Galway Churl

Sweary

Because hookers are legal. Because there are stone walls and the grass is green. Because you’re positively encouraged to be shcuttered, fluthered, or just plain dhrunk (extra h’s mandatory). Or because it was my mate Nelly’s thirtieth birthday and I was required by ancient pact and bond to be there for her. For whatever reason, for whatever riddle, I was in Galway on Saturday night – home, and bowing under the weight of it.

Not that that is entirely fair; there’s nothing wrong with Galway that living in Cork doesn’t fix. And though I’d never admit it to my mother (who doesn’t read this blog, because it’s not printed on a nice, flammable Irish Independent), I do have a great, reluctant love for Galway. It’s where I was bred, buttered, and twisted beyond anything a medieval rack could straighten out. It’s where I learned to swear, disregard warnings about funny mushrooms, and tie the dreadlocks of oblivious hippies to temporary fencing in Eyre Square. Me and Galway is like … like Stockholm Syndrome, without the Stockholm.

I’m quite extreme in my grumbling about Galway, though. You’d be hard pressed to find a Galwegian who isn’t ridiculously happy to be from Galway, and I’d imagine you can apply this to the natives of any county in Ireland … so long as there’s a catchy song to hammer home the connection to the earth beneath their wellies.

Because here’s the thing ; the only time you ever see a Galwegian’s grá for Galway is when drink’s been drunk, whoops have been hollered, and there’s a man with a guitar bellowing “Galway Girl” or the “Fields of Athenry” into a pub microphone at a decibel level that would intimidate Tarzan. “Galway Girl” is the current caterwaul of choice for the discerning Tribesman/Tribeswoman. A song bulldozed into the Irish psyche by a fucking Bulmers ad, the veins in my neck clog just thinking about it, yet this weekend made me realise how isolated I am in my impatience for Hibern-Country yodelling. “Galway Girl” is beyond popular in Galway, and it astounds me. You’d think they’d be fed up of it! But no … and I can’t even say that it endures, because that would imply that “Galway Girl” is part of a comforting backing track, as opposed to a blaring, constant squall over the entire county, I was in two pubs on Saturday night, and I heard three different renditions of the fucking thing. It’s enough to make you offer your ears to the comforting kiss of a combine harvester.

So yes. One bar of Galway Girl / The Fields of Athenry / The Joyce County Ceili Band / N17 is enough to have every soul in a Galway pub on their feet (whether clad in Louboutins or brogues or plain old wiry hair) and jiving around the three available inches of floor with their hands all over each other’s arses. I’d invite you to come see it, if I didn’t so strongly suspect this happens in every county with their own anthem. I know Cork people get maudlin to “The Banks”, but I don’t count Corkonians because they’d get maudlin to a dose of Ecstasy and an enthusiastic tickling – so tell me. Do you Dubs froth at the mouth for “Molly Malone”? Do the boys in Southill hold hands for “Limerick, You’re a Lady?”

And what the fuck do you do if you’re from Roscommon?

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