I've never been to Dingle. That's right, not once. When I tell people this in the run up to my first trip to the town for the Other Voices music festival, they nearly fall off their chairs. How is that you have you never been to Dingle? How has this been allowed to happen?
I did not realise that not visiting Dingle was such a big deal until people started reacting badly to my having not been there. I thought I was going to Dingle to do some work, to hear some great music, to eat buckets of Murphy’s ice-cream when in fact I was righting an injustice of epic proportions. I was Finally Going to Dingle. Because. You have to at some point. It is quite possibly written in the Constitution.
On the drive down the gang of us make a pitstop at the Barack Obama Plaza. There are country-style carol singers and a dizzying array of food possibilities. As so often is the case when I am on road trips I make a bad choice. But apparently the food in this Dingle place is magnificent so I don't feel too bad.
Back in the car a call comes through. The number on the screen informs me it is from somebody in Washington DC. I think for a minute that Barack Obama maybe monitors visits to the Barack Obama Plaza from the Oval Office and that I’ve been chosen randomly for a call.
“Mr Obama would like to thank you for visiting the plaza. How was that chicken burger, it looked a bit squashed?”. But when I take the call it’s only our Washington Correspondent Simon Carswell. I try to hide my disappointment. “I’m going to Dingle,” I tell him. “It’s my first time”. “You’ve never been to Dingle?” he splutters down the phone. I’m used to it by now. “Never” I say provocatively. He tells me to go straight to Dick Macs. I observe that after everybody said “never?!” they immediately tell you all about their favourite pub.
Sinéad O'Connor serenades us all the way to Dingle. I bet she's been there before. I am only in Dingle five minutes before I find myself in Dick Macs which is opposite the church with the stunning Harry Clarke windows. And where is the church? It's opposite Dick Macs. (That's a Dingle gag, you need to go there to get it. What do you mean you've never been?)
There is music everywhere and all of it is free and you really should go next December if you can. There is music in the church of St James where tins of Roses are passed around and magic happens. Music on bar counter-tops. Music in snugs. There is music in Foxy John's where on one counter I get a pint of Guinness and on the opposite counter a tube of Super Glue to fix my leaky boots. In a vegetarian restaurant called Cul Gairdín, Philip King who dreamed up Other Voices with Glen Hansard plays the tin sandwich and accordion maestro Brendan Begley tells me how his brother Seamus once bashed a cow with a fiddle.
Teresa Horgan sings Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Bernie Pháid soothes us with a lullaby and Eoin Duignan tells us from bitter experience about the wrong shirt to wear at a funeral and Gerry O'Beirne plays slide guitar.
Brendan takes me on a tour of the Dingle peninsula, going the wrong way around the Slea Head drive because he’s contrary like that. We visit Peig’s grave and Louis Mulcahy’s pottery factory and Brendan’s Creek which is looking treacherous but on a good day, out in his currach by the cliffs, is the place in all the world where Brendan Begley feels most at home.
We walk down the perilously steep path to the pier where the Blasket islanders used to land. On the way back up Brendan shows me how to walk with my hands behind my back for the support, like the islanders did. When they came to Dingle they walked in single file “like ducks” because they were used to walking on the narrow paths of the Great Blasket.
Later that day, I find my own favourite Dingle pub. Kennedy’s bar was opened last May after being shut for nearly three decades. Locals say it looks the same as it ever did. There are candles everywhere and in one room an Aga burning, but the best room in the house is the snug under the stairs. It has a small hatch through which women would order their wine out of sight from the men. “Ni olánn na mná fion, ach imionn sé lena linn” apparently.
Now that I’ve been there, all anybody can tell me is that I’ll be back. And I know they are right. I take photographs on my phone but the ones I’ll keep are in my head, my heart: a soft rain; the lilt of the language on the streets; shadowy Islands; a wine hatch; loud laughs and glasses of Dingle gin with friends; that panoramic view the wrong way around a wild ocean. Dingle all the way.