To travel the highway west to Galway over an Easter weekend is to experience O'Connell Street on a wet Friday before Christmas, but stretching right across the State. The quickest way by car to Connemara at this of year is to walk over the boots, roofs and bumpers of the vehicles which lie in one great slumbering line connecting coast with coast, hearing from within each the din of family-murder being done, and the last choking gasps of warring children as parents can endure them no longer.
At this time of year, many remember the lines:
McDonagh and MacBride,
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born.
Were Yeats alive today he would unquestionably be solemnly intoning,
Kinnegad and Enfield,
And Tyrrelspass and Moate,
Now and in time to be
Wherever cars may stall,
Are changed, changed utterly,
A dire traffic jam is all.
Kilbeggan stopover
Actually, I got out of my car near Kilbeggan to stretch my legs, and fell into a conversation with a local woman. We had something to eat, and a drink or two, and one thing led to another, and within no time at all she was pregnant. I stayed around for the birth - twins as it happened, one named Con and the other Gestion. But the mother is an independent creature, preferring to raise the children by herself, and so after I sorted out a few legal matters, I returned to my car, which had remained in exactly the same place within the traffic jam that it had been in when I left it.
How fondly I recall inching westward through Ballinasloe, Loughrea and Craughwell before reaching the many, many roundabouts which Galway's splendid road engineers have constructed as their contribution to our national effort to make Ireland become roundabout capital of the world. And though it was a title we probably won long ago, this is unlikely to prevent our engineers indulging their viavorticular passions until every road in Ireland looks like a set of rosary beads.
I never enter Connemara without feeling that it a vast Einsteinian experiment in relativity. Look at it on any map. It's tiny, the size of Tallaght. Yet the moment you pass Oughterard, you pass through portals which open onto a vast mountain range that reaches to the end of the world, loughs and cliffs and soaring peaks suddenly enfolding you, so that after only a few yards, you look back, and an entire set of Himalayas has stealthily slunk in behind you.
All the weathers that God devised for the entire planet over the course of an entire year gather within Connemara simultaneously - snow flurries, rainbows, bright sunshine, dark brooding clouds, mist, heavy downpours. It is like a meteorological catwalk in which the designer-deity, rather vulgarly (some might think) exhibits all his wares simultaneously.
Seven hours later
And finally to Letterfrack, and my, how impressively, in under seven hours - about as the same as the journey-time to Los Angeles. There's probably just about as much madness in both places: I never enter north Connemara without sensing some insane revelry is about to engulf me. For it is the region of Puck, a year-long midsummer night's dream, where merely to sip a drink is to fall instantly under the whimsical rule of Titania and Oberon, and where, in keeping with Einstein's laws, time and space have no meaning.
But first to the splendid Ellis Tate Centre for the Arts, where the young artists, Mark Whelehan and Alice Coyle are exhibiting. It is enormously heartening to see such vigorous talent, such artistic integrity, and such technical skill in two young artists, who have managed to survive the banality, indiscipline and wastefulness of so much that passes for art these days. Perhaps it helped that Mark, a sculptor of enormous skill and sensitivity, was not trained at art college, but in UCD, independently by Conor Fallon and Patrick O'Reilly, and in a French foundry.
His co-exhibitor, Alice Coyle, I have known just about all her dangerous young life. Though only 22, she is a wonderful artist, and fame is her certain portion. But I should add a health warning: she parties like a true member of the Coyle family, through the night and into the next day, glowing inextinguishably like some rare nuclear mineral, energy abundant and every bit as lethal. My most earnest suggestion is that if you are ever invited to a Coyle party - and not just by Alice, but any member of that most sinister of tribes - prepare yourself for the ambush that awaits you by sleeping for a week beforehand, and take lots of vitamin B and C capsules and a spare liver or two with you.
Chances of survival
I cannot guarantee your survival, but such rudimentary precautions might just increase your chances of seeing a reasonable old age. Long before the end of any Coyle party, just before the onset of unconsciousness, undertakers circulate, distributing their cards, and discretely assuring one of the earnestness of their intentions. (Does sir prefer mahogany or oak? Though perhaps sir might find the inlaid beechwood - brass fittings, naturally, a lovely satin cushion, very tasteful on which to raise sir's lolling head - more to sir's taste?) They are seldom disappointed: indeed the jam of hearses leaving a Coyle party, with chortling undertakers slapping their thighs in glee, can be every bit as congested as that of guests' cars arriving.
You have been warned.