When you immigrate to Ireland, Irish people delight in educating the uncultured ‘Yank’. I have, however, learned some of my own lessons by observation.
Among them: Bulmers tastes best out of the country, terribly homesick for Ireland; people really ought to stop telling camogie players what to wear; Aer Lingus ads are often more emotional than the movie at the cinema.
But for this week, I was sent to Ballybrit for Ladies Day, under strict instructions to bring a chaperone, and share my impressions. So I set off for the Races, with my mother, sporting a long dress that was perhaps more stylish in the Nineties. And, most importantly: comfortable heels.
We arrive off the bus to a queue packed with families, friends, and straggling teenagers who clearly have not received the memo about new age restrictions in Ballybrit. Children under 17 must be accompanied by their guardian.
“Sorry,” says a blue-eyed girl with braces and a friend in her shadow. “Would you be able to be our mum to get us in?”
By the time we emerge from the tunnel, just before the first race, the stands are packed. The betting ring is swarmed.
I understand the Guinness Hurdle and other Ladies Day races are some of the richest of the festival, but I find every race is an impressive display of the animal body, regardless of the human, monetary stakes.
We watch most of the races standing on the fence as horses thunder by. My mother loses several fivers to the bookies, their cracked leather bags displayed proudly on their stands.
“Oh! Jaysus! Oh Jaysus oh Jaysus!” gasps a woman next to us, clutching the edge of the picnic table as a race enters its final moments.
We navigate the throng to pass by the Ladies Day Best Dressed competition, filled with the brightest colours and motion-restricting outfits.
“Oh, some of the outfits are very extreme,” I hear a woman with a rather comical fascinator say.
There are some truly beautiful handmade hats. An older woman wears an eye-catching combination of silver.
Fashion – and falling over
Mere steps from the eye-popping ‘glamour paddock’, Penneys’ styles abound.
Quite early in the afternoon, scores of barefoot, socked, or slippered feet walk by us. For the stronger soldiers, flip flops still flap from handbag straps, heels not ready to be abandoned just yet.
A few local celebrities, highly decorated with questionable colours and over-sized hats, may be spotted in the boxes, but it seems to me that they are terribly far from the action.
Down among us plebians, The Gamblers band played ‘Travellin’ Soldier’ and ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ for tipsy revellers, dancing in the fickle sun.
I am told there was poor attendance this year – just 24,000, when the peak in 2006 was 48,000 – but it still feels like a swarmingly large number of people.
The amount of youth is surprising – not young adults, but actual teenagers. From among the throngs, it appears less like an adult’s day out, more a kind of debutante rite of passage; an adolescent’s idea of feeling grown up.
Going home with the auld lads before the last race – and the crush for buses – we pass a trio of very young teenagers, clearly drunk, one of whom is being held up by her friends. A few minutes later, we see one of the trio on his phone, begging a parent for a lift home, after the bus driver refused them.
After half a day in Ballybrit, we were exhausted, with no energy for going out in town. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable lesson in my ongoing Galway education.
All the pageantry and entertainments of the summer race festival – horses, gambling, drink, food, music, dancing, style – struck me as a very old-fashioned kind of a day out. I cannot imagine it would have been a drastically different experience today than it was ten, twenty, fifty years ago.
The Races have a kind of essential quality which evokes a continuity of culture; a still-very-much living creature of the past.
A few days later, watching a race on TV in the Skeff on Eyre Square, our bartender asks what horse we are backing. “I’ve a hundred percent success rate,” he tells us.
We are suitably impressed.
“With one horse and one race,” he says cheerfully.
Indeed. One day at the Races was enough for this Yank.
