Colm O'Regan: As a foreign correspondent reporting from Dublin, festivals around a river are a good idea

Colm O'Regan: 'The Liffey Festival was last weekend. It was built around the Liffey swim and the Liffey in general. Cork should have a Lee festival. It would be better, obviously.' Pictures: Sam Boal/Collins

What you notice afterwards is an extreme thirst for pints. As if you’ve been away at sea for months.

You’re tempted to start talking like one of Capn’ Jack Sparra’s mates, ordering wenches about, looking for your drink in tankards.

We were only in a kayak on the Liffey for 40 minutes. But it changes you. Slightly. For a few minutes.

The Liffey Festival was last weekend. It was built around the Liffey swim and the Liffey in general.

Cork should have a Lee festival. It would be better, obviously. Because Cork. But for now, as a foreign correspondent, reporting from Dublin, festivals around a river seem a good idea.

And we got discounted kayaking from around the Jeanie Johnston.

I had done it in Cork yonks ago and the feeling of completely swapping one’s view of the city came back to me.

The waving is one thing. Everyone feels compelled to wave and we feel compelled to wave back. It’s just a corny, cute moment of “clapping when the plane lands” innocence. We weren’t doing it for attention, honest. But when you get into the water, you’re, in a very benign way, making a show of yourself.

Stilt walker Molly O’Brien, entertains people at the DCC Liffey Festival, Dublin. 

We went past the country-famous Dublin Boardwalk. It seemed picturesque from a distance. And to be fair, I’ve walked it plenty of times and it’s grand. The rest of the country smells of weed now anyway, so the boardwalk seems no different.

We got on at the Jeanie Johnston and headed upstream. Immediately, Dublin sounded different. The traffic had been deadened by the water. The city was still there, but from down at river level it seemed to have turned the volume down.

And the water seemed clean.

This was a disappointment to any Cork people who had come expecting the Liffey to resemble the version preserved in the national imagination: A dark, industrial soup in which you could lose a bicycle, a shopping trolley, and a malfunctioning millennium clock without seeing any of them again.

Instead, here I was, floating through Dublin, looking at the water and thinking: “This is… lovely.”

Paddling upstream at the end, we came towards a bridge and people waved down at us.

“Is this Ireland?” I shouted. I was making a joke, you see? As if I’d just paddled from a strange land.

They smiled, but no one laughed. No one laughed. People aren’t ready for my humour in this new country yet.

Fly-boarder James Prestwood from the UK entertains crowds at the DCC Liffey Festival, in front of the Custom House, Dublin.

I think people wave because getting into the city water is a challenge to the normal way of doing things. It’s public space but locked away.

You normally pass over it in a car and suddenly discover that there is another city underneath the city you know.

You also understand why we occasionally have grand plans to put more people in the water. We’d probably have more of this if the whitewater rafting project had gone ahead.

Perhaps the problem was the name. ‘Whitewater rafting’ sounds like an expensive leisure activity for people who own vehicles big enough to carry kayaks.

If they had called it ‘Water for the Fire Brigade’ or ‘Lifesaving Training’, two of the other uses that got no publicity, it might have had a completely different public reception.

This is the problem with infrastructure.

Give something a fun name and suddenly everyone starts asking whether we really need it.

And then you see what €50m gets you these days and realise that, in the grand scheme of things, a whitewater course is practically loose change.

Anyway, none of this was my concern. That’s a problem for landlubbers. I’ve been at sea. Or at least river.