Galway businessmen came to the capital this week to discuss the benefits of oysters. "He finds them easier to swallow than the Viagra tablets," joked Oranmore Lodge Hotel owner Brian O'Higgins, pointing with mischief to his friend, property developer Michael Craughwell.
The virility-enhancing qualities of the Galway Bay mollusc "is not a myth", said Peter Allen, a solicitor and chairman of the 49th Galway International Oyster Festival. "They are very high in zinc," he said earnestly, adding: "but it only works on the men . . . still, we are experimenting every year."
The all-male management committee of the festival, under the control of festival administrator Ann Flanagan, gathered in O'Donoghue's Pub, on Dublin's Merrion Row, to sound the official start to the oyster season and invite us all to Galway for this year's festival.
Trays upon trays of our native European flat oyster (Oestra Edulis) were flown up specially for the party on Monday.
Photographers wanted a shot of "Ken and the Pearl": snooker player Ken Doherty, just back from Thailand where he won the European Asian Challenge, will be the festival's guest of honour while Tara Tyson, a student at NUI Galway, is the reigning Oyster Pearl. And so Ken and the Pearl obligingly posed over a barrel of oysters.
This year's pearls in waiting include Sinéad Ryan, Niamh O'Flaherty, Loretta Ní Ghabháin and Pauline McNamara.
Publican John Rabbitt, another committee member from Galway, says the festival, which runs from Friday, September 26th to Sunday the 28th, attracts 10,000 each year to the city. Committee member, Tom McCarthy, a retired hotelier, has spent 49 years eating oysters, he says. Only Tommy O'Neill, of Dublin's Lord Edward Restaurant, a champion oyster opener able to open 15 a minute, declined to taste the little fleshy oysters. "I don't eat them at all," he said looking briefly at the glistening grey meat.