom that sucks the energy out of my veins. And even when his teeth are no longer stuck in my neck, he remains behind the curtains. And sometimes he’s not even in the room, but I know he’s outside the house looking in.” And the solution is neither to drive a stake through his heart, nor to surrender to his embrace, but simply to acknowledge he’s there, to make friends with him. When I was a child Dracula fascinated me. I read horror comics, and nothing excited me more than an evening in the musty Magnet Cinema, with the Prince of Darkness.

Clearly I was a disturbed child, which is perhaps why I sometimes hid under the stairs and whispered words into the darkness to comfort myself. Words felt strangely pleasant when uttered in solitude; a sensuality beyond the body, at a time when the body was numb from incessant scourging with canes; a not uncommon excruciation inflicted on children, in the long ago, by those magnificent clerics in their swishing soutanes. But those days too are gone, and the splendour of Cavan civilization can be seen in the many palatial houses built in the past decade, and if a Cavan man had reached the Áras it might just have triggered a Golden Age in the county.

A week before Polling Day the renowned social philosopher Eamon Dunphy suggested, in his usual hyperbolical fashion, that the election of Gallagher might prefigure the end of Democracy, which didn’t impress the people around Ballyhaise, but as they say in Beijing, Democracy was never quite the be-all and end-all of anything.