Poteen: £6 A Bottle

With the arrival of the Celtic Tiger and added sophistication, will one marginal activity decline: that is, the making of poteen…

With the arrival of the Celtic Tiger and added sophistication, will one marginal activity decline: that is, the making of poteen? If you can afford a bottle of Bush, will you bother to encourage the old trade that journalists always remembered to feature around Christmas. You may recall pictures of gardai standing proudly beside what looked like old dustbins, with various squirmy pipes spread around; one of them, from memory, being "the worm". They are still at it in the North anyway. The Times of London had a story the other day of the making of the stuff near Dunloy, Co Antrim, a village that has figured as a place of confrontation brought to a fine art. Anyway, the reporter tells us he had been looking for one of the dying breed of poteen makers for weeks before he was led to the cottage of Patrick (not, as the paper sagely remarks, his real name). The grandson fetched a glass of "holy water" or "mountain dew", while the wife brought in tea and scones.

Patrick said that in the old days, when money was scarce, he used to produce 1,000 bottles. Now it's down to 100. £6 a bottle. Local police, according to this piece, now turn a blind eye. Not, you'd imagine, the superintendent, or whoever reads the Times. Alcohol, tobacco and diesel smuggled in from the South is said to keep them busy enough. Yes, Patrick had been twice fined. First time £5; second time, 30 years ago, £100. What goes into the finished product? Barley, spuds? According to this, it is sugar, treacle, grapes, raisins, yeast and water that makes "the wash". A story told by Jack McCann, a Ballymena solicitor with a fine sense of the humour of the Glens, concerned a man suspected of making and selling poteen. A policeman recounted to the court the finding of some tins of treacle near a suspected house and then a huge pile of the tins in the yard. "How, then, if you're not making poteen, do you account for so many tins of treacle at your house?" asked the justice. Said the accused: "Well, your Worship, I don't like jam." We are not told if that saved him.

Jack McCann's storytelling came this way from a recording of him performing before an audience, taken down on tape and given to Paddy Downey, former GAA O/C of this newspaper, during a sojourn with Antrim players. Now in retirement, he kindly passed on a copy, which is pure joy.