Hollywood, Eire
by John Stuart Clark

There is a place called Hollywood in Ireland, where holly grows in the woods. The village comprises a row of dull houses, a post office cum petrol pump, and a primary school, strung along a potholed road that meanders down from of the western edge of the Wicklow Mountains. Where mammoth tacky letters perch on the scarp overlooking Los Angeles, the Virgin Mary looks down from the crags behind Hollywood, Eire.

I rode down the cul-de-sac where the village's two pubs, and only its two pubs, face each other. It was mid-morning and hot rays had reached Tully's. Outside, the landlady sunned herself, black skirt hoicked up to reveal rolled down stocking tops. In a cloud of dust, a hire car swooped round the bend, pulled up outside the opposite pub and disgorged four beefcake Americans.

"Gee," exclaimed the blue rinse that zinged, "Ain't this real folksy. Just like that place in 'The Field'."

It didn't look a bit like soggy Leenane. Under a deep turquoise sky, it looked more like a Bad Day at Black Rock, except the boardwalk was cracked concrete.

I had come to Ireland at the invitation of the good people of Rathdrum. For the past six years they have organised an International Cartoon Festival to coincide with their Bank Holiday weekend, and I was on my fourth visit. This time I thought I would arrive early and explore a little more of a country that is fast becoming one big film set.

Far from being a cute little backwater full of lovable peasants that start the day sometime after a liquid lunch, Ireland has become the new 'tiger economy' of Europe. Over the last few years, its growth has been astonishing. For an outsider, nowhere is the upturn more evident than in the recent proliferation of their film industry.

I was headed for Wicklow County, backlot for many Irish film-shoots by virtue of its proximity to the TV studios in Bray, but started in Dublin, or what I thought was Dublin, until I cruised passed its castle. Playing a blinder as itself in Michael Collins, a large sign across the double doors announced that today it was playing Belfast City Hall. Opposite, Parliament Street had been renamed and strewn with glass and brick debris, and an upturned burnt out car. Armoured personnel carriers and RUC officers lined my way.

BOOM! The car exploded in a fireball and hundreds of people came streaming out of Belfast City Hall. From a side street, riot troops banging batons on plastic shields swept down to meet them. "Cut!" They were filming The Boxer, with Daniel Day-Lewis and a cast of southerners playing northerners. They went on until sunrise trying to get that one scene right. I know. Kinlay House Hostel was lit by sufficient wattage to turn night into day, and there were no curtains.

Wherever I went in Dublin city it seemed there were film or TV cameras. If it wasn't Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE), it was Aunty or Sky or some gibbering Japanese crew laden with state-of-the-art digital gear. I fled into the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. In front of an exquisite drawing of a peasant woman, a professor type was holding forth to camera about Irish artist Frank O'Meara and his affinity to van Gogh.

In Toner's bar, I met Bridget. She was a production designer for RTE and agreed that the industry had never had it so good. It was becoming a problem to find locations that weren't recognisable from previous productions. She mapped out a route for me, looping down to the River Barrow and back up to Rathdrum, rattling off titles that were filmed along the way, most of which I had never heard of.

I took to the hills, up a stiff climb through a broadleaf tunnel, and emerged on the spine of the Wicklow Mountains. It could have been Scotland. Though nothing like as high, wide or desolate, through a selective cinemascope lens, who could tell the difference? There were the same regimented plantations, the same round barren mountains and gorse infested moors. Only the peat was a different colour, a poorer quality, but down here they call it turf.

I caught up with Colm, a disgustingly healthy septuagenarian who rode a daily circuit from Dublin to Sally Gap and back. We talked about Kelly and Roche, both of whom he'd competed against in the old days. Coincidentally, we were riding the route of the second day of this year's Tour de France. Ireland staging the event is a further example of its current status, but Colm wasn't impressed with the new prosperity of his homeland. It was an urban middle class thing, and while everybody talked about the trickle-down effect, he said water in Ireland had a nasty habit of flowing up hill.

We rode a lumpy line originally surveyed in 1798 by the British to provide access to the wilderness. From a colonialist's perspective, this was bandit country, the last outpost for land insurgents who rose up against the Brits in the wake of the French invasion of County Mayo. For Colm this was O'Burns country, the cattle rustling clan that harried English estates in the lowlands. "Now dey deserves a fillum. Forget all dem Rob Roys an' Bravehearts dey fillumed here."

On the western reaches of Wicklow Gap, I pitched a tent in a peat field and in the morning was taught the technique of cutting by Michael from Blessington. He was a victim of the country's rapid growth, booted onto the scrapheap by a haulage company that was 'rationalising operations' to become more competitive. In other words, fewer drivers working longer hours, and if that meant fiddling the tachograph, "Jaysus, dat don't bodder dem. Dey got family in d Dail (the Irish Parliament)."

Michael's catalogue of the rich in Ireland came exclusively from the arts. Where we might disparage stockbrokers, shareholders and utility company chairmen, he launched into writers, film makers and rock stars. Sweeping down to Hollywood, I saw the underbelly of the Celtic cat. Ramshackle crofts that were more sad hovel than romantic cottage, lurked behind piles of rusty scrap bristling with sage grass and hostile dogs.

On the outskirts of Dunlavin, a wizzened old lady beckoned me into her home. I felt I was entering a Breughel painting. Either side of a covered cobbled alleyway she called her hall were two rooms, sealed by farm doors with gaps top and bottom you could push a pig through. She wanted me to cellotape an icon into a picture frame in preparation for the local saint's day. The floors were bare stone, there was one naked light bulb and one cold water tap.

She cooked on a cracked range, but every winter this frail little lady got free coal, and for this she would vote for John Bruton's Fine Gael party again. It was election time, and every lamp post where anybody other than sheep might pass was decked in plastic posters pleading "Vote for Me". The banality of their slogans stalked me all through the country. Bruton's message was "Don't throw it all away". I left the woman's miserable shed and rode back into the 20th Century.

I visited the National Stud, for no other reason than that the horse (on a council estate, in a bog, along a cobbled street) has become a cliche of Irish cinema. By comparison with the sterile wards of the English equivalent at Newmarket, it was a pleasant place to be born, if you don't mind your conception being a public spectacle. The tone is set by a Japanese garden that guides visitors down the Path of Life. Fittingly, the climb up the Hill of Ambition leads to a dead end.

On the lane south of Kildare, Ireland did indeed appear to be throwing it all away, and for easy money. Maybe the rumpled tarmac once carved through an indigenous pine forest, but now it was a pitted causeway running high above a desert of peat fields stripped by commercial cutters. Either side, the top soil had gone. Uniform piles of uniform brickets dried in the sun in uniform rows. From road side to horizon was jet black and dead flat.

This was the location for Eat the Peach, an optimistic and underrated film with a theme similar to Kevin Costner's The Field of Dreams, but better. Now and again I pedalled passed a plateau of barley or grass in fields that had a future. Everywhere else, John Innes or whoever was making the big punts (Irish £s) had had their peach and eaten it.

Thanks to EC subsidies, agriculture is actually the foundation of Ireland's emergence, and the broad reaches of the Barrow Valley bore testimony to an increasingly ominous monoculture. I camped overlooking four counties and listened to talk radio discuss the merger between Avondale and Waterford farm coops. They had investments in Italy and Hungary now, and supplied own-brand dairy and meat products to most of Britain's big supermarkets. The conversation was straight out of Wall Street, not The Field.

Avoca had hardly been touched by the success of Ballykissangel, but then there was hardly anything there to touch. Like Hollywood, it was an unremarkable village of hamlet proportions set in a beautiful valley, this time with a river flowing through and, at one end, the church. A tele-addict could kill all of ten minutes here, unless they were looking for The Tea Cosy cafe, which might kill another two.

Its frontage had been transformed into Ballykissangel's post office. Despite large hand-written signs clarifying that it was not a post office, coach loads regularly tumbled in looking for post cards of the priest and that totty from the bar. When I suggested she might invest in such an item, the owner did a double take. Evidently the tiger was more of a pussycat in Avoca, but then they had only been open 13 months.

Three days after leaving Dublin, I honked up the hill passed the civic park into Rathdrum. The International Cartoon Festival was in full swing. Artists were caricaturing, Guinness was flowing, kids were collecting autographs and the craic was grand. Half of Ireland appeared to be there this year, possibly through natural growth, possibly because the town co-starred with Dublin in Michael Collins.

Everybody had a tale to tell about Hollywood descending, and the bars all had photos of the shoot. Restoring the square from the grime of the 1920s back to the 1990s they had made improvements. There were no overhead cables, satellite dishes or aerials to be seen, not at all in keeping with a modern Irish town. In an election month, it was also unseemly that John Bruton earned brownie points by posing in public for the cartoonists.

On the other hand, the festival was opened by Father 'Feck orf!' Jack from Father Ted, which seemed totally in keeping. The ringing of bar tills suggested the natives had a larger disposable income than when I first came to Rathdrum in 1992, and while British European and American cartoonists cried over their Jameson's about the demise of 'tooning, the Irish were on a roll.

After a wander through landscapes where the eye of the tiger had been and seen, but left them undisturbed, the demands of the public and competing egos of the cartoonists were too much for me. Peter, who converted the local undertaker's into The Cartoon Inn, gave me a lift back to the ferry, bike bouncing out of the boot of his brand new Merc.

He told me about the town's Development Board. When asked at a special general meeting what Rathdrum was known throughout Ireland for, one stalwart confidently replied, "Why, the civic park, of course!" That's what I like about the Irish.

© John Stuart Clark