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Friday 18 July 2008

A swift dip in the sea at Christmas

Old Ireland lives on in a frozen Christmas swim

Old Ireland lives on in an Ardmore village custom

Winter was when our national gift for moaning entered its full bloom. The older Irish generation complained with vigour about everything. Health was the favourite topic. Scarcely a day went by without news of someone being carted off to hospital only to emerge a corpse. ‘They opened him up and he was riddled with it,’ they would say of some unfortunate who invariably had a large family. These events seemed to occur with a disproportionate regularity in the run-up to Christmas. As the holiday approached the focus shifted to money. Our elders complained — quite properly — about the amount of tax they paid to keep our ludicrously bloated civil service afloat, and whispered darkly about thieving politicians.

I can’t remember exactly when it all changed. But some time in the early 1990s the sun came out, the Celtic Tiger mewed and before we knew it an age of second homes, boutique hotels and limitless credit had arrived. Gone was the smell of damp clothes, replaced with the odour of fresh leather seats in brand-new 4x4s. I could moan on about how we lost our soul in the process but that would bore me even more than it would you. I don’t think we have really become slaves to Mammon. Particularly in rural Ireland, we remain a pretty cohesive society with strong bonds of family and community.

Nowhere is this more obvious than at Christmas in Ardmore. The charity swim is the public manifestation of community bonds. But a lot more goes on away from public view; the elderly neighbours visited every day, the careful eye kept on the lonely and the poor. Nobody in the village needs to be alone unless they truly want to be. I don’t wish to suggest some Irish version of a Norman Rockwell idyll but there is a generosity in the air that can take a city dweller by surprise.

After the Christmas dinner most of the village will slump in front of the television with glazed eyes. Those with small children may feel obliged to take to the cliff walk, a lovely meandering path high above the waves and haunted by choughs, rock pipits, pheasants, kestrels and peregrines. On the way you pass the old coastal watch posts, built during the second world war and long abandoned. Here the sentries filled the cold hours playing the melodeon down the radio to their colleagues in other posts along the coast.

More articles from: Fergal Keane | this section

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