Lara Marlowetalks to Dr Mike McCarthy, who left his GP practice in Ireland for a lifelong adventure in Georgia
A JOB advertisement in the Irish Medical Timestransformed Mike McCarthy into Maikal Makart (the name on his driver's licence), pillar of the Irish community in Tbilisi, doctor, businessman, jack-of-all-trades and Georgian patriot.
McCarthy was growing bored with his medical practice in Cork when he saw the ad in 1997 for someone with experience of medicine and the petroleum industry to oversee healthcare for construction workers on British Petroleum's Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. McCarthy had worked two summers on North Sea oil rigs, and was a qualified GP and emergency physician.
Before long, McCarthy had arrived in Supsa, a hot, mosquito-ridden village in a wine-growing area 20km from the Black Sea port of Poti. He had to throw farm animals out of the cottage reserved for him.
"Georgia was the wild west then, run by the Mafia," he recalls. "Every day there were shootings. You couldn't buy a Mercedes or BMW that wasn't stolen."
Though not an unconditional supporter of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, McCarthy credits him with stemming corruption.
McCarthy, who grew up in New York and Kerry, found Georgia "very like Ireland in the 1950s, except that in Kerry they would bring you in for tea. Here they bring you in for wine, masses of drink. I developed a very insular but enjoyable existence with expats. Every evening we'd go out for a walk. The neighbours made you eat and drink to within an inch of your life."
McCarthy loves Georgia's warm, hospitable people, but is frustrated by the lack of time-keeping, scheduling and forward planning. "When I first came here, there was no such thing as an indigenous work force. They ran restaurants and music halls for Russians."
Today's Georgia needs a Fás-type job training programme to develop blue-collar skills, McCarthy says. "Everyone is a doctor or lawyer. No one can do wiring or repair buildings and streets. They have to bring in Turkish subcontractors. There's no manufacturing, except wine."
The Georgians "share certain traits" with the Irish, McCarthy says. "Short tempers, drinking too much, singing and dancing, overeating, stubbornness, fighting a lot. We Irish don't know what we want, but we'll fight anyone to get it, just like the Georgians. Most of the uprisings here are not serious; lots of bravado and they all get drunk and then they all kiss each other and wake up angry the next morning because they have a bad head. They have Mediterranean characteristics."
On the job at BP, McCarthy met Nino, the daughter of refugees from the 1993 Abkhazian war. Their romance was complicated by the "Soviet mentality" of the time. "There was huge animosity towards foreigners, who were earning $500 or $600 a day, while the locals were paid $5 or $6. Georgians were very traditional, and most marriages were arranged by matchmakers. I had to ask permission to marry her."
Converting to Orthodox Christianity was part of the bargain. "There's no fundamental difference with Catholicism, except that it's much stricter," he says. It can be hard to follow McCarthy's machine-gun speed mumble, but I gather the conversion involved snow, Baptism, climbing a mountain and a very long Mass.
Today, Mike and Nino McCarthy are sheltering eight of her relatives, and are trying to rescue her father from Russian-occupied Poti. McCarthy has ordered a flak jacket and intends to drive to Poti to fetch him if need be. The couple's seven-year-old son Mike will attend school in Cork for a second year, and their first daughter will be born in Ireland in October.
Though he'll visit his family in Cork, McCarthy has no intention of leaving Tbilisi, where he owns a clinic, a shop selling first-aid and construction safety equipment, and a support services group that uses Georgian subcontractors to complete turnkey projects for foreign investors. He counts foreign embassies, NGOs and luxury hotels among his clients.
McCarthy declined the post of Ireland's honorary consul on the grounds he refuses to wear a suit and tie and hates cocktail receptions. Instead, he has a collection of Hawaiian shirts, shorts and mountain boots, and hangs out in the bar of Betsey's Hotel or The Hangar. He's annoyed with his military observer buddies who hightailed it out of Georgia the moment hostilities started.
McCarthy organised the evacuation of 56 Irish passport-holders from Tbilisi when the war started. He's dispatched his ambulances and the doctors he employs to refugee camps, and awaits a reply to his offer to help the Department of Foreign Affairs channel Irish aid to Georgia. "What do you expect when a Kerryman contacts a Corkman in All-Ireland finals month?" he asks.
At the beginning of the war, McCarthy says he was "stunned by the difference between EU and US rhetoric over the last three years and the action taken. They all talked a great talk but, when the chips were down, for five or six days there was a conspicuous lack of assistance or support, vocal or otherwise."
Though he feels the West has since rallied to Georgia's cause, he resented George Bush's chumminess with Vladimir Putin in Beijing, and Nato "hanging Georgia out in front of Russian forces with no backing or recourse".
Flying in the face of dire predictions for the future of Georgia, McCarthy believes adversity will make his adopted country stronger. "The spotlight has rested on them. They're going to benefit from their stance," he says. No matter what happens, he adds, "I plan to have a presence in Georgia, even if it's just a dachaon the west coast."