Free McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Page A

with not quite enough money to go round, is like a re-creation of a rural Irish way of life that has all but disappeared.
    ‘Have y’seen me hat?’
    He takes down a thickly woven bonnet from a shelf where it’s been sitting, along with a photo of his parents, some carrots, and a sword. I try it on. It’s snug and warm, and feels like raw wool, possibly from some obscure Peruvian llama-goat hybrid.
    ‘It’s me dreadlocks. Wove it myself, when I had them cut off. Won a few pints off farmers in town, trying to guess what it’s made of.’
    He picks up the squeeze-box and starts to play and sing, head thrown back, eyes closed, rocking back and forth and roaring in a gruff, tuneful voice. His hands, scratched and ingrained with concrete and brick dust, are as battered as the keyboard of the old Italian accordion. Merry comes and sits on my lap, pulling funny faces, cheeks puffed out as if by giant gobstoppers. Then he puts his fingers into his mouth and produces the two widgets he’s hacked out of the Murphy’s cans. I’m impressed. I’ve never seen a widget before.
    We’ve been joined during the music by two women, one Irish, one Scottish, vividly tattooed, and extravagantly pierced about the face. They’re affectionate to Merry, who likes his hugs. Dub reggae is booming out of the sound system now. Dom says it’s always been a party house. The couple who lived here before him were into all-night card sessions. When he first moved in, an old man used to turn up with a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the night, looking for a game of poker. He’d tap on the window, then see Dominic and remember the other people had moved. ‘Ah, feckit,’ he’d say. ‘D’you fancy a game anyway?’
    Around seven o’clock we bump-start a car that has an unusual open-plan area where the front passenger seat used to be, and I follow them to a party that’s going to run until Sunday night.
    It’s Friday.

    ‘The way I see it, we’re repopulating a place that lost its people to famine and emigration,’ says Dominic.
    We’re walking up a long potholed lane towards a stone ruin on a hill. I don’t think the repmobile would have coped. Midges are biting, and Merry is talking to his Granddad on a toy cellphone. Music of the Afro-Celtic-Anarcho-Psychedelic persuasion is drifting towards us on a chill evening breeze, and I feel as inconspicuous as Prince Charles trying to score at the Notting Hill Carnival. I try to loosen up. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? That someone will take me for some sort of narc or undercover snooper, beat me senseless, pump me full of crack, magic mushrooms and superglue, and feed me to the enormous lurcher-wolfhound thing that’s just knocked me into a fuchsia bush?
    Maybe it’ll be worse than that. Maybe I’ll be forced to join in the fire-juggling.
    ‘Come on,’ says Dominic. ‘I’ll introduce you to Danny.’
    It’s Danny’s house and birthday party. He got an even better deal than Dominic—£7,000 for three acres and four stone walls, which he’s spent six years restoring, in between working five-day weeks as a builder. How many English builders are there out here, anyway? And if an Irishman on an English site is a Paddy, what do they call these fellas? Nigels? Jeremies?
    He’s a lean man in his thirties, with close-cropped black hair, a silver earring, and black leather trousers, but I’d never criticise anyone’s dress sense on their birthday. He’s got a strong Norfolk accent, though he’s been out here nine years. Couldn’t afford to live in Norfolk, he says, because of commuters pushing prices up; couldn’t contemplate a council house in town; couldn’t live a travelling life because of prejudice, legislation and complaints about loud parties. But there’s space here. He says the house has been habitable for six months. He’s been living here with his wife and children for six years.
    ‘But look at that, man.’
    We’re on a hilltop that falls away