A COLD EYE ON THE SUMMER OF 1978

Anthony Cronin, writer and journalist, surveys wet wet summer of 1978 from Puck Fair to the Leeson St. discos
THE Irish Derby is, indubitably, a Racing Occasion of some importance. It is also, supposedly, a Social Occasion. It owes its position as the first to the enterrprise of the Sweep, who decided to put an enormous amount of money into it; as the second to the fact that we really haven't got social occasions like Cowes, Ascot, or Henley (the neighbouring island being of course the model in these things) and if you haven't got social occasions it is necessary to invent them.

About its quality as a racing occasion this year nobody could complain. Piggot, who has transformed so many Curragh occasions, was there, as was the legendary little American, Willie Shoemaker. The race itself, which had highly intriguing aspects, was won from an international field by the very game, genuine, and eyeefilling Shirley Heights, a horse already sure of his place in history as the Epsom Derby winner.

Therefore it was, as often, a memorable day with a satisfying result. As a social occasion it looked to me, as it always has before, to be a bit of a flop, the product of an ad hoc society with few traditions and little sense of what it really wants or where it is going. The Curragh has no lawns or flower-beds or places to sit at dinky little garden tables and drink Veuve Clicquot under fringed umbrellas. It has boxes in the grandstand, but no reserved enclosures; and in so far as reserved enclosures would put us further away from the finish line the general public ("us") quite rightly wouldn't stand for their institution.

More important, perhaps, those who want it to be the sort occasion which would gratify their own sense of social importance have no ultimate inner galaxies, circles, and stars to revolve around. In order to be a successful snob you have to have someone above you as well as below. You have to have someone who can give the accolade, a Queen Mum or a Queen Bee, and we have no one, with the result that the bourgeoisie is left, at times like Derby day, milling around lookking at its own membership with a wild surmise. Their backs may not exactly be, as Yeats said, "aching for the lash," but they are aching for the nod, the gracious inclination of the aristocratic neck. Alas, there is no one to give it. The notion that there is an inner circle of "horsey" aristoocratic people present on such occasions to confer anything on anybody is largely a figment of their own imagination. The "horsey" people are mostly, nowadays, our own. In racing they are professionals with their eyes on the game itself; and the old Protestant element has largely been reduced to the status of fellow proofessionals who are interested in the results of professional endeavour. The king is dead; and long live the likes of you and me, however much money they have, just will not do.

BUT if the Curragh is, to some extent, Ireland in search of a norm then Galway is the norm from which we all more or less came and because it is the old norm it is, in its social aspects anyway, in process of dissolution. On Hurdle and Plate days the racecourse itself was packed to the gunwales and a place of the most extraordinary discomfort. You would nearly believe, until you looked more closely the old story that all sorts of people came in large numbers from all over to be there. A closer examination revealed that the attendance was overwhelmingly rural; farmers and then more farmers, some with wives and off-spring, the wives carrying superfluous cardigans and trailing a bit behind. The hobbledehoyness, the subtle wrongnesses of dress and make-up of those under thirty are still rather extreme, and emphasised by the fact that the way they dress is now much the same as the way people dress in the big city.

The popularity of Galway with the farming community is easily explained. There is a lot of good mixed racing on a track made for interest and drama and more important, it comes between hay and harvest when as a general rule there is little to do. A man I met had a farm in Westmeath, "comfortable enough", he admitted. He brought the family and they all stayed in a guest-house a couple of miles out. They only came racing on one day but he came on them all. If he won or lost twenty pounds on a day's racing "it was as much as he wanted to win or lose." He had seen a small dealer man from down his way, a cattle dealer, draw three hundred pounds after II the last. "He won't last long at that rate of going". He himself could get into th;-Wr and go racing again at Mallow on the Saturday, but he wouldn't. He'd soon begin to neglect things that way and the twenty pounds he might win wouldn't keep them all for a day at home.

A sensible man he was and I suspect typical, giving the lie to the headlines which screaming about a tote aggregate of over a quaeter of a million, suggested that we were all gambling mad.

Galway as I remember it used to be one colossal booze-up for all sorts and conditions of male Irish humanity, but to say that it is all much, much soberer now might be slightly misleading. There are far less lugubrious or ! aggressive males jam-packed into the pubs I seeking either oblivion or sudden death. The story of Kevin Barry in his lonely prison cell is scarcely to be heard (once only in Eyre Square). The man who brought his wife from Westmeath probably took her out each evening, and if the children were anywhere of an age they probably went out too. The drinking, in other words, is spread more evenly between the two sexes and the various age groups and it goes with other interests. In the comparative gloom of James Cullen's the banjos and the bodhrans continued to play eoen while the races were in progress and the place was evidently the same kind of glue pot for foreign girls as is O'Donoghue's of Mertion Row. The student bars, The Cellar and the The Tavern,' had much the same bedenimed, unisexual denizens as during term time. There were unlikely tQ have been women participants in qny of the epic poker games taking place in the bedrooms of the Great Southern: but there Were women in plenty in the bar of that establishment and, whether they werd staying there or not, doubtless some of them uiound up in the bedrooms too.

But the scene in Galway, race-week or not, is- in Salthill,' a mile long stretch of bars, hotel bars, more bars, dance-halls, and discos, which vibrate to the beat of several kids of' music throughout the summer. In the Lenabay Arms there was thunderous hardrock for an audience whose age precluded memories of the fifties but which greeted the announceement of any bit of fifties nostlagia with little squeals of delight. In the Hill Top a more eclectic local' group was inducing a good deal of audience participation with a medley including country and western. This was a friendly group with a chatty leader who introduced some of his numbers with a nostlagia bit as well. There Was no place to dance, but the audience was encouraged to get up, hold hands, and sway. Somewhat less than half were drunk enough, happy enough, or unselffconscious enough to do it. Of the others, some appeared to be wishing the thing was over or worried about what was going to happen afterwards. Some of the boys had nothing to say and were only pretending to join in the songs. Some of the girls looked embittered. Numbers of those present seemed to prefer to talk to a member of their own sex. The traumas of youth and adolescence are much as they ever were.

In Eyre Square (sorry, John F. Kennedy Square) on the Wednesday night John Joe McGirl and Councillor Frank Glynn were addressing a meeting about H Block. It was raining and the meeting was breaking up as I came along, so I asked johnjoe if he had been getting any response. "Fair bit," he answered, but he seemed, for such a man, a bit disprited.'

On the Saturday a man I knew from Kevin Street Sinn Fein had set up a stall in the Square among the other market traders and was selling H Block pamplets and other literature. He told me he had sold fifty pounds worth, much of it to Northerners who, he said, wanted to find out what the Provisionals were really after and had no means of doing so up North. He had also sold a lot of songgbooks. "The country people are mad for songs," he said.

Driving across the midlands we came up behind a security van escorted by two jeepploads oj soldiers with automatic rijles. This was the summer when more precautions, and more armed men,' were needed to conuey money jrom place to place in Ireland than ever were necessary to jerry gold dust from camp to railroad in the American West. In Roscrea money jrom a bank was being transferred to a van while soldiers stood uneasily by with their uieapons at the ready. This was the jim summer since 1934 when soldiers were deployed in the streets oj our country towns.

It was the summer oj notices which asked, "Are You Ready For RTE 2?" It was summer oj longflounng skirts, banded round the hips and oj Ajro hair-dos. And was the summer when the country girls who came to town finally decided that east-west, home's best. '

Around where your correspondent lives is bed-sitter land, inhabited by myriads of workking girls from the back of beyond. Once upon a time they all thought the city was the place to be. Latterly they' have been about equally divided between the merits oj town and cOl!ntry. Now at week-ends they disappear jrom the laundrettes, the late night grocers, and the Rathmines pubs. The take the bus, in a high state oj excitement, and in the country. towns the jellas meet the buses in cars. They say there is better crack down where they came from. They say the city is lonely, nasty, dirty, and dangerous. They say they wouldn't go to a disco or a dance hall in the city except with a chap they knew that had a car and they don't know many that have that are interested in taking them. They say the jellas are nicer in the country and have more money. They are probably right.

In Connemara under torrential rain they are playing endless games of twenty-five in the pubs. The signs say "Loistin - 30Q Metres." At the Poitin Still the Swarbriggs are advertised and at other places simply "Cecil Anocht." Through Spiddal and beyond the neat little grant houses stand among the rocky fields, all of them in better taste than the Hispanophile and Georgian villas nearer Galway city, withhout architectural distinction. At Barna there is talk of a triumph over local authority: the new sign posts are in Irish only. In a bar a few miles beyond, one English phrase, "fifty-eight pound a week," is repeated over and over with varying emphasis.

Spiddal is a row of bars and superrmarkets, what the whole area would be if it could, but beyond is dole country, though nearly every house has a car parked outtside. Sudden flocks of city children in red and blue anoraks emerge from the Gaeltacht schools; and at Carraroe there are several couples, aged 13 at most, walking entwined, Dutch and German cars stream past westward with red and blue nylon gear flapping on the roofs beside yellow iceeboxes. At Camas, the post-office has been picketed after mail deliveries were susspended because no postman could be found. (If you took the job you would forfeit the dole.) In another pub there is low-voiced talk of a fight outside a dance hall on the Saturday night. My friend, who knows the place, is told some of the story I and a certain individual is conndemned-"fear seine," a man of the knife.

At Rosmuc, Pearse's cottage maintains a forlorn dignity beside the lake, but a sign between it and the road says that fishing rights are reserved and threatens prosecuution for their infringement. There is a new police barracks successor to the one burnt down not long ago-"to give employment" a wag says; and a notice behind the bar tells (iri English only) of "EEC Direction No 225 Headage of Cattle in Dis-

I advantaged Area.s Benefits." The proopnetor says she hasn't seen so much English money in circulation for three or four years-other summers there it wasn't worthwhile separating it. Thirty thousand pounds will soon be spent on a community centre which can be used as a dance hall- this in a community of 200 and odd households, "half of them one old bachelor or two old bachelors living together." There are supposed to be 219 houses in the locality but a guard doing a survey could only find 204. The others, presumably, were abandoned.

At Scoil na Bhfian Father Piarais O'Duil is in charge. He wears an open-necked blue shirt and speaks with enthusiasm of recruitment of city children, 250 at a time throughout the summer. I refrain from asking him about their class background and perhaps raising aI,l argument about the language becoming another middle-class advantage trick, but when I lived in Ringsend I never heard of any ehiluren going to the Gaeltaeht in the summer holidays.

Driving away from the school we meet an endless stream of them on bicycles, a sudden kaleidoscope of coloured rain-roof clothing against the green and grey. In the pub at Screeb they are still playing twentyyfive and talking about the price of cattle in  the language the children have come to learn. On the Clifden Road the Dutch and German cars are still streaming west, the drivers wearing dark glasses under a dark sky.

In every town in Ireland a boutique: Tricia's Boutique, Joan's Boutique, even the homely Norah's. In the pubs of every town, Cabaret. "Boutique" and "Cabaret" are the great naturalised words of the seventies, but then to be sure, we naturalised "garage" and "restaurant" long ago.

Outside every town new "Georgian" houses. In the old streets of many towns real Georgian houses moulder into decay. Georgian is one of the great words of the seventies. At the fine art auction in the Mansion House everyything is Georgian: chairs, tables, halllstands, fire-irons, Victorian bed-steads. A people with no taste and hardly any visual sense is obsessed by the name and the faint whisper of a time when the opppressor knew what was what.

On every stretch of road Band B signs.

Supplying Band B is the great new industry.

Round the ring of Kerry, in sparkling sunshine which seems almost miraculous, go the Dutch and German cars, their drivers stiU"~'wearing dark glasses. On the hill over the lake in Killlarney, in full view of it and from it, perch the square, modern Germ~n chalets and the German Hotel. There was a row about planning permission but the Germans won. The hotel-and chalets are owned by the concern which brought the huge new crane factory to the town. What, I ask, do they corne for? One man tells me the tourists corne for the past, for soutterains, cromlechs, and dolmens; about which they are very knowledgeeable. Another that the executives come here because you'd want to be Baron Thyssen to have a life like they have at home. Here they have boating and shooting and fishing and maids in starched aprons.

In Ballybunion a middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows recites "The Stag At Eve Had Drunk His Fill," a poem of connsiderable length by Sir Walter Scott. He is a local. His friends evidently know what to expect and prompt him when he falters. They are small-town cronies who drink together during the long winter months. They too are part of the past.

Motor-cyclists gratuitously revving their engines, riding - back and forward. Gangs of youths and girls. Why, having seen no evidence of any violence, do I think they are dangerous? We have been conditioned by the newspapers and the media to think each other dangerous. Perhaps they think I am. Humble people, couples and in-laws, in the hotel lounge singing "I Did It My Way" with enormous intensity. But they didn't. They did it the way somebody else said they would.

At two o'clock in the morning the distant rock-beat merges with the sound of the sea. Below a- sort of embankment a couple lies on the wet grass in the lightly falling rain. She appears to have taken her trousers off, he to have kept his on. It could be anywhere, but yet it's somehow unmistakeably Ireland. They are doing it their way.

Time was when we were all supposed to find illuminations of our common ancestral past at the big rural festivals. In the early days of the state there - was an approved myth about such gatherings being the ultimate in Irishness and there wa s also the 'myth of classlessness. The poets of the Free State were never done singing their praises. They spoke of the beauty of the lasses. They said it was of an order to induce dementia among strong young sheep farmers from the back of the hills and even in the poet himself, who was probably a civil servant desperately hoping for a transfer to Radio Eireann. The poeticism of the thimble-rigger, the trick 0' the loop man, and the other pathetic operatives of the '{Irish fairground was a constant theme. Being born and brought up in a rural parts themselves, the poets had probably once looked on such exotic strangers with wide-eyed wonder.

Puck Fair begins with the enthroning of the goat on a high platform in the square at Killorglin, supposedly at six o'clock. gn Th ursday. At six thirty on a reasonably' fine evening a subdued, not to say depresssed, crowd was still being informed about what was going to happen by a member of the committee with a hand microphone. He was coatless, had a slight though not pronounced Kerry accent, and was obviously a cut above some of us in the social scale recognised locally. He said he saw many Germans among us, and told us that in 1928 the German flag had been flown along with the Irish one from the top of the platform to celebrate the crossing of the Atlantic by a German aeroplane with an Irish crew member. "So, well done, Germany."

As the minutes passed he was driven to very remote expedients to fill in the time but he kept gallantly on. He said he had just been handed a poem by a certain Sigerson Clifford, a poet who had written something about Puck Fair and he would like to react a bit of it out to us. Since I remembered the work of the said Sigerson from the long ago, the lines read out held no surprises for me. Nor was I overly surrprised when a few minutes later the young man said, "I believe there is a whole book of poetry about Puck Fair written by this Sigerson Clifford, so if any of you have any interest in literature perhaps you'd like to try to get hold of it."

At length he was able to announce that the parade was at hand, the Queen and King Puck were coming, and would we all move back a bit to let them into the square. There were two pipe bands, one of them a "ladies" to which we were asked to give a big hand. After that came some bare-tighed Fenian warriors, one of them a female, on horseback. Then, just when a sensible man might be about to despair of the whole proceedings, to the complete astonishment of myself and some nearby Germans, there was carried into the square an indubitable, unrnistakeable, ugly-as-sin phallus. It was about four feet high. It appeared to be made of some sort of grey paper material and it pointed unashamedly at the heavens. It had a platform of its own, also carried by Fenian warriors, and: there may even have been a school of thought which said it was a round tower, but you can take it from your corrrespondent that it was a phallus and nothing else but. Round towers are prettier.

The commentator, who had been giving us a brief history of the ladies' pipe band and other matters, made no reference to it whatever; and so I shall never know what he or anybody else thought it was. True, a drunk near me did call out "What's that yoke there?" and he and his friends evidently thought he had asked a funny question; but by that time the commmentator was welcoming the queen herrself, a wee mite not yet nubile perched on a dray and accompanied by her attendants (similar) and enthusing about the Billy Goat, who at last had come, tied down securely by all four feet and exuding that air of complete well-being which is the hallmark of a greyhound who has had his sufficiency of vallium. "Isn't she beautiful?" he asked us about the little wench who was being towed after the phallus round the square; and "Isn't he a splendid animal?" he queried of us about the beast itself, but neither by word nor sign did he illuminate for us what tradition told him about the thing made of grey paper.

And if it, whatever it was, seemed to promise totally uninhibited joys and disportings to come, I am afraid I saw no sign of them. The commentator told US about the Ceilidhe, about the old-time waltz competition, about the dance for which the band known as Fish and Chips had been procured. He asked the prize winners in the egg and spoon race to come to the platform. He reminded us several times that "Confessions From A Holiday Camp" was to be seen at the town's cinema. He besought us to enjoy ourselves in whatever way we chose to celebrate the crowning of the Puck; but it soon became evident that Puck Fair was principally an event at which pints were consumed on a rather dull and repetitive, if admittedly somewhat gargantuan, scale. The pubs were open, that Was what it amounted to; and they would stay open till three o'clock in the morning.

True there were the tatty little gambling tables so beloved by the Free State poets. There were the swings and roundabouts. There were the fortune tellers and the traders from afar (well, from Tralee anyway). True also that, as in the case of Eyre Square, the drinking was no longer the totally male, rancorous or lugubrious drinking of times gone by. There were young walls parading the streets and in and out of the pubs as well as young fellas. There was, let us even hope, some commpanioning and coupling before dawn lit the eastern slopes of Beenmore. But when I left at an advanced hour they had certainly not begun to tear the clothes off each other. There were doormen at a number of pubs to keep the tinkers out. The whole thing was patently sinking into booze.

Ten miles away in a rather smart hostelry of the middle class persuasion the subject of Puck Fair came up next evening and it soon became evident that consensus held it to be an event which had little, if anything to recommend it. Nobody quite went so far as to say it was for tinkers and bog trotters only, but that was the general impression. I had thought at first that a class thing had crept in recently; and in the streets and pubs of Killorglin I had wondered at the absence of all but townsspeople, tourists, small farmers, and tinkers. Now I saw that the classless ness of it was a myth propagated by Radio Eireann poets. Puck Fair was an orgy for the lower orders and at best it was regarded by other Kerry people as a curiosity or with disdainful amusement. Judging from the phallus, there may, there must have been something which has degenerated, something in which a whole community, priests and princes, included, perhaps once participated. Now it has degenerated beyond recall. A few days after the fair this year a newspaper sugggested that there was a strong feeling among the more respectable citizens of the town itself that the whole thing should be abolished in spite of the money it brought in. It was, they said, a festival for tinkers only and the tinkers were a danger and a nusiance to other people. King Puck is dead. Long live John Travolta and Olivia Newton John.

Was it or was it riot the summer of the Boom? Mr Colley and Professor O'Donoghue Were adamant that The Boom was coming, was under way, was here. Various bodies of experts saw, on the contrary, nothing but downturns in the entrails. One thing is certain: The Boom proves an illusion, Mr Colley and Professor O'Donoghue are merrily walkking the plank.

It was undoubtedly the summer of The Breathalyser, Much or what your corresspondent observed must be read in the light of that fact. It may just be that withhout the Breathalyser the Irish people en fete would have been drunker than they were. There might even have been more singing of Kevin Barry .

On the night the Supreme Pontiff was laid to rest I went around the Leeson Street discos with a friend. They have appparently more than doubled their number in the last few months and there are now near a score of them within a very small radius of each other, 13 between the Adelaide Road and Hatch Street corners alone so whatever other reasons there may be, there is certainly an obvious one for calling this stretch of Leeson Street The Strip, and for many people the summer now vanishing will have been the first summer of the discos and whatever happened after them.

About what is supposed to happen those who go there, male and female, seem in no doubt. In one of the first establishments we entered I was introduced to an affable fellow in light summer clothing who was said to be a big, big spender and who was entertaining several people to Steak Burgoyne. "If you're looking for your Nat King Cole" he said, "you can't miss. There's plenty of it about tonight." Of course your correspondent couldn't be sure until he tried, but from the looks of things there may actually well have been.

Make no mistake about it, however, the proprietors of these establishments mean to make a break with the old tradition in these islands which says that places devoted to the pursuit of your Nat King Cole must be rather sleazy and seconddrate. These are classy places, so classy that they are turning business away; and before getting in anywhere you have to submit yourself to an examination through a peep hole or grill. This is so that the doorman can get an idea of the general cut of your gib, including presumably your (money) spending power, but nearly all the places we visited had specific regulations about denims and the wearing of a tie. So much for the permissive society aspect of it all.

The first place we went into occupied a hall floor as well as a basement, and it had a plush, richly furnished ante-chamber with old-fashioned leather sofas, like the drawing room of the sort of Edwardian establishment where the lady in charge preferred to establish a free and easy, brandy and soda atmosphere before enquiring about the client's tastes. This was followed by a quiet dining-room where couples and foursomes ate what seemed like good and not too expensive rood in moderate comfort and discreet surrounddings. The dancing, the foodless drinking, the jumping lights, the altogether hellish noise, and the casual-acquaintance making were downstairs in a long room where the tables had telephones so that you could ring somebody at another table and ask them to dance or whatever. (Your corrrespondent's table was number 3 and nobody rang him up, but since the number was visible only to those at the table he didn't see how they could have. Incidenntally Jack Buchanan visited an establishhment where there were such table teleephone in the movie "Goodnight Vienna," circa 1931, so there's nothing new in the nightclub business.)

By the time we visited the second or third establisbment my friend and I had however, acquired. a channing companion who is a habitue and she told me things I would otherwise have had to discover by empirical methods. One place, for example, has a reputation for attracting married men and single ladies; another married dames and single gents. Some are places where you tend to bring YOUr own date, wife Or girl friend, others where you have a fair good chance of finding a companion de nuit -or, let's face it, what's left either of the nuit or of your staying power after yoU have jumped and jived and guzzled Chamberin at five pounds a bottle until four in the morning. Pressed further she told us that the conjunctions made were not, for me most part, commerrcial. Many of the girls were working girls who paid their own whack and were not looking for anything from anybody except, perhaps. yOU know what. As to venues, she insisted she didn't know that much about it all! But she thought it was often as not the car.

And so mere yon have it. There may be two opinions about whether going down into the basements of Leeson Street and submitting yourself to the noise and the lights and the cheery, cheery converse for serveral hours is more like hard work than whatever you're going to get is worth. What would bother me a little more is the success orientation of which most of mese places and people stink. There was one place whiclt was a bit more democratic and bohemian in the old sense than others, and the girds were, many of trhem, human-seeming as well as personable enough, but the general impression was of successs, conformity of a very intense degree, a conformity to which the sex bit was almost ancillary. As for spreading it around, what with peepholes and ties and the necessity for five pound notes in every pocket they could almost be said to be restricting it.

The R.D.s Stalls and compartments for both humans and horses, many private places of retreat. In a large empty, private tea room, with white table cloths three little girls are being served with tea, cales and sandwiches by a maid in full uniform. Just next door, the wet general public is queueing up for soup and chips. Down at the end of the jumpiong arena, on a sort of Hill 16, young gurriers are clinging to the trees. When any member of the Irish Team has a clear round the cheering is shrill and ecstatic. Later, In the main exhibition hall, a wave of excitemtne sweeps over us all. " Ireland has won, Ireland has won! somebody shouts. Why o I find this more offensive even than talk about "Ireland" winning or losing other sorts of sporting events? Is it because I feel people have been conned by the democratiic television into taking an interest in what is essentiall y someboody else's affair? A few minutes later I watch the middle classes filing down from the seats in the stand which the had booked many weeks in advance.For the most part quiet suburban people, now anxious about the rain and baout getting hinme,. Mothers and daughters. Yes, they have been conned. The horsey aristocrats, many of them English, were in the private stands.

Croke Park: Kerry overwhelming Roscommon in the pouring rain. In front of me are two counrty swains and two lasses. In the interval between the minor match and the seniorone of the girls gets up to go somewhere. "My arse is all wet", she remarks cheerfully. A Roscommon man behind me, displeased by a member of the other team shouts "G' long out a that ye dirty fuckery ye" Go home to Kerry ye dog ye". He ehorts his own: "Break his fuckin'leg". When one of the Roscommon team is hurt he is concerned and indignang. IWhile a Kerry player writhes on the fround in front of us he yells: "Get up ye good for nothin'! Get up ye cunt ye!".

The Kerry girl beside me is with two Roscommon supporters, a boy and a girl. She tells me that she lives in a furnished room in Rathmines for which she puys ten pounds per week. "But its nice to have your pwn place". She goes home by bus every third weeke-end.  She doesn't go out much when she gets there. But then, she doesn't go out much in town either except when "we all" go out.

There are no fights. In the long ago there would always be a fight somewhere nearby. While blows were struck and curses exchanged one would clutch one's father's hand in a mixture of terror and excitement.

Late at night in the Oscar Theatre in Ballsbridge Mr Alan Amsby, otherwise Mr Pussy, entertains a mixed audience which is not camp, not overly queer: "us" in fact. Some of it is sharp enough stuff, some of it old broad music hall, but we are in a relaxed mood and we seem prepared to take anything. "I have a request here for Angela Dympna Joan and all the rest of the boys in Bartley Dunnes."
"If you are driving home tonignt please be careful because twenty per cent of the population is due to accidents".
There is a fire-eater, stripper, and amongst other revue sketches, a genuinely outrageous take-off of the sort of young priest that used to appear on RTE's nauseating "Outook" feature by a highly talented performer whose name I cannot catch. A general impression of some sort of bravery and defiance as well as of a native cabaret for struggling to be born. Good Lucj to all concerned.

On the 8 August the London bookmaker William Hill laid odds of five to one against anybody predicting 3 dry spell of two consecutive days during the remainder of the month. A host of takers rushed in, the weekend of August 12th and 13th proving especially popular among the first punters. On Sunday August 13th, the day Kerry played Roscommon at Croke Park it poured steadily and almost without cease over the islands. After that, although the offer remained open and some money was eventually won, business began to slacken off. Gamblers like everybody else, have a sense of the inevitable. The summer was a wash-out and everybody knew it.