It’s a Victorian house complete with bay windows and stately steps to the front door. The property includes eight bedrooms and five bathrooms. It’s airy, painted a jolly shade of blue and situated in Donegal’s Ailt an Chorráin, or Burtonport, close-but-not-too-close to the wild Atlantic.
Sounds pleasant. So what might go bump in the night to deter nervy buyers? It’s the house known far and wide across the Donegal countryside as the former home of the Screamers, the Atlantis Commune long resident in the area.
The commune had a colourful history, arriving in 1974 to practise its form of primal therapy at a time when many people influenced by the new ideas of the 1960s were colonising the west of Ireland. They chose to do their screaming in the Gaeltacht village from which the ferry to Árainn Mhór runs.
If the sense of difference wasn’t clear from the noises emanating from the house, it was also colourfully painted with esoteric symbols and eyes surrounding the windows.
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Media coverage began almost immediately at the time, including a court case taken by a University of Galway lecturer seeking a barring order against his son, who allegedly “took me by the throat and all the time kept up a series of blood-curdling animalistic screams”.
Upon being vacated, the building retained its appeal for other unorthodox communities. In 1982, the Silver Sisterhood, a neopagan religious community rather than a New-Age lifestyle sect, took over. It morphed, as neopagan religious communities are wont to do, into a simulacrum of a Victorian boarding school for women in their 20s and 30s known as St Bride’s.
The house has in recent times been renamed Foirnis, after the Connemara island elsewhere in the Gaelic universe. It has come down in price by 25 per cent since its initial listing, to €595,000, which may be enough to attract a new controversial community to the area, and the building’s legend lives on.
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Udder voices
Spare a thought for Dublin Independent TD Barry Heneghan, who, in the teeth of the heatwave summer, recently entered a Dublin shop in search of a refreshing pail of unpasteurised milk, to no avail: “I walked into my local shop and I could buy an apple-flavoured vape,” he said. “I could inhale it. I could also buy 20 cigarettes. I cannot, however, go in and buy raw milk easily.
“My granny drank raw milk and she lived to 98,” Heneghan told Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon, whose research may not have taken this point into account.
The TD went on to point out that Ireland allows “multinationals to come here and sell us cans of carbonated drinks with 40g of sugar, but we do not allow someone to get a glass of raw milk”. Point taken.
Raw milk is, within certain bounds, legal in Ireland. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland recommends boiling it before use, which is actually a more extreme form of processing than standard pasteurisation, but it can be got. Some comes directly from the producer to the local community, such as in farmer-journalist Hannah Quinn-Mulligan’s Tory Hill House farm shop, but the testing and labelling regimen is strict.
Heneghan’s stomping ground of Dublin Bay North, incorporating such bucolic pastures as Raheny, Artane and Fairview, leaves him with few options in this respect, with many of the capital’s pickup locations relying on Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, the organic capital of Ireland, to supply.
“There are not many farms in my constituency,” Heneghan admits. “The only fields we have are GAA pitches.”
There are also a few golf courses which might make good grazing, however.
Taking back Halloween
With St Patrick’s Day, Ireland already has one festival that not only draws tourists to disburse the doughty dollar, but spreads soft power across the globe, with celebrations in places that have plenty of snakes and limited numbers of Irish people.
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Is it enough? It is not. In 2018, Fáilte Ireland undertook a “major feasibility study” on the topic of Halloween. It “identified” that Ireland “has a legitimate claim to the origin of modern-day Halloween”. Which means a green light to take back what is ours and tell everyone we invented it.
Halloween is genetically descended from Samhain, the ancient Gaelic festival involving hilltop fires and a thinning of the veil defending the realm of mortals from the otherworld. In admixture with other harvest traditions, it produced the orange-plastic US understanding of Halloween, which has spread across the world without giving us credit.
Preparations are well-advanced, with local authorities invited last year to join a three-year “Home of Halloween Destination Development (Pilot) Scheme” to provide things such as “seasonal destination hubs that can deliver a critical mass of authentic Samhain and Halloween-themed visitor experiences”.
It’s going well so far, and Fáilte Ireland is now seeking strategic and project management expertise to help co-ordinate the chosen local authorities as it progresses.
What’s the ultimate goal? The tourist promotion body imagines the following: “The Island of Ireland is internationally recognised as the authentic home of Halloween, motivating visitors to choose Ireland as a ‘must do’ cultural tourism experience in the off-season, generating economic benefit, sustaining communities and creating employment across the island.”
Forget Sleepy Hollow.
Better late than never
Better late than never is wisdom that has served Pico Lopes well. The Crumlin-Cabo Verdean defender turned professional at age 24 and was 34 playing in his first World Cup.
After missing a LinkedIn call-up to the island nation’s squad, the Shamrock Rovers defender circled back and set in motion a chain of events that led to him dealing better with Lionel Messi at the World Cup than England’s well-remunerated star defenders could manage.
The important thing is he got there, arriving at household name status via the international route after hundreds of stalwart domestic appearances went unremarked upon by the wider public.
So perhaps it’s no issue that Dublin City Council’s “special civic welcome” for the superstar comes somewhat late. On Saturday, July 25th, an event is planned for Eamonn Ceannt Park in Crumlin to welcome him back.
By then he’ll have appeared on the pitch for Shamrock Rovers up to three times, including twice in Europe, on top of the various RTÉ punditry appearances and presumably trips to the supermarket and petrol station and the various other places one goes when one has already returned to daily life Ireland several weeks ago.
