Pete McCarthy: McCarthy's Bar

By BARBARA HARRIS

Starting from the premise that "you should never pass a bar that has your name on it," Pete McCarthy travels through the west of Ireland, rising to the challenge like a man blessed.

Years of writing and performing for radio and television have honed a wonderful sense of timing in this, his first book.

Self-deprecating and funny, he is a master of the withering one liner: "She has a voice that could bone herring at 20 fathoms."

He has a strong empathy with the place. It's not all about drinking extraordinary quantities of Guinness, although it's one of the few places in the world where the bike shop could double as a pub. And, believe it or not, there's a theme park which has a "genuine" pub, where at night, the locals escape tourists.

Having an English father and an Irish mother, McCarthy is in search of his roots. He eavesdrops, he listens and he enlightens the unenlightened to an understanding of modern Ireland and its contradictions.

As he rides round the country in a battered Volvo you feel as if you're in the passenger seat being spooked by that strange breed, the perpetual caller to radio phone-ins.

Even in the acknowledgments McCarthy concludes that no job was ever this much fun.

And, I have to say, anyone not getting a laugh out of this book would have to be an eejit.

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