`Are ye right there, Michael, are ye right? Do you think that we'll be there before the night?" The West Clare Railway beloved of Michael has long gone out of service, but west Clare does have Ireland's one and only Postbus. The country's Postbus experiment began in 1982 with a pilot scheme in Clare. Are ye right there, Postie, are ye right? Twice a day, the An Post minibus leaves Ennis for a 68-mile clockwise trip through west Clare. It has seats for eight passengers, whom it picks up and drops off along the way in towns and villages such as Kilfenora, Lisdoonvarna, Lahinch and Inagh.
Like the Scottish Postbuses - from which An Post got the idea in the first place - the journey combines rural postal collections and deliveries with a local transport service. Although widespread in the Scottish Highlands, the scheme in Ireland was never extended to other areas of the country, although Donegal, Mayo, Connemara and parts of Kerry and Cork would seem ideal locations for such a service. It's a great altruistic idea, but as John Foley, public relations manager of An Post explains, the scheme has never been expanded because "It's not economically viable."
The afternoon Postbus leaves from the yard of Ennis post office at 3 p.m., Monday to Friday. When I arrive to board the bus at 2.45 p.m., it is already full, so I perch atop the luggage compartment. While criss-crossing the country over the years, I have spent a great many journeys standing in the aisles of overcrowded buses or sitting on my rucksack in the corridors of packed trains. Funnily enough, never once did I hear these national transport carriers mention Insurance or the dictum No Standing, let alone voice any concern for my creature comfort.
But hey, the times they are a-changing. Compo culture est arrive. Even the bould Michael himself wouldn't have got on as the ninth passenger on the West Clare Postbus that day. Like me, he'd have been told: "We don't reserve seats," and "We're not insured to carry non-seated passengers."
I get off the bus. I am not happy at all. It's now ten to three. Negotiations are done with telephones and a local taxi rank. My revised plan is: follow the bus by taxi until someone gets off and I can take their seat. No problem! Sorted!
Not quite, as it turns out. The arrival of the taxi five minutes later coincides with an examination of my pockets and the sinking realisation that I am in that situation which everyone has experienced at least once: the dreaded No Wallet Scenario. Not thinking I would need any more cash than the modest bus fare, I have left my wallet behind at the house where I am staying for the night.
It's three o'clock. Departure time for all those lucky seated passengers! The Postbus accelerates out of the yard, edges carefully past the taxi, and takes off down Bindon Street, heading for Corofin. As it disappears from sight into the misty afternoon, I meditate briefly on the fact that I now have a full understanding of that old Irish expression: Ah, you've missed the bus! Nothing for it but hop into the taxi, return to the house for the wallet and then try to catch up with the bus.
"I'm only driving a taxi three weeks," the driver confides, as we eventually get under way and head out of Ennis. "Would you be knowing the road to Corofin?" If Percy French was sitting in the back with me, he'd probably have to be restrained from warbling Do you think that we'll be there before the night?
We find the Corofin road. It's now 3.10. Vroom, vroom! I consult the timetable. The Postbus is due in Corofin at 3.35 p.m., where I know someone will be getting off. The miles go bumping by and no sign of the green bus swaying ahead of us. Corofin is a pretty riverside village with one long narrow main street. The post office, of course, is at the far end of this street.
We get stuck behind a herd of cows which appears from nowhere in one of those scenes of magical rural idyll, beloved of John Hinde photographers. It takes some considerable time to pass out these bovine critters. I sit in the back of the taxi, thinking steak, spare ribs, burgers.
At last, we spy the little post office. It's just gone 3.35 p.m. There is no sign of the bus, but perhaps it hasn't yet arrived! Pelt out of the taxi and into the building. "The Postbus?" I shriek from the door, in tones worthy of a trainee banshee.
The postmistress looks up, startled. "It's just gone this very minute!" she cries. "You'll surely catch up with it in Kilnaboy." Pelt out again. Remember taxi-driver doesn't know where he is going. Pelt in again for directions to Kilnaboy. "Turn right at Our Lady!" are the instructions. We vroom vroom past the grotto at the end of the village. The taxi driver is game for the chase, but getting anxious. "It's a pound a mile from here on out," he tells me, as we splash over the water-logged potholes. I do a few sums. At this rate, I'll soon be walking back to Ennis.
Kilnaboy, a couple of miles down the road. The green roof of the Postbus swims into sight. "Gotcha!" shouts the taxi-driver, beeping furiously and drawing up beside it. A passenger has got off in Corofin. Nobody else has got on. I collapse into the one vacant seat and wave the gallant, bewildered taxi-driver off. This is not quite the afternoon I had anticipated.
Is this what cruise liner passengers feel like when they miss the boat out of port and have to get speedboats to catch up? There's certainly enough water out there in west Clare to think we are afloat.
All this time, it has been raining: that persistent dreeping misty rain that windscreen wipers are ineffectual against. Clare is sodden. We're on the edge of the Burren here, stone country. Nor enough water to drown a man, nor enough earth to bury him, nor a tree to hang a man from. Not enough water? Obviously, Cromwell's man must never have been in Clare when the rain was falling, the turloughs were full and ducks and swans were languorously flapping their wings in fields flooded with water. You could have done away with an entire army that afternoon, no problem.
Bridget O'Donoghue is the woman with a host of shopping bags from Moran's Drapers of Ennis, who is sitting next to me. When I have recovered my breath, I ask her Bridget where she is off to.
"Stone," says she.
"Pardon?"
"Stone."
Is this some arcane name for a village in the limestone landscape of the Burren? I've never heard of a place called Stone. It's not on the list of places where the Postbus stops. Then, for the third time she repeats the name and this time I hear it properly. "Sdoon."
"Ah, Lisdoonvarna!"
Sister Mary Bernard Fleming has also been shopping in Ennis. She is a member of the Sisters of Charity, who have a retirement home in Lisdoonvarna. "The Stella Maris. It used to be a hotel, but the sisters took it over a long time ago. The Postbus is very handy," she confides. "It means that I don't have to be inconveniencing any of the sisters. They don't have to be driving in to collect me."
The bus bumps on past hedgerows ghostly with whitethorn as Sister Mary Bernard recounts the history of the foundation of her French order to me. ". . . and two of our sisters were guillotined during the Revolution," she finishes serenely, as Lisdoonvarna hoves into sight and she starts gathering up her bags.
Gerard Hehir has been driving the afternoon Postbus run for three years. "Friday is the really busy day. Pension day. They're all out that day," he reports. We don't reserve seats. I have a vision of elderly ladies and gentlemen whacking each other on the ankles with brollies and shopping bags in their scramble to gain a seat on the Friday afternoon bus. I feel marginally better. He leaves Sister Mary Bernard off at the Stella Maris. Then we go up town, past the Pump Room and he drops off a young South African couple, who have been snuggling up to each other in the back of the bus. "The tourist season has started," Gerard Hehir says, when the South Africans get off, clutching each other and plastic bags full of digestive biscuits and Pringles. "In the summer, we get a lot of Americans. Doolin. They're all mad for Doolin."
At Lisdoonvarna post office, John Paul Mooney and Margaret Kelly get on. John Paul would have hitched to Ennistymon, but, as he explains, shaking the rain off his jacket and settling down, "the day is cat". Margaret is from Ennis and has been visiting her sister in Lisdoonvarna. "It's grand and handy going home on the Postbus. I'll be back in time to make dinner - chicken a la king."
Fiona McDonagh, who has been aboard since Ennis, is from Doolin. "The place is hopping all the year, right enough." She says she would probably have been hitching too if the weather had been better. The bus passes tea-coloured rivers and clumps of gorse bushes, their blazing yellow flowers the only colour in the landscape. All the fields are edged with twisted whin bushes that prevailing winds have permanently pushed to one side.
At Doolin Cross, Margaret blesses herself as we pass the graveyard. Holiday houses loom against the horizon, their curtains closed against the season, palm trees incongruous in every neat front garden. At Doolin, the bus stops at Fitzgerald's Shop Local, which is also the post office. There's a sea fog rolling in from the Atlantic. "You won't be seeing the Cliffs of Moher today," Margaret says. The smell of a turf fire permeates the bus and Gerard Hehir staggers under the wind when he gets out to collect the post. "You should have your wet-suit on," Margaret calls out after him.
Near Liscannor, all the houses and sheds are roofed with the flat and ancient flagstones indigenous to this area. The rain is pouring down. There's not a soul on the road. "Cat," muses John Paul. "It's pure cat out there."
We're driving alongside the sea now, the thin waves remaking themselves tirelessly, as regular and flat as the Liscannor flagstones. The bus stops at the side of the road to collect letters from a postbox surreally attached to a telegraph pole in the middle of nowhere. It's one of those neglected-looking boxes that delight in fooling you into thinking they went out of service several decades previously.
At Lahinch, we hear from someone passing that there's a horse fair in Kilrush. "Poor divils. They'll be drownded." John Paul dives out at Ennistymon. "I'm going visiting," he announces happily and waves goodbye. We're on the home stretch now. Signs outside the village of Inagh invites us to stop awhile at Biddy Early's Brewery and sup some `Black Biddy Stout'. There's no time for that, though. The Postbus sails past Inagh and Biddy's beverages. A couple of more short stops at unlikely postboxes set into walls and then the outskirts of Ennis come into view. It's been less Percy French than Grateful Dead - a long, strange trip.
The Postbus leaves from Ennis post office at 7.10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Friday. A round trip costs £5.20.