A Close Call with Authentic Ireland

Never mind that Americans have long enlisted a callow iconography of Irishness as a means of flogging soap, beer, T-shirts, and Ben Affleck movies. There’s still a certain satisfaction in hearing a barmaid announce to the regulars in her pub that you have “come back to us from the States,” as though your return to the homeland, mongrel Irish pedigree in tow, were as inevitable as an early-summer sea gale. It’s equally charming to be told, by a botanist from Kildare who’s had several pints, that he’s glad you’ve chosen to come to Achill Island because it’s a slice of the real Ireland: “You don’t go in for that Paddywackery [stuff].”

I’ve come to Achill Island alone, and I’m supposed to be doing research. That means I’ve had to try to make friends, something I’m not good at under the best, least rainy conditions. Happily for me, it turns out that a village that has exactly one pub is a village where it’s difficult to remain a total stranger for long. In the words of one of the staff at my bed and breakfast, in the village of Dooega, “there don’t be even a shop.” The owner of both the pub and the bed and breakfast has said that he can get me as many interviews with as many locals as I can handle; it’s safe to say that he knows just about everyone in town. That’s another bit of good luck, since I have only one other means of procuring interviews—that is, making a nuisance of myself at the aforementioned pub.

So, at one level, going with the local flow—self-consciously undertaking what American universities have lately taken to calling “cultural immersion”—is the only thing to do. And if you’re hanging out in an out-of-the-way pub in an out-of-the-way village with nary another American within cycling distance, you can tell yourself that you’re doing something much more profound, much more interesting than your studying-abroad classmates are doing. You’re experiencing the authentic, and we all know how important that concept is to the self-satisfaction of contemporary Americans.

It helps, of course, that Ireland, being a well-developed part of the greater English-speaking world, can absorb an American with little fuss. If an American in Ireland is going to commit a faux pas or an outright offense, it’s probably going to be the kind of thing that Americans usually disapprove of, too.

For instance, you could get to drinking with a retired cab driver from Dublin and a carpenter from Limerick. They could be hurling jovial insults back and forth at one another (mainly having to do with rugby), while you sit in between, unable to pay for your drinks because both of them are quicker on the draw than you are.

They could buy you so many drinks, in fact, that you have to spend the next morning considering how you’re going to tell the bed and breakfast staff that you threw up on the carpet. Be sure to apologize to them as pathetically as you can, and make a point of letting them know that “this isn’t the kind of thing I usually do.”

But why did you (I) drink all of those Guinesses and Bulmer’s ciders, anyway? It wasn’t because I wanted them; I tried to leave the pub at 10:30, five drinks before I eventually made it home. No, it was because I had to keep pace with my new buddies, with their rich accents and decades of stored-up pub lore. I couldn’t leave the pub early because I had to make a good showing on behalf of young American men, especially young American men of Irish extraction. I had to prove that we can go drink for drink with the real Irish, in the real Ireland.

I was, in other words, being vain and stupid—not to mention wrong about being able to go drink for drink. The essence of my misstep would have been the same in the U.S., but there’s probably no such thing as an American who could have convinced me to accept that many offered ciders on an evening when I wasn’t really feeling it. I would do it only if I thought I was obligated to embark on a Cultural Experience. Turns out, that’s not as good an excuse as I had hoped.