Cormac MacConnell: Of hares, free drink and two types of cat
One of those premises has been trading for about two centuries, and is world famous and, factually, is located in the Pope’s Parish, just off the Wild Atlantic Way.
The other establishment is located in the Convent Hill Shopping Centre in my new Killaloe base, it has been trading for less than a week, and dammit, I was barred or life, hours before the joint officially opened, just because I wanted to buy two tins of paint before the rush began.
The pure truth yet again, and sadly so.
For obvious reasons, I infinitely prefer to talk about the other premises, beloved for so long by so many, and that is Joe McHugh’s great pub in the fishing village of Liscannor, close to the Cliffs of Moher, a village soaked in history, folklore, and hospitality, and the birthplace of Holland, inventor of the submarine.
In Joe McHugh’s pub, for many years, I have enjoyed hundreds of great nights of music, song and craic and, because of events which occurred before my first visit, I swear I was never allowed to buy even one drink there, in the time the great man himself was behind the bar/counter of this olde-world haven.
You see, what happened away back in the 1970s was that I was asked to write an article for the Irish Press about the traditional first greyhound coursing meeting of the season, always then in Liscannor, and this was at a time when the anti-blood sports campaign was at its height, and tensions were running hot.
Joe McHugh was a passionate coursing man, like many of his customers, and so was my late father-in-law Mick Conlon from Ennistymon and, for that matter, my own dear father Sandy, who kept coursing greyhounds in his time, until they were displaced by the arrival of a young family.
Leaving Connemara for my day’s work I was determined to report accurately and fairly on what I observed at my first coursing meeting. It was the sight of a sparrow hawk stooping and killing a sparrow outside Oranmore on my journey that put it into my mind to tally the roadkill on the way to Liscannor.
I cannot now remember the exact figures, but they were considerable, including several rabbits, a young badger, a cat, and birds, including magpies.
Later, at the coursing, I recall that just one hare died on the day, and that the slipper clearly rejected a number of hares upon their release, and did not send the hounds in pursuit of those.
The crowd was composed of decent folk who clearly were knowledgable about their sport, not a bloodthirsty mob, and there was a sigh of regret when the hare was killed.
I injected the roadkill tally into my report, and it emerged as a positive one rather than all the condemnatory articles on coursing which were so common at the time.
It earned me an anonymous bullet in my postbox about a fortnight later!
However, it also meant that Joe McHugh, the man made so famous by Dermott Kelly’s ballad years later, always gave me the warmest of welcomes to his bar when I visited a while afterwards.
I was never allowed buy a drink in that special pub and, indeed, was so embarrassed by that reality that I called less often than if I was buying my round in the normal way.
Passion for sport created that situation. It is my understanding that another sporting passion, this time for hurling, amazingly led to me being barred for life from the new E&G Hardware establishment in Killaloe.
I have been told the proprietors, Eddie O’Gorman and Ger Bourke, are so driven demented by the challenges of the championship, and, like all hurling fans, are so fearful of the Kilkenny Cats, that something snapped when I entered the shop looking for cans of black and amber paint!
Wrong time. Wrong place. I will survive!
