Super Mac

Peter McCarthy's quest
By Martin Russell
Irish American Post Book Editor

Peter McCarthy was on a quest...part of it hilarious (his drive to have a drink in all the McCarthy's pubs in Ireland) and part of it serious (a search for an identity). This travel correspondent with an English father and Irish mother tackles both in his McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland  (St. Martin's Press, 2001, $24.95). The book was a slam-dunk on the Irish best-seller lists where readers guffawed and immediately identified with his keen observations about tourism, out-of-country land developers and the mewing Celtic Tiger. Stateside, McCarthy's  has just begun to find its way to the bookshelves, where anyone in search of him/herself can find a funny and literate road map done in an absorbingly and alternating comic-serious read. 

Throughout the '90s, McCarthy was a popular television journalist hot on the trail of off-beat stories from Berlin to Copenhagen to Zanzibar. He was in Red Square during an attempted military coup and found himself hacking his way through a Costa Rican rain forest. Perhaps his stint as a stand-up comic in the 1980s helped him through these challenges. 

The travel bug had bitten him much earlier, however. "On my first year out of college in the 1970s, I hitchhiked 23,000 miles around the U.S. and Canada.  It was the trip of my life. Now I make a living at it," he chuckled on a recent book store gallop around the East Coast. 

He hopes to make it to a Midwestern round later this year, after another Canadian book signing trip — especially after hearing that Finbar McCarthy, whose McCarthy's Auld Sod pub in Saukville, Wis., would probably lay out a welcome mat...just as other McCarthys might be inclined elsewhere in Irish America. 

He would like to get back to Madison, Wis., where on his first visit years back he discovered what cold weather was really like. "Jesus Christ, I was very seriously freezing.  But I was young, vibrant and thought all that was immaterial," he recalled.

"After my stint at the BBC, a publisher approached me and asked if I would do a book about my travel adventures.  But this came first," he recalled of the opportunity given to him to write.  "I was questioning who I am, just like millions of others, I suppose, who have one part here and another part of themselves there."

McCarthy's mum, Margaret, was an Irish nurse World War II who came to work in Liverpool's Dockside and often brought her son back home to visit the rels.  "I got to know the country really well and decided that as an adult I'd come to see if my impressions of belonging were genetic, nostalgic or idiotic.  I wanted to know if Ireland is being canned by Guinness." 

His mother is now 82, and his dad, Ken, is 79. They both live in the same Liverpool house in which he grew up. "They're delighted with the success of the book," McCarthy said. Other relatives in Ireland also said how much they liked McCarthy's Bar. 

He pointed out that his feelings leading to the Irish search were genuine.  "They were powerful. And I've gotten a lot of letters after the book came out in Ireland and the UK from folks who felt as I did.  I think  if a family comes from some place, it encodes a feeling, a sense or romanticism. Ireland has really done a great job in marketing itself as that kind of place," he explained.

"Anyway, I've always been a bar man," he laughed.  "I don't like corporate bars and restaurants, preferring the individual kinds.  In Ireland, you can try them all until you find the one that fits. There is a whole other Ireland a mile off the road that I love to explore," McCarthy said.  On his writing adventure, which took about a year, he said he tried to let his Celtic side overtake his Anglo-Saxon side by not being totally planned in his search.

"You need space in your journey to find those happy accidents that make the best encounters," he emphasized.  "Of course, you have to be brave or you won't get it done.  And I certainly do love crisp linens and minibars of all kinds, but for the most part, the interesting stuff just falls into your lap."

Interesting indeed, McCarthy comes across English hippies living on a windswept mountains and followed barefoot pilgrims on their spiritual voyage to an island called Purgatory where well-soled (souled?) priests -- in true good-cop/bad cop fashion -- alternately berated and encouraged them on their personal emotional treks.

McCarthy's Bar sports a photo of Himself on the cover, standing in the doorway of a real McCarthy's bar in Castletownbarr, with a bespectacled nun  sitting on a nearby bench while sipping a stout.  With a throaty chuckle, the writer doggedly declined to identify the good sister. "I swore to protect her anonymity," he claimed good-naturedly. Yet he did identity the fellow at the end of the bar pictured on the inside flap as a priest.

McCarthy and his wife Irene, a former accountant, live with their daughters, 12 and 3, in their rural East Sussex home called Owl House. "Rather Pooh Bear, don't you think?" he asked. The house, actually three interlocking old cottages, was built in 1760.  "We love it here although we do travel a lot together. No one cares what you do for a living. It's a nice place for kids, with vast meadows out front. Trouble is, with the hoof and mouth problem, we can't go for rambles out there any more," he said, referring to Britain's worsening animal husbandry woes.

McCarthy wrote his book in longhand, admitting he was not computer literate. "The pen is instructive, it is an extension of me,"  he said.  On trips, he kept his ear tuned to conversations, which he tried to transcribe after returning to his rooms. "I've trained myself to rule out hangovers. I guess I have an internal barometric that keeps me going."

"I am a great believer in books, even in this computer culture. You absorb a feeling for words from books and that is a big thing to me. Writing for television was rewarding but it was gone into the ether after being aired.  Part of me was yearning for permanence, hence the book," McCarthy added.

Well, there are enough McCarthy's bars around the world that could keep this particular McCarthy on the road permanently.  May the road rise to meet him....