Where have all the signs to Muff gone?

Muff is a small town in Donegal in the North West of Ireland. One of the things you notice when driving into it is that there are no sign-posts pointing towards the town and nothing within the town itself to tell you where you are. This may be due to embarrassment on behalf of the local council or it could be because the signs keep getting pinched and now reside in Irish bars from Manhattan to Mandarin.

The petrol company “Top” have a garage on the edge of town. Apparently, they used to provide their staff with sweatshirts that said “Top Muff” but it led to complaints from the female employees. The village doesn’t have an airport but if it did, the signs for “Muff landing strip” would bring a chuckle to the hearts of Irish teenagers who must be bored with the joke about the annual Muff diving championships.

Muff aside, (as the Bishop said to the actress) Donegal is a pretty well sign-posted place. In fact all of Ireland now is, as the change from miles to kilometres a few years ago coincided with the country having a few bob to throw around. Ireland finally had a chance to dress up all those roads that the Germans unwittingly paid for in EU grants.

The blog went on holiday for a few weeks (as you may have noticed) and travelled back to the Old country. I felt like one of those returning yanks that Irish families used to entertain in the 1970s. All I needed was a Stetson hat and a condescending attitude to complete the picture. My uncle used to visit us from Boston when I was a kid and we’d drag him around all the relatives and plague him for money. Well, it turns out that they do that to people returning from Australia too.

I came with several objectives. The main one was to indulge in some Guinness for the first time in eighteen months, to sample some of the culinary delights that can only be found in Ireland, such as Curry chips and Tayto crisps, and to see if the death of the Celtic Tiger had made Ireland liveable again.

I’m pleased to report that all objectives were met and a fine time was had by all. The Guinness tasted like mother’s milk, the curry sauce was thick enough to stand a spoon in and the absence of obscene wealth has made everyone normal again. Before I left, it was impossible to hold a conversation in Ireland without it veering off into a discussion on property prices, what to spend your Special Savings account on, or what size of bouncy castle you were renting for your kid’s Communion. Thankfully, the recession means that conversations have returned to their normal status of football and Michael Jackson jokes.

I apologise to any of my Irish readers who have lost their jobs or found that their Romanian investment property is now in negative equity, but I really feel that the recession has been good for Ireland. There was a vulgarity about the Celtic Tiger that reminded me of Dell Boy in “Only Fools and Horses” after he had made his first million. One thing everyone seems agreed on is that we had really lost the run of ourselves. Now it’s possible to a chat with people in shops and to book a hotel room on the day you want to stay in it.

And the tiger has at least left a few toys behind. All that decking won’t disappear overnight and if the worse comes to the worse, it can at least be used for firewood. Everyone seems to have an “08” Sports utility vehicle, which assuming you can afford the petrol and insurance, will last until at least 2015 and the bouncy castles have to be used somehow and could be turned into cheap fitness centres for unemployed teenagers.

But the legacy of the tiger is pernicious in other respects. During the boom years the Irish government did everything in its power to help the building industry for reasons that are unclear. However, the large bribes paid to numerous government members probably helped. As a result, the country is now littered with ugly holiday homes in areas that used to be called “places of outstanding natural beauty”. As a child, my Dad used to take me to the beach at Baginbun every year. It was a pretty remote place on the Hook peninsula in Wexford and for years was marked only by a few nosy cows and a sign noting the spot as the original invasion point of Ireland by those perfidious Brits in 1169.

Now the beach is surrounded by hundreds of identical houses, standing empty as a silent memorial to the psychotic obsession with property that consumed Ireland for the past ten years.

Thankfully, it’s possible to find places where the blight of the tiger didn’t reach. I have seen many great places in the world. But few compare with the trip from Louisberg to Clifden. As you head towards Connemara, the landscape becomes rockier and the mountains higher. The wow factor increases and just when you think you’ve seen it all, you sweep round a corner into Killary Harbour. The evening sun was shining directly up the harbour towards the picturesque town of Leenane and there was not a sound. A little graveyard stands at the nexus of the harbour and the poor souls buried there are washed each night by the soothing nectar of the setting sun.

Carry on towards Clifden and you pass Kylemore Abbey, nestling at the end of a lake and offering itself selflessly to a million holiday photos. The West was not awake but it was all the better for that.

That is the real Ireland. A country of wild and natural beauty. Go there before the tiger recovers and somebody builds Spanish style hacienda villas all over it.