The young lieutenant to my left was from Munster, and before dinner he said grace in Irish. The host and commanding officer, a Dubliner, was educated at St Mary's. Always fancying military life, he enlisted as a private soldier, and had been promoted from the ranks to his current position of lieutenant-colonel, in charge of a battalion of some 600 men. Yet his second in command, also a Dubliner, was taught by the Christian Brothers in Synge Street, and he too was promoted from the ranks.
We had been bidden to dinner by a female orderly hammering on a wooden plaque, just one of those little traditions which most armies have. At dinner's end, the port circulated clockwise, each guest helping the person to their left. The toasts were drunk, and then the pipers came in, with that jaunty swagger that invariably attends the wearing of the saffron kilt. Their musicality was absolutely magnificent as they performed their repertoire of the traditional airs of Ireland which really only achieve their true splendour when played on the Irish war pipes.
Military hospitality
Military hospitality anywhere tends to be dangerous; Irish military hospitality compares with plutonium, with the port-pouring madman beside me, the young Irish-speaking lieutenant, behaving as if he had been told he would shot at dawn if my glass ever came close to empty. At a certain point, the evening vanished into a blur of port and pipes, the music ringing down from the joists, and my face glowing as if someone had placed it on a long-handled fork and toasted it nicely in front of the fire.
There was never any question of going home after such a concertedly violent assault on my liver, and a full colonel and his wife who lived nearby, knowing nothing of my habits, had naively agreed to give me a bed for the night. We were decanted from the mess into his car, and from that into his home, where he offered us tea. Thanks, I said, and I'll have a gin and tonic. It seemed a good idea at the time. After all, the night was young - it was four o'clock in the morning, and I'd only been drinking since around seven the previous evening. Then bed - followed, no doubt, by the nude sleepwalking which I tend to go in for when away from home and which makes me such an enormously popular house guest. Nothing quite like somnambulating naked into a teenage girl's bedroom to give a chap a reputation.
Few minutes' sleep
The wake-up call came at seven. Not seven the next evening, which would have been about right, but seven the same morning. That's the military for you. They get by with a few minutes' sleep here and there through the year. Moreover, they've got livers that can process nuclear waste. It's possible I've felt worse, but never having been hit by naval shellfire, I doubt it. My brain had decided it no longer wished to stay in my head, and was using sledgehammers in its bid for freedom. My stomach resembled a washing machine spin-drying an engine block. The briefest glimpse in the mirror revealed a 250-year-old vampire who had been caught out by the sun, with eyes like leaking blood-banks.
My hostess shied as I slunk into her presence, uttering a little scream of terror, as one does when the Creature from the Black Lagoon enters your kitchen. If she had offered me a fry, I simply would have lost my frail hold on life, and expired there on her floor in a pool of foul-smelling self-pity. Instead she gave me tea. I was unable to manage the co-ordination required to stir it, so I merely examined it, as one might a firing squad. Her husband the colonel, after a full 15 minutes of slumber, the slacker, had already zoomed off about his numerous duties. Inasmuch as I was capable of any thought, which is doubtful, I tried to frame a curse on the young lieutenant beside me the night before, the Irish-speaking lad from Munster who had been firehosing port into my glass, but was unable to. The worst thing about my ordeal was the certain knowledge that he didn't share it, and was probably at that very moment out on patrol.
Regimental loyalty
Patrol? What patrol? A patrol of the Royal Irish Regiment, as a matter of fact: for the military gentlemen who had set about sculpting a textbook dose of cirrhosis inside me were not from the Army but the army. The Munsterman is a platoon commander on home duties - that is, he is doing the work the Ulster Defence Regiment used to do - and far from being unique, two of his men are also from the south-west. Peter Robinson's opinions on being stopped at a British army roadblock and questioned in mellifluous Munster might be worth hearing.
What unites the Dubliners and the Munstermen with the majority of the Ulstermen they command is clearly not simple national identity, but passionate regimental loyalty, expressed in the rituals which go back hundreds of years. These men are fiercely proud that they are Irish soldiers, doing peacekeeping duties in Ireland and abroad; and all those I spoke to are desperately keen to have close professional and personal relations with the Army of the Republic, and I hope they do. In the interests of all-Ireland harmony, might I suggest our lads take a spare liver or two with them whenever they enjoy Royal Irish hospitality? Two weeks later, and I still resemble Chernobyl.