By contributor Sean Carey
Some years ago, when I was an undergraduate I took an annual holiday in Ireland. My friends and I made our pilgrimage to Fouhy’s bar in Glanworth, a village around 30 miles from the seaside town of Youghal, where we always stayed. The pub was situated halfway along the main street, and despite fierce competition always drew a good crowd, especially at the weekends.
Unlike the other nine pubs in the village, however, not all customers were locals. I remember walking through the door on one occasion, and seeing the legendary British businessman and horse racing owner Robert Sangster and his wife, Susan, sitting at the bar drinking Jameson’s Irish whiskey.
Why was Sangster and his Australian socialite wife in Fouhy’s? His horses had won two Epsom Derbys, four Irish Derbys, two French Derbys, three Prix de l’Arc de Triomphes and a Melbourne Cup. The venue, a typical village bar with sawdust on the floor, was undoubtedly a far cry from the couple’s more usual, opulent haunts in the Isle of Man and Barbados, where they lived as tax exiles.
Part of the answer is: Sangster owns a major share at a nearby thoroughbred stud and was on one of his periodic visits to check on his investments.
The main reason was that the couple were there for the same reason my friends and I were: the conversation in Fouhy’s positively crackled.
The owner of the pub was Eileen Fouhy, a diminutive, unmarried woman in her early 60s. She stood behind the bar and poured the drinks until the last customer went home at a time of his or her choosing (normally his). She would not allow television. She thinks it ruins people’s ability to communicate with one another.
Eileen is right, of course. Go into any bar or pub anywhere in the world where a television set is switched on and observe the many people gazing at the screen rather than into the faces of their fellow human beings, even if they are not interested in the program being broadcast.
One lunchtime I was the only customer in Fouhy’s. I was an anthropology student, so this was an ideal opportunity to find out something about local folk beliefs. I asked Eileen, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of local and national Irish history, whether belief in the existence of fairies had declined in Ireland in recent years.
“It has,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s because of the declining strength of Guinness. In the old days, I’d pour a pint and just like now there would always be some that would drip down the outside of the glass. But back then if you left it too long you’d have trouble picking it up — it would stick to the counter. That doesn’t happen nowadays.” She paused and added: “The stout is no longer what it was.” It was a fantastic reply. What else could I do but laugh?
But the story, with its quicksilver wit, summed up why locals, second generation Irish, U.K.-based undergraduates, and two members of the super-rich called in at Fouhy’s bar.
I was reminded of that conversation this week when I listened to “Away with the Fairies” on BBC Radio 4. The presenter, Dominic Arkwright, began by asking whether fairies are now mainly perceived as “innocent, little butterfly creatures you see in Disney films, all wings gossamer and glitter” or “spirits which can be dangerous and malicious, not at all the sort of things you would want cavorting around at the bottom of your garden.”
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