An Irishman’s Diary about Clonmel and the changing face of transport

When the American traveller Asenath Nicholson toured Ireland in the 1840s, she was outraged at the mistreatment of passengers and horses alike on Charles Bianconi’s coach network.

The cars were horribly overloaded, she complained (on one trip there was a large dog in the luggage bin, partly resting on her head).

But because the company insisted on punctuality, the horses were also very hard-driven and often whipped, despite her protests.

Well, by serendipitous chance last Saturday, I had to catch a bus to Clonmel, the town where Bianconi’s famous service had begun 200 years before, to the very week. And if Nicholson’s ghost is reading, I’m happy to assure her of the vast progress Bianconi’s successors have made since.

My coach was roomy and comfortable. There were no dogs in the overhead bins. Above all, in the advance our American visitor would most approve, the driver was conspicuously easy on the horses.

I noticed this because my bus was supposed to reach Clonmel at 5.45pm. In fact, that was a detail of some importance to me, because I was due on stage at 6.30pm, chairing a discussion as part of the Clonmel Junction arts festival.

The 45 minutes between arrival and showtime would, I had hoped, allow me find my B&B, drop a bag there, and still be at the venue in time. But as 5.30pm passed, I noted with concern that the bus was only in Kilkenny. And by 5.45, never mind Clonmel, the town of Callan – 35 km away – was the height of our achievement.

Not even then, however, did the driver resort to the whip. On the contrary, when we eventually cantered into Clonmel at 6.20pm, I was the one who had to gallop, luggage and all, to reach the venue with four minutes to spare.

An hour-and-a-half of literary discussion later, as is the way at arts festivals, I was being ushered at speed to the nearby White Memorial Theatre, still no wiser about my B&B.

We were there to see Mikel Murfi's brilliantly funny play, The Man in the Woman's Shoes, for which a capacity crowd later raised the rafters (a dangerous thing in a former Wesleyan Chapel, from 1843, now in need of some refurbishment).

And after that I really should have gone looking for the B&B, or at least phoned it, which I would have done if I hadn’t accidentally deleted the email with all the details. But by then, it was another race against the clock to find a restaurant that served food after 9.30pm on a Saturday – a surprisingly difficult thing in Clonmel.

So by the time I had dinner, found the name of the B&B, and turned up on the doorstep, it was a bit late for an unannounced arrival. The host clearly thought so too. “I was nearly giving up on you,” he said, as I blurted apologies and blamed the animal welfare lobby.

Like me, Asenath Nicholson spent only one night in Clonmel, “a good portion of it seeking a lodging place”. Then she left first thing in the morning, on another Bianconi to Cork.

Whereas I deliberately missed the early Bianconis back to Dublin in favour of a relaxed stroll around one of Ireland’s great inland towns.

It’s a strikingly handsome town still, full of Georgian houses, old churches, and stately, well-planned streets that contrast pleasantly with views of the surrounding hills and mountains.

Some of the former grandeur is a bit distressed these days, like DW Parke’s chemists, a lovely old timber-fronted shop on Gladstone Street, frozen in time at the moment it closed, and doubly frozen because one of its display windows is now broken.

Other antique buildings have had to reinvent themselves, including the 1838 Scots Church, whose latter-day incarnations included a spell as a car sales-room, probably the only one in the country with Romanesque pillars.

But speaking of cars, amidst Clonmel’s 19th-century elegance, I was struck by another relic which, although of more recent vintage, also evoked a lost world. It was a plastic wall-sign, from the late Charlesian (Charlie Haughey) era – circa 1989, I guessed. And it read simply, “Yugo Cars”.

As a mode of transport, the Yugos are already more forgotten than the Bianconis ever were.

But for a brief period in the late 1980s, they promised an economical alternative for cash-strapped Irish customers. Alas, they were not a long-term investment. It’s usually just the cars themselves you have to worry about. In this case, even their host country was soon broken up for spare parts.

@FrankmcnallyIT