My mistake was telling the children I was going to Dingle. It was one of those occasions when a parental lie might have been justified. I could have said I was off to Ballyjamesduff or Termonfeckin or Moate or Moneygall. They wouldn’t have cared a continental. But admitting to destination Dingle led to serious histrionics. I had brought them on their first trip there last May for Féile na Bealtaine and they haven’t stopped demanding a return visit ever since
“I can’t believe you are going to Dingle without us,” they said, swearing to shackle themselves to me like suffragettes (they’ve been watching a lot of Mary Poppins in anticipation of a trip to the theatre tomorrow), blocking my path and launching into an impassioned description of the delights of the town. “But we want to see Fungi! Murphy’s ice-cream! That big church with the magic windows! The Dingle Skellig Hotel! THE BREAKFAST BUFFET!” Missing out on multiple trips to the Skellig’s breakfast buffet seemed the biggest disappointment, bigger even than the dolphin or those magic Harry Clarke windows, but they got over it slightly when I promised them a toy from the shop on Green Street where they spent a happy hour choosing Lego the last time.
Anyway, I escaped. Off to Other Voices in Dingle with the treacherous promise of Storm Desmond and the magnificent Conor Pass seeming to close in around us as, hours after leaving Dublin and the traditional stop in the Barack Obama Plaza, we neared our destination. We heard afterwards about the 100ft drop on one side, mercifully invisible in the dark.
As Glen Hansard said during his beautiful performance in St James Church, Dingle is a hard place to get to and a hard place to get out of. All the musicians we saw, laden with speakers and instruments, around the town were here despite the storm and the diverted flights and broken down, flooded out vans. Dingle during that very special weekend in December is peopled by a hardy gang of music lovers who would not be anywhere else if you paid them. The spirits were high all over town and not just with Dingle Gin. And the scallops and black pudding in Doyle’s would send them soaring again if they were run low by the ravages of Desmond.
Of course, I had the consumption. Or the TB. Or something else that laid me so low I had to get myself to bed by 10pm each night. Thankfully there ’s enough going on during the day to make you feel you are not missing out. And I had made a friend in Dingle last year, a sort of music and local legend called Brendan Begley, who arrived in to Other Voices HQ Benner’s Hotel with the promise of The Cure.
So it was into his battered white Fiesta, 20 years old, with nearly half a million miles on the clock, through some seriously flooded roads and into the little shack he has built himself on a trailer truck. It sort of shimmies from side to side in the wind, and it’s like being in the cabin of a boat. A boat on wheels. It’s perfect, except the very eco-friendly dry toilet he’s had shipped in from Sweden isn’t working yet and you only stay a small while in the shimmying shack because you wouldn’t fancy using what Brendan calls the “All Star” toilet outside. Not in a storm.
He brought me a mug of The Cure: Single malt, hot water and the magic ingredient, Ballyferriter honey. He brought me a few more mugs and played his squeezebox and brought me another mug before driving me back to Dingle, The Cure for what was ailing me sloshing about in the cup like billyo and the sickness seeping out of me.
Into the Church of St James to see Hansard and then Sheffield's Richard Hawley who waxed so lyrical about love and Dingle that he forgot to sing some of his songs. And then back to catch the tail end of Mahalia, a 17-year-old musical force as memorable as another teenager, Little Simz, who had the church rapping in the palm of her hand the evening before. And at some point it was into Kennedy's, where Coleraine's Hannah McPhillimy sang Silent Night on piano and a song about the wind on her ukelele which has one dodgy string she says will never be in tune.
“So did it cure you or kill you?” Brendan texted on his ancient phone as my companion and I headed through the Conor Pass, visible now on the kind of serene Sunday morning that bore no resemblance to the Saturday before. Did it cure me or kill me? I think Dingle in a raging storm could probably do both at the same time, but thankfully it was a cure and a tonic and a boost and a nice bit of fine tuning for this dodgy string.
Roll on Other Voices 2016. Public Displays of Emotion by Róisín Ingle is now available to buy from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks