An Irishman's Diary

MY THANKS to reader Brendan Connolly who, responding to the Diary’s mystification (February 19th) about “coulogeous” – as in John B Keane’s Independent Coulogeous Party – explains that the word means “great craic altogether”.

Its usage is not confined to Co Kerry, he adds. “Growing up in north Monaghan, when a lock of boys would gather and talk would turn to some infamous evening of high jinks, someone was likely to declare: ‘It was coulogeous’. We would then all nod in agreement. Sometimes, however, ‘highogious’ would be substituted . . . The difference? I don’t think any of us knew.” Perhaps I should explain that the term “lock”, as Brendan uses it there, has nothing to do with hair, canals, or security systems. It’s a collective noun, popular in the border counties, and it most commonly refers to “boys” or “pints”; or often both together. When a lock of boys get together for a lock of pints, crack/craic – and sometimes trouble – is almost guaranteed.

As to when a coulogeous adventure becomes a highogeous one, maybe other readers can enlighten us. I know only that both are limited to a maximum mathematical value. This is in accordance with the famous Einsteinian law that, however great it appears to be, the crack can never exceed 90.

AS JOHN B KEANE readily admitted, consumption of pints was a big influence on the creation of the ICP and its fictional election candidate, Tom Doodle.

And I’m indebted to another correspondent, Vincent Carmody, for a fuller account of the Doodle fever that swept Listowel in 1951. Vincent was only six at the time, he says. But he was so impressed at how the episode lingers in the collective memory that he researched it for a local history project and posted his account on the Listowel thread of the website Boards.ie, where it can still be read.

While I’m at it, thanks also to yet another reader: a sharp-eyed individual who (preferring to remain anonymous) has noticed the comeback in this current general election campaign of a word that fell out of fashion circa 1951. He refers to “flapdoodle” – meaning “foolish talk” – as used just the other day by Micheál Martin.

In an apparent coincidence, the same reader had spotted the same word in David McCullagh’s superb recent biography of John A Costello (the “reluctant taoiseach” who addressed a rally in Listowel on the night before Tom Doodle did, and drew a much smaller crowd).

That book’s quotation comes from a few years earlier, during a Dáil debate on Ireland’s proposed membership of the UN. Supporting which, Costello expressed the hope that there there would be “no flapdoodle or tosh-talk . . . about our neutrality.”

Could it be, asks my sharp-eyed correspondent, that even with his party at 15 per cent in the polls, Micheál Martin has been reading The Reluctant Taoiseach? It certainly seems so. After all, as the reader adds: "Thoreau once remarked that coincidence could explain a lot, but not finding a trout in the milk."

I LOVE THAT last-mentioned phrase. As do many prosecuting lawyers, especially when trying to impress a jury about the strength of circumstantial evidence. Indeed, whenever the legal term res ipsa loquitur(literally "the thing speaks for itself") occurs, the concept of "a trout in the milk" is often close behind.

Urban readers may be puzzled about what exactly it means. Well, in Thoreau’s more pastoral America, a farmer taking his milk to market might sometimes be tempted to stop by a river en route and top up the churn to maximise earnings. But of course it wasn’t just in America that such things happened. With the possible exception of the give-away trout, similar events have been recorded in Ireland.

Where I grew up, there lived a man who was known for a time to have increased his monthly creamery cheque in this manner. His milk was collected at the farm by a lorry from the co-op, and just before being siphoned from tank to tanker, it was always tested for purity.

But the system had a security weakness, in that a well-timed invitation into the house for tea would allow a bucket or two of water – maybe even a “lock of buckets” – to be added to the tank, post-test.

Anyway, this happened more than once, before the ruse was rumbled. A suitable settlement was arranged. And the incident might have faded from local memory eventually except that, some time later, the man decided to run in the local elections.

Thus he was addressing a public meeting one night – perhaps outlining what he would do if elected to high office – when a savagely-timed heckle inquired whether his plans included watering the milk. In an instant, his misdemeanour was elevated to immortality. And he didn’t even win a seat.

Maybe the unfortunate man was ahead of his time. His, er, folk wisdom might be more useful in these straitened days when Ireland is in hock to the IMF and Europe. There has been a lot of flapdoodle talked about the subject during this election campaign. But there seems to be near-consensus now that the new government will need to dilute our contributions in some way. Otherwise, we’ll be paying till the cows come home.