It's late by the time you check into the quiet country hotel in east Clare for a gentle midweek break. The tranquillity is other-worldly, reports Kathy Sheridan in east Clare.
You slip into bed, marvelling at how a simple change of scenery can erase the mental ache of marathon election counts, tearful candidates and any damn thing at all to do with George W. Bush, and you drift off to sleep wondering whether the rest of your life should begin with a spot of golf or a swim.
Next morning you dawdle down for breakfast, to find . . . good grief, you've checked into CIA Central. Or Langley (in Virginia,where CIA headquarters is located), as some locals have christened it.
The lobby of the Clare Inn Hotel is heaving with toned-up, clean-shaven young men in polo shirts, short haircuts and a babel of American accents. These are always in earnest discussions, either on their phones, among themselves, or with numerous, rather tense-looking, stocky Irish policemen in suits. In the restaurant, a table of grave, polo-shirted ones blink in bemusement as a waitress straight out of central casting asks merrily and repeatedly: "Would ye like more toast, lads?"
Outside the modest hotel, a deputy Garda commissioner strides towards the door with his entourage, from a car-park gleaming with a fabulous array of large Mercedes cars - mostly limousines or American embassy cars marked with CD (diplomatic corps) plates - and Chrysler Voyagers with tinted windows. The dusty Mondeos, we may assume, belong to our lads.
On one side, an enormous black armoured wagon with foreign plates and bristling with antennae appears from somewhere out back and a Garda squad car swings by to escort it down the avenue to its destination. On the other a tradesman is wondering whether he can go round the back to finish a job begun the day before.
"You'll be shot," goes the reply. That's probably a joke. But he's still not allowed round the back. With a golf course and commercial laundry round there, a stone's throw across the fields from Dromoland Castle, rumour has it that gardaí are trawling the golf course with metal detectors and hiding in the laundry baskets on stake-outs.
Who knows? At this point, the locals will believe anything.
By 8 p.m. next Friday, when President George W. Bush sets foot in the Republic for the first time for all of 18 hours or so (including his customary generous rest periods and night's sleep, making it, in the words of a Boston Globe journalist, "a 12-hour photo-op"), the biggest security operation in the history of the State will see every inch between Shannon and little Newmarket-on-Fergus teeming with 3,800 gardaí and another 2,000 Army, Air Corps and Naval Service personnel, plus 600 to 700 American secret service and support staff, plus the services of a private Irish security firm.
It's bonanza time for hotels and bed and breakfasts - if not for the taxpayer - as block bookings for security staff mean that anyone dropping down Shannon-Ennis way next week is doomed to disappointment.
"They're not saying they're guards, but you'd know them," says one B&B operator, sagely tapping a nose.
Dromoland Castle has been closed for weeks. A couple whose wedding coincided with the Bush visit were forced to cancel, and won a settlement in the High Court. In any event, they might be pleased to hear, external appearances at the castle are not conducive to a stylish summer wedding. Several entrances to the lovely old castle are variously bedecked with Portakabins, Portaloos, large, lurid-coloured generators and a selection of uniformed and plain-clothes gardaí.
No, nobody is allowed in, not even for a quick drive around, says a pleasant garda at the main entrance. If I had very, very short hair and an American accent, would that improve my chances? He grins.
Up the road between that and the service entrance, a bored-looking garda leans against the stone wall in the drizzle. Across from him, another stands miserably in the bushes. That made five uniformed gardaí in total between just two entrances, plus the plain-clothes men. On Thursday afternoon, high fencing was being erected along the bushes. Yesterday, additional electronic surveillance arrived in the form of a camera perched on a large crane, positioned on a hill overlooking the castle entrance.
Every manhole cover between Shannon Airport and Dromoland has been checked (with a garda present) and welded shut. At the airport yesterday, another camera-laden crane arrived to supplement the extraordinary security activity at the main entrance. New cameras have already appeared in the service area. Intense activity is visible in the distance where an aircraft taxi-way is being re-tarred. The Honk pub on the perimeter has been ordered to shut for several days. The airport is not accepting any left luggage.
In addition to the heavy Garda presence, the military - the Irish military, that is - has become highly visible in recent days, inside and outside the terminal, manning trucks and diggers. It is believed to be operating from an empty factory on the industrial estate. Meanwhile, advance US deliveries this week included a C130 military transport plane containing two Black Hawk helicopters.
Entry to the airport, as one typically infuriated local put it, is now a matter of controlling your temper. Car searches began about two weeks ago. Checkpoint security at the entrance had swollen this week to some eight gardaí and airport police.
Each person and car is stopped and scrutinised and questions are asked about the nature of their business. Four further gardaí man the entrance to the car-park. While one of them writes down name, full address, car details, nature of business and precise duration of visit, another searches the boot without a token "may I?". "It's for security reasons" is the terse explanation.
For locals and visitors, this has gone beyond mere irritation. By Thursday, queues were growing to a point where one airport visitor timed his journey from entrance to car-park at 32 minutes. Even for a long-standing staff member, it took 20. Not good news, in these intensely troubled times, for the airport authorities, who are determined that, whatever else occurs, no airport customer should be unduly inconvenienced throughout the two days of the Bush visitation, when 250 other aircraft movements are scheduled, involving up to 20,000 passengers.
Meanwhile, local workers who might once have driven through the airport to the golf club for a lunchtime sandwich have given up. Anyone patient enough to survive the queues to get in finds yet another garda stationed on the road to the golf course. People have grown accustomed to seeing gardaí stationed on bridges and roundabouts, hearing stories of them hiding out in empty factories, of "suits" taking pictures of houses, of a wing being cleared in Limerick Prison for use in the event of "disorder". Rumour has it that an empty factory in Shannon town has been cleared to create a makeshift detention facility for a few hundred detainees.
Independent (ex-Sinn Féin) Councillor Mike McKee hasn't heard this last rumour, "but the funny thing about all this Garda visibility is that we don't see guards on the beat here normally, although we've been calling for it for many years".
All this is in addition to the Big Brother-style surveillance that has been ongoing throughout the area for several months. It began with gardaí calling on nearly 3,000 homes, apologetically seeking details of every resident, the registration numbers of their cars and information on any visitors expected the weekend of June 25th and 26th. Meanwhile, it was made known that residents would need a pass to enter and leave the "sterilised" zone around those dates.
Not for the first time, one local harks back to the Black-and-Tans for the last instance of surveillance, when families were ordered to display on their front doors the names of all within. Among the myriad protests planned for the surrounding area next weekend, there is talk of a ceremonial burning of passes.
Some refused to give their details on the basis that the information might be put to other uses, or shared with the American secret service and used against future visitors to the US. Eilish McGettigan, one of the refuseniks, believes that she will be refused a "pass" as a result.
"It's like being in a temporary invasion by a foreign power," she says.
This week - oh joyous days for the Portakabin company - another Portakabin appeared outside Shannon Garda station, from which residents' passes will be issued, beginning on Monday.
While there will be attempts, no doubt, to characterise the protests as the sole preserve of the rent-a-riot, anti-everything-American crowd, this is far from the reality. During several days in the area and dozens of random interviews, I found fierce anger and resentment among people of every age and class.
"I regard it as a terrible intrusion of privacy," says a polite, middle-class, middle-aged woman bound to Shannon for 39 years. "It's a nuisance and a shameful waste. We see all these policemen around us now, yet when you want a guard, you can never find one. And so much money being wasted . . . all for one man to come and visit who isn't even very popular at home because of how he has handled his so-called war on terrorism. My great fear is that he is going to make a target of Shannon now."
A Clare businessman with much to gain from such visits explodes when asked what he made of this one.
"It's a load of bollix," he snorts. "This carry-on has been going on for six weeks. The amount of money being spent would keep Ennis Hospital going for 10 years."
Another with strong American business links, when asked for details of his household by the Garda, went so far as to make official inquiries about his rights under the Data Protection Act.
"This is typical of the Americans and their contempt for everything from the International Court of Human Rights to the UN. This is how they operate . . . Just go ahead and do it, then worry about the legalities afterwards. Is this what they call freedom?" he says.
The visit is repeatedly referred to at every level as, typically, "a PR job" and "a handy opportunity for Bush to look statesmanlike in a pretty Irish castle for the folks back home in election year".
Nonetheless, all of them, including anti-war activists such as Labour councillor and veteran trade unionist Greg Duff, are acutely conscious of the security situation since September 11th and the Madrid bombings - and that security measures are required.
They are even more conscious of the fact that Shannon Airport is their livelihood, or a substantial contributor to it, and are deeply ambivalent about the dozens of protests held there in the past few years. So the trial of Mary Kelly, the woman charged with causing more than €1 million-worth of damage with a hatchet to a US military plane at Shannon, is being carefully monitored. They know that a tiny piece of debris on a runway brought down Concorde.
"These are strange times. Doesn't that suggest to even the most obtuse among us that this summit should have taken place in Brussels?" says one.
In fact, says another, in the system of rotating venues for the annual EU-US summit, this visit should be taking place in Washington this year, "so tell me, why isn't it?".
Greg Duff's mission now is to "just uphold the right of the residents of Shannon to protest against Bush and the troop movements through Shannon that were not approved by the Dáil. We will be asking people who have plans to come here and cause trouble to stay away".
Still, it could be worse. In Turkey, to which President Bush will proceed immediately after his Irish visit to ring in the NATO summit (the big event of his global perambulations this month), all weddings have been cancelled from June 27th to 29th, university exams have been rescheduled, and hotel workers with "questionable" backgrounds are being sent on early vacations.
And it's only fair to end with another strong rumour that was flying around this week. Just in case. This one, credited to a senior Garda source, suggested that Bush would be going nowhere near the west but would in fact fool the lot of us by landing in Baldonnel, Co Dublin. On the other hand, Cork has already been designated an alternative landing-strip. One way or another, they're putting on a jolly good show at the Clare Inn.