Erin Breen: An evening at Carberry's
DROGHEDA, Republic of Ireland
It's not the type of place you'd walk into on your own — not unless someone pointed it out and told you to. It looks closed. The windows are covered with newspaper. But even from the street you can hear that real Ireland lives there. And I was lucky enough to have Jan and Kevin Lyons take me in.
They are friends from Reno who moved back to the Emerald Isle a few years ago. And last weekend's adventures with them will yield a lot of stories. This one is from the night I arrived.
Aine and Roisin Carberry are just two in the cast of characters who live in the town of Drogheda, north of Dublin. The two sisters run a bar that was run by their mother and started by their grandparents. Roisin has flaming red hair and loves to tell stories; Aine has gray hair, a weekly radio show and no problem throwing out anyone who isn't toeing the line in the bar. Their rules include no cellphones, cameras or pictures of them. They sometimes fight over things that seem rather insignificant. And that scrapping always proves pure entertainment for anyone around. They are great!
As the story goes, no one wanted to live in that particular building because a grumpy ghost had chased so many families off. So Aine and Roisin's grandfather got it for a song and put his carpentry skills to work turning it into a thing of beauty with wood-paneled walls, wainscoting and a big sturdy bar. He made friends with the grumpy ghost and the bar was a success. It was handed down to the sisters' mother, who was a story in herself. She was a dancer, she had a ceili band, she could sing and play and she brought in musicians from all over the world.
"Sometimes we'd come down for breakfast and step over people while we were making toast because they'd played music ’til 5 am and then passed out. We didn't have a very traditional childhood. It was filled with music and musicians and family and friends," Roisin tells me.
Their mother worked up to the day she died. She was found dead on the kitchen floor at the age of 73. Cleaning out closets and cupboards, Roisin came across boxes and boxes of postcards. They were from all over the world. Not only had the bar attracted some of the finest musicians over the years, it had also been a magnet for travelers. And many of them had sent postcards to the sisters' mum. Roisin put them together into a book, explaining the history of the bar and organizing the postcards for posterity.
"My mom used to say, 'Why travel the world, when those who do send the world to you?" Roisin says.
Here's the catch, Aine is rather private and doesn't realize that her sister has even put the book together, which will obviously lead to some pretty entertaining scraps behind that bar when she finds out.
Erin Meehan Breen is an Emmy award-winning writer currently living in Galway, Ireland. You can follow her journey here, and find her first two books on her website at ErinMeehanBreen.com.