THE DECLINE OF AN ORGY
By RAWLE KNOX
ON the last Sunday in July the first of this summer's barefoot pilgrims moiled their way up Croagh Patrick, and next day a Dublin newspaper that does its bit to assist the rediscovery of the Irish language by publishing a phrase a day chose for translation: Q. Were you on the Pilgrimage? A. I was not. A, I felt, was so curt that he must be hiding something, and two days later, in Galway, I saw him personified. He was a very large man, very red in the face, with a towering vacancy of upper lip, and he was walking down a small street singing, in a bathroom tenor, "Come back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff." After pleasing himself with a number of encores he held a low note too long, exhausted his breath and toppled forward, falling clumsily on the pavement and into a deep, alcoholic sleep. What he omitted to tell Q. was that he would have more need of a pilgrimage after Galway Race Week than before.
I was at Galway Races because I had a week's holiday and did not wish to appear odd. It is assumed in Ireland that if you have managed to disentangle yourself from work in the last week of July you will automatically go to Galway Races, automatically drink all night and every night, sleep—if at all—on some stranger's floor, and, when it is all over, wonder how on earth you ever got home. Even the Bishop of Galway swallows a large part of this assumption. For though his annual diocesan letter, issued on the eve of Race Week, appeals to the public to behaye itself, the appeal seems something of a formality when he goes on to warn parents to keep their children off the streets at night so that they may not witness scenes "in flat contradiction to Christian decency." Bishop Browne is known throughout Ireland to be the toughest of disciplin- arians ; he led the battle last year against the Galway Blazers' choice of their joint master (a lady who had been through the divorce courts), and won—by inducing farmers to bar their fields to the hunt. But the men of Galway are tough also, and their discipline is largely their own, schooled by the exigencies of nature. They are God-fearing but sternly conservative, and a parish priest• who tried to introduce rugby football to a rural stronghold of the Gaelic game found himself respectfully ostracised for fifteen years. By tradition Galway Race Week is an orgy, and Galwegians seem determined to keep it so.
,Galway bound, we drove from Ennis, where the talk was all of horses, to Gort, and stopped for lunch. In the bar the talk was horsier than ever. West Wind was a certainty for the Plate, but you'ld get no price for him. You couldn't rule out Royal Enfield, with Martin Moloney on him. (The unique Martin Moloney rides in the top class both on the flat and over hurdles.) " Silent Prayer," said a van-driver whose inspiring hoarseness of voice must have been due to standing in draughty stables ; if Tim Moloney was flying over from England to ride him he must have known his younger brother wouldn't have the beating of him. (The van- driver's confident logic was good enough for me ; and Silent Prayer did win the Galway Plate.) After Gort the file of cars thrusting towards the racecourse at Ballybrit grew denser ; the last five miles were covered in a thick white cloud of flying dust. No one needs any excuse for a thirst at Galway Races, but here we started off with a throatful of dust and a most un-Irish sun blazing down on our heads. Bunched on the race-track itself, we waited for the weary operation of a single turnstile to let the crowd into the grandstand. We wouldn't get anywhere by pushing, said the garda, trying to push us back. We didn't get anywhere by the time of the first race, and the horses thumped by a few yards behind a hundred or so late-comers who were still struggling to enter.
Inside, the long bar under the grandstand looked like Oxford Circus tube station in the rush hour. It was all sweat, shirt-sleeves and the despondent faces of unlucky men. (Only one favourite won on that first day.) Galway is a country meeting, and that means a men's meeting. There were women, of course, and they were making a brave attempt to show that they had a place in the scheme of things. But the New Look, by the time it had unrolled its length as far as Galway, appeared distinctly novel ; it seems that Dior came to Ballybrit by way of Athenry—and other such provincial trans- forming places. However, the men, going through their crowded routine of a bet, a beer and a rush for a good place in the stand, hardly noticed. And for those that did, Ballybrit, despite its dramatic setting—the castle in the course's centre and the view out over Galway Bay—was a difficult place for gallantry and romance. As I left I saw a man sitting on the grass outside one of the bars and tenderly holding a girl in his arms. The pair were surrounded by a ring of a few hundred empty bottles.
" From the fury of the O'Flaherties," it was once inscribed over Galway's west gate, "Good Lord deliver us." The Tribes of Galway were lucky never to know the fury of the loud speakers. " Bongo, bongo, bongo," they dinned in Eyre Square. " I don't war= leave the Congo ; no, no, no, no, no, no." The hurdy-gurdies roared and the fruit machines clanked. In one corner a sad little Hindu from Cawnpore was doing sad little conjuring tricks from Gamage's. The bars were open until midnight ; and if you happened to be inside when they closed you stayed there till they opened next morning. Everyone behaved, not as though he had known you all his life—there was a thirst-provoking tendency to tell life stories— but as though he was quite prepared to know you for the rest of it.
I will admit that I like a good orgy. I could have been a tenacious hanger-on at the courts of the Roman Emperors or the Russian Czars. But a good orgy must have some warmth at its core—a love of wine, perhaps, or women, or even of extravagance for its own sake. In Galway the orgy had a better centre than any of these, the love of hospitality. The Races originated, of course, as the point-to-point meeting of the Galway Blazers, and the members of that hunt have always been renowned for their impartial generosity. You can still go to Galway as a complete stranger during Race Week, make a casual acquaintanceship, and find yourself drinking and playing poker in half the houses in the city before the night is out. But, alas, Galway has discovered that Race Week is good for trade. " The whole year we live for this week," a railwayman told me over a pint of porter. To judge by the prices prevailing it seems possible they may live the whole year on the proceeds of the week. And some of the ancient glories are becoming extremely dim. At the Galway Blazers Hunt Ball there were sweat, shirtsleeves and the uplifted faces of half-drunken men. A few members in dinner jackets and evening gowns tried to look as though this were the peak event of the social season, while the two best dancers on the floor were a couple of Civic Guards who had* presumably come in to enforce the licensing laws.
We left Galway at about four in the morning—early, they say, by Race Week standards. A trail of wobbling cyclists was heading south ; sometimes a man fell off, and less frequently remounted. At intervals cars were drawn up by the roadside, their drivers peace- fully asleep. Had they enjoyed themselves ? You could not avoid feeling the cold-bloodedness of this mass migration of persons, the majority of whom set out for Galway in the morning with the firm intention of being drunk by nightfall.
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