Heathen Eden – An Irishman’s Diary about living next door to the Forbidden Fruit festival

It’s not quite like living in a northern Catholic enclave on the Twelfth of July. But being a resident of Kilmainham during the first weekend of June does also encourage a siege mentality. The reason is the Forbidden Fruit festival, which we host. And although that’s a very different kind of event, it does have other similarities with the North’s marching season.

As happens up there, for example, many of the young visitors to our community during Forbidden Fruit also wear orange. In their case it tends to be fake tan, rather than sashes. Another difference is that it’s not the brethren who wear it, generally. It’s the sistren – who prepare for the festival by painting all their non-clothed parts – which is most of their parts, usually – tangerine.

Living at the interface – the main entrance to the venue – we also get a close-up of other aspects of the visitors’ culture. And an important part of their preparatory rituals, I have noticed, is the consumption beforehand of large amounts of (non-orange) drink.

Pre-loaded

Some they buy in local shops, including the Superquinn (as we still call it) down the road. Then they walk the Superquinn’s Highway, or sit on it, pre-loading themselves with all the alcohol they cannot be confident of smuggling past security. Only then do they march to the “field”.

We watch all this from behind the safety barriers the organisers put in place at the entrance to our cul-de-sac. The barriers are sometimes supplemented by gardaí. But in fairness, this is where comparisons with Drumcree, circa 1997, break down.

The festival is, in general, good-humoured, and the worst depredations we suffer are the occasional adventurer who thinks our back gardens might provide free entry (they don’t), or who need semi-private places to wee.

Another minor inconvenience is that, every time one of the residents tries to enter the road during the weekend, he or she risks being mistaken for a festival-goer. Mind you, I find now that, being several decades older than the average participant, this is less a problem than it used to be. When it happens these days, I’m always flattered.

Invitation

Actually, this year, for the first time, everyone in our enclave was given free tickets for the opening night. Some had no interest, but I for one was fully determined to go. Except that, on the same evening, I also had an invitation to an event in the National Concert Hall, intriguing in its own right.

It was a screening of Terence Malick's 2011 film The Tree of Life, which won the big prize at Cannes but somehow passed me by at the time. And the reason it was in the NCH now was that its opulent soundtrack was being performed live, by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and choir.

Spectacles

So not wanting to miss either of these spectacles entirely, I formed a cunning plan wherein I would go first to the concert hall, but slip out at the interval and then catch the last hour of the show at Kilmainham.

It would have made for a dramatic contrast. The film’s soundtrack involves Mahler, Mussorgsky, and Holst, whereas Friday’s bill-topper at Kilmainham was Dizzee Rascal.

Unfortunately, my plan had a weakness, which finally dawned on me about 90 minutes into the NCH show. There would be no interval.

Yes I could still have left, apologising to the seven or eight people seated on either side as I skulked out, But this would have made me look like one of those shallow people who found The Tree of Life too arty and slow-moving. A slave to culture, I stayed where I was.

It was certainly a challenging film. Starting in 1950s America, it portrays a family in crisis and then sets a world record for cinematic flashback – several billion years – by tracing the evolution of life from its origins to modern humanity, before posing some deep philosophical questions, including one, which frames the film, from the Bible’s Book of Job.

Drama

As for another question that increasingly bothered me – when the movie would end, if ever? – the answer was 10.20pm. At which point I raced back to Kilmainham, where another biblical drama unfolded.

Sure enough, the concert was just ending, in line with the curfew imposed for the benefit of the besieged residents coalition. So I didn’t get to taste the Forbidden Fruit myself. But thousands of others had and were now streaming past me, out the gates, like mankind after the fall.