ALL THIS TALK about ghost estates set me thinking again about Jeanette Winterson's plumber. Back around St Patrick's Day 2006, the English novelist wrote an admiring piece about Ireland and the Irish for the London Times, the gist of which was that we were a very poetic people. This was a controversial opinion in itself then: we're talking about the height of the boom and, as you'll recall, our German ambassador was taking a somewhat harsher view, writes FRANK MCNALLY.
But where Ms Winterson really raised eyebrows (mine anyway) was with a claim about her Irish plumber. “My plumber likes to recite Yeats to me while he lays his pipes,” she said, “and he likes to remind me that in Ireland they will divert a road around a fairy oak, not because they believe in fairies, but because they believe in believing in fairies – as he puts it.” At the time, this stretched my credulity on several grounds. For one thing, much as I respected folklore, the rationalist in me could not believe that there was such a thing as an Irish plumber. I had never seen one, nor had anyone I knew. And in the unlikely event that one of them should turn up in London, I very much doubted if Ms Winterson could have caught him and held on long enough to make him lay pipes, never mind quote Yeats.
But even if we accepted that it did happen, the plumber’s comment about roads being diverted around fairy oaks was problematical too. My memory of Ireland in 2006 was that if excavation for a road project had uncovered a full-blown fairy convention, in plenary session, it would have provoked a hasty ministerial order to preserve the event “by record”.
The fairies would have been asked to pose for archival photographs. Then, while they were distracted by smiling for the cameras, they would have been concreted over before any of them got a chance to talk to the press.
But of course all that has changed now. And suddenly, viewed from ghost-estate Ireland, Jeanette Winterson’s plumber no longer seems nearly so fanciful as he did four years ago. Traumatised by the suddenness of the downturn, Ireland is returning to its old beliefs. The supernatural is once again all around us.
Already, for example, the great Irish property developers of recent times have come to resemble the Tuatha Dé Danaan, that mythical race who once (if I remember correctly from my old Horslips albums) cast a spell over Ireland and ruled it by magic for a period, before their luck ran out. Then they became the “little people” and went underground, where they continue to live, unseen but exerting mysterious powers over humans on the surface.
Their abandoned “ghost estates”, meanwhile, have become Ireland’s new fairy oaks and ring forts. Superstitious humans fear to enter them, or knock them down. They will probably be just be left there indefinitely. Roads will be eventually diverted around them.
Future generations of Irish children will marvel at their parents’ stories about the vast pots of gold these houses were thought to contain once. And although such estates are everywhere, it can be no coincidence that, as revealed this week, the highest concentrations are in counties Leitrim and Sligo. Yeats Country, in other words, as I don’t need to remind Jeannette Winterson or her plumber.
SPEAKING OF ghosts, 2010 marks the 120th anniversary of a sad event in American history: the Battle – or massacre – of Wounded Knee. Whatever you call it, the losing side was the “Great Sioux Nation”. Only 14 years after Little Bighorn, this was its last stand. And it was also the last engagement of the so-called Indian wars.
The event was even more poignant in that it was preceded, and perhaps indirectly caused, by a phenomenon called “ghost dancing”. This was an Indian ritual in which participants worked themselves into a quasi-spiritual frenzy.
As such it was mistaken for a war dance, whereas it was more of a millenarian cult: inspired by an 1888 prophesy from Wovoka, “the Paiute Messiah”, who said that if Indians danced hard enough, the “Great Spirit” would come and reverse all the harm done by white men, even down to restoring the (by then almost extinct) buffalo to the great prairies.
Here is part of Wovoka’s prophesy, from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: “Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time . . .” Well, sadly for the old Indians, it hasn’t happened yet; although maybe there’s still time. As well as dancing, Wovoka urged Indians to move to high ground, because there was a flood coming for the white man. So he might have the last laugh yet.
In any case, it strikes me that the ghost estates of Ireland may inspire a similar cult before 2010 is out. This will hardly involve dancing, even in Nama headquarters. More likely it will take the form of incantations, repeated endlessly in media interviews until the listeners fall under a trance.
Already I can hear estate agents talking up the possibility of the great spirit’s imminent return to the Irish economy. “He bring back game just like before. Old dead houses come back and live again. Prices be strong, be rising in leaps and bounds. Guide prices be wildly exceeded – even shoebox apartment cost heap big money. Old estate auctioneers feel young again and have fine time.”