There's a certain rite of passage that's celebrated about this time of year off the promenade in Galway's Salthill, writes Lorna Siggins
As sea temperatures rise, herring fry swim into the bay, closely followed by flashes of blue and green that mark Scomber scombrus - the mighty mackerel.
The rapidly swimming fish chases its prey with the sort of feverish enthusiasm that provides rich pickings for dozens of shore anglers. Some years ago, however, three young lads from the Claddagh decided to take to the water in pursuit of the shoals - and met an old woman en route.
"Are ye going to sea?" the woman asked the trio; as they nodded, she advised them to go back home first and fetch an axe, a hook and a very large knife. They did so, without quite knowing why, and then left harbour. They met a brewing Atlantic storm, which swept up over the Cliffs of Moher, across the Burren and down into Galway bay, and their boat was submerged in three very serious waves. . .
You'd be sitting on the edge of your seat - several dozen international language students were - as Rab Swannock Fulton continues his account of the three brothers' fate in Salthill's Cottage Bar. A balmy summer's night is transformed into a winter's maelstrom; it seems as if wild waves are lashing the very walls.
There's a brief pause before Clare Muireann Murphy is swaying before us, weaving her arms about as she recalls an ancient dispute over whether Antrim's Rathlin island ever had snakes.
Murphy talks of a 10-year old Rathlin lad who disobeyed his mother's orders not to climb cliffs, splash in water or touch the hawthorn. . . and how his patchy personal hygiene saved his life. Next, she's throwing an imaginary ball into the air, pucking it across the room and relating how Setanta earned the name Cúchulainn. Remembering that she has Spanish visitors in her audience, she gives a brief precis of another story in her best Castilian.
"Real, authentic and powerful" is how Prof Kathleen Slevin, chancellor professor of sociology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA, describes a night with Fulton and Murphy. "Our two hours with them were decidedly 'untourist-like'," Prof Slevin says. "Their stories were not those told to pander to stereotypes, or to notions that non-natives might have of the Irish and Irish culture or history." Slevin wasn't sure what to expect when she took a very mixed age group of students and faculty staff members along. She was pleasantly surprised. "Both were enormously engaging, smart and captivating for all of us. Clare drew on Irish mythology and she was quite magical in her ability to take her audience back in time, and to hold people's attention through some complicated detail. I especially liked the way she used her body and used space to enliven her stories. By contrast, Rab's stories were contemporary and generally pretty funny; they provided a perfect shift in mood and tempo."
For the storytelling pair, such responses are very satisfying after several years of collaboration. Murphy, from Howth, Co Dublin, came to Galway to study Spanish and English. Writing "since she could hold a pen", she has won several short story awards. She wrote and directed Play, a circus theatre production in association with StageCraft which was performed at Galway's Project 06 festival; and with Fulton, she hosted a week of storytelling workshops in the Galway Rowing Club during that event.
Fulton, a Glaswegian who was, he quips, expelled from the Scottish swimming team, is a poet, storyteller and novelist based in Galway for the last few years, where he works at NUI Galway's sports centre. His "rants", as he describes them, are published on the www.geygallus.com website. He is currently working on his third novel, entitled The Woman Who Was not Adele.
With Murphy, he began telling tales in schools in Galway last year, and last autumn the pair hosted sessions in two city libraries and ran a four-week course for students in NUIG. They continued their association with several schools in Shantalla and Mervue, examining traditional tales, inventing stories and working with the pupils to perform their own interpretations at NUIG's Muscailt arts festival.
Earlier this year, they initiated the Celtic Tales project, but also travelled out by ferry to Aran's Inis Mór to regale a group of Princeton University alumni in Dún Aengus. As festival season approached, they developed the Cottage Bar as a twice-weekly venue, on Monday and Wednesday evenings from 8pm to 10pm, sending out flyers and putting Lower Salthill on the tourist map.
The response has exceeded their expectations - perhaps because, Fulton suspects, life gives us less and less time and space to talk, to listen. They finish up in The Cottage on Monday, September 17th, but continue in the new Tara restaurant in Galway's Dominick Street on Tuesday nights. The pair tailor their accounts to their audience, but keep their spookiest stories for younger folk, and Fulton can even give a fright or two by mobile text.
As in: "On May's eve, a woman went walking after dark. She saw a goat sitting like a man on a wall watching her. She ran past. It leapt on her back. She blessed herself three times. Third time, there was a flash and the beast was ripped off her. She survived, but from that day none would come near her, for her back was left twisted, by the mark of the. . . BOO!"