Uncle Pat And Decent Bombing

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The phone rang. For some reason its peal stilled him. He lifted the handset slowly. The sacred heart lamp was guttering. He’d have to get a new one next time he went down the road.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line had a hint of American. ‘This is Patrick O’Carolan?’

  ‘It is, sure.’

  ‘Hello, Mr O’Carolan. Your code word is Dan Breen. Could you confirm you understand me?’

  There was something else under the American note in the voice, a hint of something deep and dark. Pat’s tongue felt double the size, his voice thick. ‘Yes.’ Damn his hesitancy, it sounded like he had a stutter. He mustered his wits; his eyes squeezed shut to block out the nightmares of the past. ‘Yes, I confirm.’ As he spoke, his mind shrieked: No, tell them no. Tell them you don’t know what the fuck they’re on about and to leave me and my niece alone.

It all started with Sarah's uncle Pat. He's a mild-mannered, gentle man who keeps a small herd of milk cows on a wee farm up on the margins of the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary. He likes tea. As a younger man, he was a bit of a Republican. The Irish kind, not the looney gun-totin' American type. Being a bit 'green' as a lad hardly marks you out in South Tipperary, you understand.

I've long teased Sarah with dark mutterings about how uncle Pat's sitting on an IRA arms cache. It's amusingly incongruous if you know Pat.

And then one day it hit me. Hang on. What if he WAS? And what if bad people came calling? Really bad people. And what if he had a past? And what if...?

I started to throw the idea around and pick it up by its ears to see if it squealed. I did a little research and yes, it could work. I worried a bit about what I was setting out to do to Pat, the placid, kind man with a Pioneer badge who'd done nothing to deserve being turned into a gun-toting leviathan. And then I got over it and started writing. That's the trouble with this writing thing, it tears away your morality and leaves you stealing people, plucking this trait from here, that sentence from there.

Don't ever chat to a writer. Seriously. You just can't trust 'em. You never know where your unplucked nasal hair, kipper tie and Bootle accent is going to turn up next...

A Decent Bomber And Rambling About Irish Life

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The yard light snapped on. Pat peered out, but the yard was empty. The dog was still by the range, her long snout on her paws. Her steady brown eyes regarded him.

‘Sure, Mikey. No, nothing at all, I have everything I need.  Sure I will, of course. Take it handy now, will you? Give my love to Anne. I will, I will. Goodbye, Mikey.’

Pat replaced the handset. Motioning the dog to stay, he lifted his coat from the hook and stepped outside. The harsh light glittered on the puddled ground. Pat stood on the threshold, scanning the yard but nothing moved in the hazy wetness of the South Tipperary winter night. He sniffed the air, a hint of turf from the hummock of sods tied over with blue plastic sheeting by the wall. He’d footed his own turf these past twenty years. Still a strong man, he was nevertheless finding it harder. Sixty this year, by God. On a whim he went back into the kitchen and lifted the white plastic feed bucket he used to carry the turf indoors. He would have his ease and a fire with a hot whiskey tonight. He went back outside, pulling his heavy coat around him.

Pat plucked aside the tarpaulin and dumped the musty oblongs into the bucket. Straightening, his hand on his back, he was stilled by the strong sense of a presence he felt when the yard light came on. He pushed the kitchen door open with his back and dropped the bucket just inside. He whistled for Kirstie. She bounded past him.

He strode along the wall of the house, following the edge of the light. He wanted to call out, just for the reassurance of sound. The darkness beyond was absolute, no light pollution here on the hillside, his farm the only building for a mile and more around. Kirstie returned to pad by his side. The cow shed was all bovine warmth and hay. The cows shifted, their tails swishing and hooves thumping dully on the muddy concrete.

Back into the drizzle, past the milking shed. The dog whined, pushed ahead then halted, growling. Pat shouted. ‘What’s your business?’

Sometimes it was pretty hard trying to squeeze my head into a winter's night in South Tipperary or a drizzly Dublin day. Surrounded by blue skies, sand and sun there were times when the smell of turf smoke and the sound of rain dripping from rooftops would come easily and times when it was maddeningly elusive.

I was frequently rescued from this dilemma by a Grooveshark playlist put together by bro-in-law Brian. You just slip on the cans, hit play on the iPad and, yessss, here we are again. I'm sure someone cleverer than I would identify it as a form of neuro-linguistic programming - a sort of proto-Pavlovian experience, but it worked like a wonder. Dropkick Murphys, Thin Lizzy,  The Stunning, Fight Like Monkeys, The Frames and others would propel me back to the drizzle and dark of an Irish night, the creak of a farmyard door and feet on flagstones, a turf fire and a hot whiskey.

Music's always been a big deal for me writing, a given tune playing in the car while I'm thinking about a scene will influence the way things develop; sometimes a piece will shape the development of a whole chapter or sub-plot. L'autre Endroit by Silence shaped the Aleppo souk scenes in Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy more than I did, while George Winston's music created the moods of Olives - A Violent Romance as surely as if he'd been tapping the keys on my notebook.

The winter countryside in Ireland still smells of turf fires and people still 'foot' their own sods of turf up in the bogs. It's back-breaking work, little pyramids of turf left out to dry and then stacked in reeks by the side of the house or in a shed for winter. You can buy Bord Na Móna briquettes, but they're not the same, although one bloke is gleefully selling them to the Americans for a staggering $49 a bale so their houses can 'smell like Ireland'. There's no smell quite like the smell of turf, mind.

Of course, all this talk of turf fires and whiskey leaves one open to the accusation of writing up life in Ireland as a 'Darby O'Gill' sort of thing, especially when you're talking to city types. I recall one Dublin paper snootily referring to Tipperary-born comedian Pat Shortt as 'the hick comedian Shortt', as if Ireland needed to excise its rural character or was in some way ashamed of its 'culchies'.

Shortt's 'hick' comedy is, although admittedly and unabashedly slapstick, remarkably observed and enjoyed precisely because we've all met 'mountainy men', loudramans stuck to the local bar and the other characters that populate the enjoyable world of his Tipperary village of Killinaskully. Here's a taste of the stuff - a warning, you might find this utterly impenetrable.

But the one thing you're guaranteed to find in A Decent Bomber* (apart from bombs, of course) is rain. When we were married, in June, our wedding day was the first sunny day of the year. And one of the first quaint madnesses to strike me visiting Ireland was someone looking out across a landscape of unremitting drizzly grey and proclaiming, 'Soft day, thank God.'

* Available now on pre-order from all good book retailers such as Amazon.com. Ahem.

Pre-Orders, Book Marketing And, Ahem, A Decent Bomber

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Quinlan passed out; a merciful release.

He should have expected them, should have seen the signs of quickening interest in his daily movements. The tailing moped; the sallow, bearded fellow he never saw before and then glimpsed all too often.

They came when Deirdre took the girls for a sleepover with their wee cousins. He had just poured a whiskey when the doorbell rang. His hand flew back from the latch as the door burst open. Their silent, brutal assault buried him under a flurry of expertly dealt blows. They pinioned his hands with nylon ties.

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

And so starts A Decent Bomber, my fourth serious novel and the first not set in the Middle East. I've been making a wee fuss about it being on pre-order and (sorry if you follow, know or are somehow linked to me. It'll go away if you buy the book, honestly) will continue to do so for a while.

Why am I so bothered about pre-orders? Because on the 5th November, when the book publishes, every pre-order will count as an order on the day. If you collect enough pre-orders, the book rockets up the sales charts and comes to the public notice. Briefly, probably not in a chart topping sort of way, but nevertheless in a more attention-getting way than shouting 'buy my book' from Dubai will do.

Book marketing in general is something of a nightmare for the self-published author. And, actually these days, for publishing houses, too. There's a lot of noise out there with all this self-publishing lark and a lot of people trying to find ways of getting their book in front of people. As the 'traditional publishing' model breaks down (catalogues and sales teams knocking on bookshop doors to flog this season's new offerings), even quite large publishers can be found on Twitter retweeting every time a reader says a given author's book is quite nice. There's a hint of desperation in the air.

It's hard to get horses to water and drinking, especially in today's online world. McNabb's Law of Clicks refers - thousands of impressions don't necessarily mean sales. Book bloggers have 'To Be Read' lists stretching for months ahead. It's amazing how many go out of business, breathless blogs with 'I love to read' in their headers shuttered and strewn with cobwebs, that aspiration to share great reads submerged in tottering piles of desperate authors pushing their dubious wares. Tracking coverage in Middle Eastern 'major media' shows a distinct lack of correlation between media coverage and book sales - even rave reviews in national media.

One challenge in marketing A Decent Bomber is that the book is set in Ireland and the UK. Without a Middle Eastern angle, its target market is really in the Western world - where I am not. Anything I can do to get people in the UK/US talking about the book, sharing it, recommending it or otherwise focusing their attention long enough to click on an Amazon link to swap $2.99 for 350 pages of mayhem will be considered.

Funnily enough, you can help. Tell the folks back home about it. Encourage them to tell their friends and family about it. Share a link to the book on Facebook. Let's face it, the sooner you do, the sooner it'll go nice and quiet around here again...

Book Research Madness

It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I've said it before but can't help repeating it - I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.

Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...

I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...

Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it. I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?'

Ulp.

My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself.

It's a bit like researching Shemlan by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street.

You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-by's of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.

And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.

A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon, iBooks and all good ebook outlets. It's also available in paperback from Amazon, Createspace or on order from your local bookstore.

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, I've been embroiled in a last minute flurry of edits and changes, a lot of book formatting and layout and quite a bit of uploading.

It's all quite exciting. For a start, I find layout therapeutic, a load of rote tasks performed with the assistance of a glass or two of Bombay's finest and some quinine-laced fizzy stuff. Page down, change headline to 22 point Perpetua, body font Palatino Linotype first para no indent, second para 0.5cm indent.

I've been messing around a lot with font sizes, templates and margins and think I've got quite a good combination going now, so I'm trying to reformat all of my print books to meet the new grid. Slightly more space and a slightly larger font/leading. After much soul searching, Garamond is going and Palatino is this year's body text bikini model.

Like people give a hoot? Yes, I think easy on the eye is good if it's unobtrusive and the reader finds it more comfortable. Do I care too much about type? Oh, yah. Seriously. Perpetua, and I'm sure you'll think I'm odd saying this, is my typographical Musar; the Orrefors of the world of letters. I have long admired the odd life and achievements of eccentric stone cutter (and enthusiastic rutter) Eric Gill - the William Morris contemporary who gave us the London Underground's typographical identity, which persists today, as well as WH Smith's logo - and Perpetua was, to my mind, his finest lifetime achievement. Seriously.

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

Check spellings, get annoyed at Microsoft's daft blue-lining of things that are patently right. Catch SNAFU, wince, change.

Then the MS, updated to reflect my Createspace edits. Lose all the italics in the book, damn, spend an hour replacing them using the Createspace file as a reference. Fine. Review some of those itals and lose a couple. Find an awful literal sitting there in the text snarling at you like a drugged-up bullfrog. Excise the bastard like one of George Bush's colonic polyps. You'd have thought I was experienced enough not to have to deal with these things. Oh no.

The manuscript is now complete and uploaded to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords and so A Decent Bomber is available for pre-order from Amazon as a Kindle book, from iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other brilliant, decent even, ebook platforms. It publishes 'officially' on November 5th, but every pre-order means another heave up the rankings on that day, so I'll be irritating everyone I know between now and then to pre-place their orders. The Createspace book, the paperback, will go 'live' sometime in the next week.

I won't, once again, be doing a conventional print run. It's simply not worth it. Olives took five years to make back its Dhs15,000 investment and I still don't have a final report from the distributors, despite the book having sold out before last year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

But I'm happy. Truly happy. Two years in the writing, albeit with very many breaks and stops, A Decent Bomber is now a novel I can say has merit and personality enough to be a readable thing.

Which is nice...

A Decent Bomber

Back in February, I glibly declared here on da blog, A Simple Irish Farmer was finished. This turns out to have been deeply premature as today, the 19th September, I actually finished it.

In the meantime I have wailed, gnashed and generally hooned around wearing sack cloth. I have written another book (a psychological thriller called Birdkill) and spent a lot of time not working on the book about an IRA bomber pulled out of retirement which I have come to title A Decent Bomber after someone in publishing who knows that she's talking about told me ASIF was the pantsest title she had ever heard for a book.

Beta reader feedback, together with the need to fix some things in the book that simply didn't work that well and which made it a weaker and less enjoyable read than it should be, meant I had quite a bit to do. In fact, this has generally been my experience with my books so far - Olives is a markedly different book to the one I finished back in 2004, while Beirut needed a total restructure following its reader's report and Shemlan lost 30,000 words to that slash-happy servant of evil, editor Gary Smailes.

So now A Decent Bomber has gone out to a bunch of agents in the US, mainly because the UK bunch have an aversion to Irish books. And, depending on what happens with them, it'll likely be publishing in December.

In the meantime, both A Decent Bomber and Birdkill's covers are gracing my lovely website as I phase out my various book websites and consolidate all there.

So now you know.

Dubai Foodie Fashionistas Unite!

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I got an email this week from somebody announcing they were a 'Dubai-based foodie fashionista' and letting me know they were starting a blog if I needed any publicity.

I get a lot of random emails from people wanting publicity because I'm on a list operated by a company called Cision, which offers a subscription based service to PR people. Cision is quite a powerful tool, but often lazily used by PRs, who just blanket mail everyone they can find, rather than using Cision's segmentation tools. So, although I'm on Cision as a 'blogger', I'll frequently get 'Dear Editor' emails or invitations to 'cover' someone's event, job move or new self-adjusting dimplex.

Actually, I also often get 'Dear,' emails. And now and then, in moments of solid gold, 'Dear blogger'.

What, dear flak?

I also get emails hoping I've had a lovely weekend from people I don't know who don't seem to think that strangers hoping you've had a good weekend - or are having a great day - sound perhaps just the teeniest, tiniest tad bit insincere.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with this email thing. It's occasionally quite interesting. I get emails telling me about new wireless routers, carwashing 'solutions', touristic events in Abu Dhabi and hotel launches. I get a large number of press releases written by people who are clearly witless, drooling clowns on behalf of clients who are wasting good money with bad marketing, poor targeting and communications that shouldn't be tolerated beyond primary school. I am often amused by these, in the dark way that the Darwin Awards are amusing, or someone dying horribly while using a selfie stick. I know, I know. You couldn't make it up, could you?

But a Dubai foodie fashionista trolling me for freebies (which is what 'foodie fashionista' is secret code for) is a new departure. The very idea of a bloated Mr Creosote in a rose-patterned tea dress is enjoyment enough. Not, you understand, that my idea of fashion is a rose-patterned tea dress. My concept of fashion, as Sarah would gleefully inform you, is far, far worse than that.

That someone would self-identify as a Dubai-based foodie fashionista is glorious. What do you do, then, Bill? Oh, I'm a welder. Why, what do you get up to? Oh, I'm a Dubai-based foodie fashionista. Oh, right. Nice, if you can get the work...

Anyway, I deleted the email.

Of Migrants And Emigrants

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's interesting to see the pictures on our screens showing the masses swarming Europe's borders. The proportion of women and children is tiny - the vast majority of  migrants would appear to be able bodied men.

I'm probably not allowed to say that, this week.

It's amazing how fickle we've become. Public opinion is now capable of turn and change at remarkable speeds as we all get caught up in it all; the mood of the mob has never been so unpredictable nor so quick to whip up. And the mob has never been so large.

A week ago Katie Hopkins, the somewhat egregious voice of Right Wing Reason, wasn't so out of step. The Sun has even been deleting Tweets promoting the infamous Katie column urging 'gunships to stop migrants' as it tries to get with the new mood of its readership. This is entirely different to last week's Mood Of The Readership, which would likely have cheered our Katie on to new heights of silliness.

This week, you're on a fast track to grovelling apologies if you so much as suggest that migrants aren't lovely and your home is open to as many as it can hold.

The haunting image of a Syrian 3-year-old lying face down on a beach has a lot to do with it, helping to do what 'father of PR' Edward Bernays called 'crystallising public opinion'. Governments found themselves neatly caught out, too. Our very own David Cameron was still fighting them on the beaches, missing the sudden and drastic public mood swing until (apparently) his wife tugged his sleeve and said 'Dave, I think you'd better take a look at this...'

I'd like to think this was all human compassion at its best, but I suspect it's just a mob. Mobs form online fast, and they dissipate just as quickly - and unpredictably. They're like clear air turbulence: even the best weather radar can easily miss them. Sometimes they fizzle out, sometimes they catch on and woe betide anyone who's not following the tide of public opinion with split second precision. The media these days aren't driving the mood, they're just amplifying it because they're getting on the bandwagon.

Mobs don't think very much, they just express themselves, whipping each other up in a frenzy of encouragement until it all gets out of hand and the monster's house is afire. Then they sort of look around a bit, a little dazed, before shuffling off home for tea.

We, the British, were dragged into war in Iraq by our leadership - rather against the desire of the majority of the people one suspects - a US-led war, and bloody aftermath, that destroyed the physical and moral infrastructure of Iraq so completely that it created a vacuum for the lunacy that is Islamic State to fill. We bombarded Libya in the name of regime change and swiftly spent not one penny on supporting the foundation of a new state in place of the one we helped destroy so expensively. I'm guessing the Syrian uprising had more than a little covert support from Langley and Millbank from the get-go. And let us not forget Afghanistan...

The UK is now to 'fulfil its moral responsibility', even if the US has been keeping its head down and Not Getting Involved. You wonder how much simpler it would have been if we hadn't been so glib about supporting the high-handed destruction of these countries' systems of governance and civil infrastructure with no plan - or appetite - for getting involved in the aftermath.

Now the 'War on Terror' is coming home...

Telco Fail Special. Etisalat WINS Challenge.

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I know quite a bit about telcos. Back in 1991, strangely enough as allied forces started the air and ground assault to liberate Kuwait (great timing, I know), I launched a magazine called Communications Middle East Africa, or Comms MEA as it became known. Then, in the late 90s, I was involved in the communications strategy, planning and rollout of privatised Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil. I subsequently worked with France Telecom, Jordan Telecom, Jordan's Mobilecom, Fastlink, Zain, Wataniya in Kuwait, Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Batelco, Nawras, MTN (in its Saudi license bid) and others in the Middle East and further afield. I've worked on communications strategy, marketing campaigns and capacity building programmes in telecommunications and ICT for regulators, telcos, manufacturers and governments.

I've got telco form, in short.

I knows me telcos.

So it is with considerable confidence I can assert that never in my life have I ever encountered a telco as woefully useless as the UK's EE. We're not talking just averagely bad, we're talking organisationally dysfunctional to an extraordinary degree. We're talking spectacularly bad in a sort of massive display of really bad fireworks of badness bad. I wonder they remain a viable business, so awed am I by the symphonic virtuosity of their badness.

It's truly incredible, a Harvard Business School case study in how an organisation can remain profitable whilst exhibiting a stellar disregard for its customers. If you're in the customer service business, give up. Go home. You're wasting your time. That EE is still trading demonstrates for all time that the customer really doesn't matter.

I'm not going to bore you with the whole story. But you'll get an idea of how awfully bad they are when I tell you that I finally gave up and walked into one of their stores to get help fixing my issues with their awful service, blitheringly incompetent UX and heart-attack inducing IVR-driven call centre.

"I know," said the chap in the shop. "We're really, really bad. And there's nothing I can do about it, they don't trust us to get access to anything here in the shops, you'll have to talk to the call centre. It's frustrating, I know, but there's nothing I can do for you."

"But there's no way you can ever speak to a human at the call centre. You're just stuck in the system and when you eventually find your way to the option to talk to a representative it hangs up in your face."

"Yup. I know. Everyone hates us."

It's an interesting customer service technique. My frustration and anger were instantly defused. If it's so bad their own people have given up, what chance do I have? I eventually managed to find a way around my issue, albeit an inelegant one, but then found their iPhone app crashing every time you tried to invoke it. Reboot mobile, no change. I went to another EE store.

The bloke in the store grimaced. "Yes our app does crash. It does it on my iPhone, too. Look, I'll show you. There. Crashes every time.  Bad, isn't it?"

"But a telco in the smartphone era whose app crashes on the world's most iconic smartphone platform is surely on a one way ticket? It's almost unbelievably incompetent."

"I know. But what can we do? We just work in a shop."

In fact, EE's service is so bad, it got fined £1 million by UK regulator OFCOM. Googling 'EE customer service' gets you access to a very deep bucket of ordure indeed. It's the UK's most complained about mobile operator, as it turns out. And that seems to be quite an achievement in itself given the tone of debate around the other operators.

Which is why, coming back to the UAE from leave, I found myself looking at Gerard Butler gurning at me from a green-tinged billboard and thought, almost fondly, 'You know what? It might still be running the dumbest, most ill-advised campaign in the history of telco promotion, but Etisalat isn't all that bad.'

Yup, you heard it here first. Challenge accepted. Etisalat vs EE? I'll take the home team any day...

Fitzpatrick's Pub in Carlingford

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had reason to dip into that long-defunct food blog, The Fat Expat, this evening. I found my recipe alright, but I also found an old review of Fiztpatrick's fine public house near Carlingford.

And it made me wonder for how much time I managed to make - back in the day - for posting things to blogs: my way of compensating for the journalism I was no longer doing and the book writing I had paused as I worked out what the hell it was that publishers actually wanted (something I still, clearly, find challenging).

Anyway, this is the review I wrote of Fitzpatrick's back in 2009 - just as valid today as it was six years ago...

Eating in Ireland is truly a roller-coaster ride that lurches easily from (if you’ll excuse the term) feast to famine. When it’s good, it’s very, very good but when it’s bad it’s usually so bad that it’s an experience in itself. Sometimes the simplest things delight – bacon, cabbage and potatoes, the national dish, sounds awfully plain, but at its best it’s a revelation: a golden ‘floury’ spud, tranches of steaming pink, tender bacon and a pile of slightly crunchy, slightly salty cabbage cooked in the bacon water and running every gamut of green from the pastel light green of sun shining through winter surf to the deep green of the fresh fields in the spring.

Parsley sauce is a love it or hate it experience, but I love it, curly parsley chiffonaded into a butter-rich creamy thick sauce that drops rather than pours.

And then there are the awful disasters – these days from Irish chefs treading the same well-worn paths of wretchedness that the Brits have already blundered along - stupid cack-handed melanges of ‘Thai-style’ spices imposed on ingredients that deserve more respect, awful attempts at food with ‘molecular’ influences and, unforgivably, ‘nouveau Irish’ food – piss-poor attempts to serve classic Irish dishes in plates of clashing flavours and colours that revolt rather than delight.

This, then, is the gastronomic wilderness that is Ireland post ‘Celtic Tiger’ - it’s a dangerous place, people, a country in transition... You will always find Cork’s Ballymalloe, the mother-lode of Irish cookery, a place of wonder.

But I found an almost equally wonderous thing near Carlingford – a pub that looks so cod-Irish from the road that anyone but an American would shudder and pass it by. And yet the locals flock there in their hundreds, Les Routiers has slapped its mark on the place and so many awards decorate its walls you can almost see them in the sea of mad memorabilia that covers every surface – horizontal and vertical alike. And I include the ceiling – you have to duck at times to avoid being brained by low-hanging beams festooned in brass pumps, irons, cameras and, well, just stuff really.

Fitzpatrick’s pub should be a disaster. It’s famous, bang on the tourist trail and decorated outside with flowerbed jokes, bicycles, baths and bedsteads. They pour Guinness with a flourish of shamrock on the ‘head’, for God’s sake. Eat there. It’s expensive (you’d better be ready to shell out €30 for a main) but I loved it. When food makes me laugh, I know I’ve ‘arrived’ – and I laughed my way through dinner at Fitzpatrick’s.

We ate in the restaurant (a small area to the back of the huge, labrynthine pub) which has its own separate kitchen and a ‘local’ chef. The main kitchen had a chef from Newry, but we decided not to take the foreign food. Service to begin with was a bit patchy – our Sancerre came warm and with a lot of mucking about with the glasses, but eventually things settled down and the Fleurie that followed was a delight. The wine list is basic, smartly compiled and good.

Breads were offered around, Irish brown, white, garlic and others – and then the kitchen sent out a tiny bowl of vegetable soup as an ‘amuse geule’ – a little taste of warm, mushroom-dominated thickness that was just right for the rainy night. I took a starter of pan-fried scallops and black pudding, purposefully courting disaster. I have always hated ‘surf and turf’ dishes, believing (perhaps perversely) that if God had intended beef and shrimps to be in the same place he’d have arranged things that way rather than separating the two environments quite so effectively.

It was really good. It would have been stunning and world-class if the scallops had been slightly less cooked, had spent a couple of minutes less on the pass under lamps. But the black pudding was rich, crumbly and served with a creamy slightly sharp sauce that did it proud, almost a béarnaise but not quite. I was grinning by now, and it wasn’t the excellent Sancerre alone. Other starters taken included breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, which were pronounced good but would have been better fried and served dry rather than buttered as they were. Odd that you could get a black pudding scallop starter right and muff a breaded mushroom dish, but there you go.

My main was classic stuff – an 8oz fillet steak served on a celeriac mash (note no horseradish addition to the mash, thank God. Horseradish mashes are an invention of the devil) with a black truffle sauce and foie gras. I thought I’d go for the light option, obviously. It was impeccably executed – a delight. The steak beautifully done and the little decorations of foie gras were fried off so they were crisp outside and yet wobbled, the sauce was rich and dark, pungently contrasting the rich, buttery mash and it was all topped with crisp onion rings in a light batter. The fries that came along with it were fat, crisp and floury when cut. A bowl of crisp, green spring vegetables with a rich cream sauce and another of new potatoes in butter arrived for each pair of diners. Others had sirloin steaks, a plainer serving of huge and beautifully cooked steak and then there were plates of fresh sea-bass.

Desserts came with an attendant cardiologist. I passed and selflessly ordered an Irish coffee (yup, a shamrock of brown sugar was dusted on it. I forgave them) but others took silly things like a walnut and banana crumble tart: rich, warm and gloopy, swimming in a crème Anglais, apple tart and ice cream and the ‘special’, organic strawberries and strawberry ice cream served in a little brass bucket alongside strawberry compote and cream. It looked outré, chi-chi and crass and tasted divine.

We went off to the bar for icy glasses of Tyrconnell (Ireland’s finest single malt and a whisky that eclipses much that Scotland offers, IMHO) afterwards. Because if you’re going to be this indulgent, you might as well go mad. Good wine, outstanding food and our insanely opinionated waitress, Carrie - part entertainment and part expert guide to the menu, women's hurling and the delights of working in a restaurant with the boyfriend (‘the boyfriend’, the barman, was of course stopped and shown off to us, to his horror) meant that we all agreed our evening in Fitzpatrick’s was a one-off, a memorable evening of excellence in a convivial, warm place filled with laughter, cheer and delight.