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

suppose that’s possible.’ The grin again.
    He perks up for a few minutes, and becomes quite animated while calling his solicitor a gangster and a cunt. Then he takes me by the arm.
    ‘I’ll tell ya something now, boy. If it’s true what they say about whiskey, that it’s bad for you, then I’d have been dead years ago.’
    We leave him staring out towards the ruined McCarthy castle in the valley, the spectacular view completely obscured by six-foot nettles.
    ‘Come again, boys, it’s nice to have company.’
    Dominic puts an arm round him.
    ‘Take care now, Stephen. And good luck.’

    I suppose I was expecting some sort of commune, but what they’ve built is a village: different families, and couples, and singles, living on their own plots of land, sharing similar aspirations, but living their own lives. And, like a village, everyone knows everyone else’s business.
    ‘That’s no bad thing. It’s the way village life used to be, back home, but isn’t any more.’
    Davie is a broad-shouldered man in his thirties, originally from Devon. We’re sitting on the grass outside his battered mobile home. Next to it is the house he’s building. Below us, lie’s planted an orchard. Ponies are grazing off to our left.
    ‘It all changed in England some time in the seventies. Everything modernised, and became homogenous. You all had to live the same way, and local differences started to disappear. Townies moved in, and wouldn’t speak to you if you were local. It’s all burglar alarms now, and four-wheel drives to take the kids to school. I hate the way England is now. I could never go back.’
    We go inside to make tea. On the wall is a poster of an alien smoking a spliff, captioned ‘Take Me To Your Dealer’. I ask about the gardai.
    ‘Ah, they know what we’re about. It’s a small place, and news travels. Y’know, if we started a cocaine factory up here or something, that’d be different, but that’s not us and they know that. We look a bit rough, and we like a party, but we have to work hard just to survive, and we love our kids. I think people round here can relate to that.’
    Further up the hill is the community centre Dominic helped build. There’s a stone floor they cut from the mountain and laid themselves. There’s a coffee bar, and toys for the creche, and a big Bob Marley quote on the wall: ‘One world, one love, let’s get together, it’ll be all right’.
    We pass cabins, roundhouses, a yurt-like affair, and dome. I can’t help wondering about planners, and whether they’re likely to move in with the bulldozers.
    ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to evict us. They’d have thirty families, more than a hundred people, to rehouse, for a start.’ Laurence is a mild-mannered, dreadlocked father of five. He lives in the most spectacular house I’ve seen—a thatched Hansel and Gretel fantasy. Inside the huge living-room, a tree trunk, still rooted into the ground, serves as a chair among more conventional furniture. He’s recently added a conservatory on the front. Again, the floors are native stone, except for just below the conservatory window, where flowers are growing through bare soil. We’re high up the hill. In England, you couldn’t buy this view for a million.
    ‘Anyway, if a building’s been up five years and there’ve been no objections, you can get retrospective planning permission.’
    He works as a thatcher all round Cork. There aren’t many people left who can still do it. People come and watch, he says, and want to talk about it, and about the past that’s disappearing. His kids are in the village school—one of the women from the mountain is a teacher there—and this is home now, for good.
    ‘But do you feel you belong?’
    He pauses and smiles. ‘Well, I’ve no family links so I’ll always be an outsider. We’re a community within a community, I suppose, but I can live with that. They’re good people, the Irish.’
    The kids are reading, or watching