A Secret Map of Ireland by Rosita Boland

Author:Rosita Boland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GemmaMedia
Published: 2010-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

LAOIS

NO TELEVISION, NO CARDS,

NO SINGING

Un-PC or sad as it might sound, given our abysmal track record with alcohol as a country, it is nonetheless a fact that some of the best nights of my life have been spent in pubs in Ireland. When I was twenty-five, I spent three months hitch-hiking around the entire coast of Ireland to research a book. I tried to stick as closely as I could to the coastline and followed rural roads wherever I could. Since it was winter when I was doing this – October, November, December – and I was often staying in quite small places, I ended up spending a lot of my evenings in the local pub, as nothing else tended to be open. I started drinking later than most of my peers – at twenty – and was out of Ireland most of the years between twenty-one and twenty-five, so my hitch-hiking winter was a bit of a personal odyssey through Irish pubs. That winter, I discovered the pubs I liked best were small and old and simple with a clientele that included sometimes quite elderly people, whom I particularly liked talking to and listening to their stories.

Some months ago, I was in one of those Dublin superpubs, meeting an old friend for a drink. While we were there, a few of her office colleagues joined us. One of them asked us for our orders on her way to the bar. I said Guinness. She looked blank. “Guinness? A pint?” I agreed that this was what I would like, helpfully holding up my glass by way of an additional clue as to its size and contents. I thought she hadn’t heard me properly the first time because it was so loud – ear-splitting music being played over the loudspeakers that were lurking behind every potted palm in the place.

It turned out I was, apparently, a) only the second woman whom my friend’s colleague had ever seen drinking a pint of Guinness and b) the first woman she had ever ordered said pint for. She told me this as she handed over the glass. The result of her sharing this information with me was that a) I felt very, very old and b) very, very gobsmacked. Ever since a brief period of drinking gin and tonics in my last year as a student, I have always drunk Guinness in pubs. As have many of my friends, of both sexes. (And no, nobody belonging to me works for Guinness, in case this all sounds like a large ad.)

The woman who had just bought me the first pint of Guinness she’d ever bought another woman was from Wicklow. She’d been living in Dublin for four years. She loved superpubs, cocktail bars and hotel bars. When in them, she and her friends drank bottled lager, wine, cocktails, flavoured vodka. What age was she? Twenty-five. She had never touched Guinness. Why? Because it was an old man’s drink. I looked around me with new eyes to see what everyone else was drinking.

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