An Irishman's Diary

DOWN in darkest Tipperary last week to visit the in-laws, I had the interesting experience of attending a firewood auction. It was part of an annual parish sale-of-work. And what was impressive about the event was not just the 70 or more trailerfuls of chopped wood that had been donated by the landowners of a small village community, but the fact that they had a professional auctioneer out from town to sell them.

It was a while since I’d heard the machine-gun patter of a country auctioneer at work and it brought me back to the sales-yards of my childhood (no, since you ask, my childhood wasn’t sold there – it was mostly cattle). Then I used to wonder how anyone could talk so fast. Now, studying the technique anew, I realised that there was less being said than it appears.

The auctioneer’s trick, basically, is to repeat two figures over and over: the one he’s just secured and the one he’s aiming for next – “Eighty I’m bid 80 do I hear 90 who’ll gimme 90?” – while giving the impression that he’s cramming other information in between.

Also important is that he must never dwell on the lower figure a split second longer than necessary. Once 90 is bid, the 80 must be dropped immediately, if not sooner, banished like the insult it was, and never spoken of again, as the focus shifts to the search for a hundred.

You can probably flesh the patter out a bit more with livestock. But there’s not a lot you can do with wood. The merchandise in Tipperary was all much of a muchness (I’m guessing none of it was ash, which especially in hurling country, would be too valuable to burn). So the only variation was the size of the trailers, some of which – in the famous estate agent phrase – may have been “deceptively spacious”.

In any case, the point of the patter is to hypnotise would-be buyers, or at least draw them into an atmosphere of urgency, in which bargains seem to be slipping through their hands if they don’t act quickly. It must have worked in Tipperary because all the lots sold, in quick time, for prices up to €300.

Maybe nobody was hypnotised, exactly. But I noticed that a repeat bidder dropping out of a race would often do so by ending eye contact with the auctioneer. First there would be a shake of the head, then the gaze would be averted downwards, as if to break the spell.

When and where the technique originated is an apparent mystery. Googling the question, I found it was raised only last year in the US online magazine Slate, after another kind of fire-sale: the one in New York where “jewelry, shoes and other possessions” owned by disgraced financier Bernie Madoff were auctioned off at “tongue-twisting speed”.

Slate concluded that the origins of auctioneering fast-speak unknown, although not before declaring erroneously that the technique was “uniquely American”. The writer’s point seemed to be that it wasn’t used in Britain, at least, which may be true.

Certainly I’ve heard of English people visiting horse-sales here and lamenting that they have to contend not just with rapidly-speaking auctioneers but with a different dialect wherein, for example, a horse’s ability to jump “ditches” means something very different from home.

The American consensus is that bidding chant became popular around the time of that country’s civil war, when military auctions of seized goods were common. A rival, or complementary, explanation from the same era is that it originated in the tobacco-leaf auctions of Virginia, before spreading north.

And it’s entirely possible that Americans invented it all by themselves. But if it did go US-wide during the 1860s, there must be grounds for suspicion that it had crossed the Atlantic with the estimated 200,000 people of Irish birth who, as mentioned here last week, took part in that war, and some whose famously loquacious relatives are still using the technique back here, whatever Slate magazine thinks.

MOVING FROMTipperary to the other end of the Shannon basin, in conclusion, I received an e-mail from Cavan recently concerning the name of a local nursing home. It was in the context of our occasional discussions about "nominative determinism": the phenomenon of people having apt (or in some cases very inapt) names. Digressing from which, slightly, a reader inquired if I had heard a Cavan nursing home called the "Omega".

No I hadn’t. But there really is such a place, it seems. And I share my correspondent’s opinion that, if you had to name your nursing home after part of the Greek alphabet, the last letter is hardly the most sensitive choice. Of course, maybe Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta were all taken. I don’t know.

It could be worse. Speaking of things Hellenic, I also learned recently that the Greek air force academy, where all military pilots and engineers train, is officially known as the “Icarus School”. And you can see the logic, in that Icarus was a pioneer of air travel. In his ambition to go as high as possible, he just made a grievous technical error, which is the sort of thing that flying academies learn from and avoid repeating. But even so. You wouldn’t name a commercial airline after him.