It was that quiet in Glengarriff last Wednesday, even the seals might have taken the day off.
“They were here this morning,” says John D O’Sullivan, one of the boatmen on the Harbour Queen II ferry motoring across to Garnish Island. “Something must have frightened them.”
Like the tourists, the seals will come again, but today the west Cork village seems in a state of suspended animation.
There are still a few visitors around the place, with cyclists trundling down the main street and a quartet of Americans, some already in tweed caps, nosing their way into Quills Woollen Market, but it feels like time itself is slowing down.
Claire MacCarthy, who runs the Weavers of Ireland store and the adjoining Glengarriff Park Hotel, seems to capture the mood of this strange time of year.
“You need the winter,” she says, referring to stocktaking and exploring new lines for the shop and so on.
“The only problem about it is, if we had a kind of more of a constant business all year round, we could offer more secure and long-term employment. We wouldn’t be restarting a business every year. It’s like relaunching.”
MacCarthy used to live over the shop growing up and it was her mother who was the main driver in its expansion.
“We stay open for accommodation all year long,” she says. “And our kind of thing is we want to keep the light on.
“We have a big car park out the back, and I tell the staff to park out the back in the summer. But you know,” she says with a laugh, “please park in the front in the winter so they can see there’s somebody in the village.”
Across the road, the coffee hatch at Gigi’s pizza is attracting a few passersby. Mark Funston, who owns the business with his wife, says trade was up 50 per cent this year – their second – compared with last. Funston’s accent and the South African apron hanging on the wall reveal his origins, but he has lived and worked in Ireland for decades. He previously ran a food business in Castletownbere but Gigi’s represents a gear change.
“We wanted an easier life. The reasoning behind it was you can train people to do pizzas,” he says, lamenting the shortage of available chefs. That and a shortage of accommodation are obstacles to hiring, he says.
In Quill’s, the Americans have shuffled off but, according to store manager Sean Hussey, they will be back.
“It’s kind of changed a little bit, where now we find a lot more people around are searching for property this time of year,” he says.
“What I did notice last winter was Americans looking at property and somebody said to me they were ‘Trumpugees’, trying to get away.
“I met an English couple there this morning and I was asking them and they said they are trying to get out of London. We are now being told we are the ideal climate, particularly since things baked up in Germany and France and even in England this summer.”
[ Winter in Bundoran: ‘Northerners are the people who keep the town going’Opens in new window ]
A Kerryman who has clocked up 40 years with Quills, Hussey has been in the Glengarriff store since the Covid lockdown and can see some differences between this part of west Cork and his native county.
“Garnish is known, it’s fabulous, but it’s less well known than other places,” he says of the nearby island.
On the Harbour Queen II, The Irish Times is one of two passengers going to Garnish Island on the 12.15pm ferry, the other being a young man who works in the film industry. Helpfully, ferryman O’Sullivan points out Maureen O’Hara’s old home and other landmarks visible in the distance.
Garnish is home to spectacular plant life, complemented by unique buildings and gardens. It is now owned by the State and managed by the Office of Public Works, for whom Glyn Sherratt is island foreman.
Originally from Manchester but married to a Kerrywoman, Sherratt has worked on Garnish for four years.
For him, the summer just gone was marked by a wave of visitors in July and August – “if anything, it’s a bit too busy” – but with quieter periods either side. Winter will allow for upgrades and repairs, not least to the cafe which is being refurbished.
Escalating temperatures across Europe also helped drive new visitor trends.
“We had a real lot of French, Spanish, Italians – we kind of call them sort of heat refugees. They love to come here, and all of them thought: ‘Oh my God, it’s so lovely – everything’s green and it’s not on fire,’” he says.
It’s a view echoed by Brendan O’Sullivan, who operates the Harbour Queen Ferry. He believes new ferry connections between Ireland and France boosted visitor numbers from that country.
“The American market was down for us, but the French, the Spanish, were up,” he says.
There is abundant shade on Garnish, but only one place can also provide coffee and cake – the Tea Rooms, run this year for the first time by Italian, Lily Precaj.
“It was fantastic,” she says. “Every day different people, different stories.”
Arriving in Ireland was “a big change”, yet the most dramatic transformation appears to have been the switch from high summer to quiet autumn.
“It was scary,” Precaj says. “When the previous person that had this [cafe] before, she was just telling me and explaining me everything, and she was saying for a few days, you will be all day there, and you will be selling one coffee. I say, what? I will go crazy. Yeah, it’s a total change, but this is weather dependent, this island.”
Fortunately, some visitors are already milling around ahead of the island’s closure on Sunday.
Taking in the island’s Martello tower is actor Jonathan White – Fr Flynn in Father Ted, as well as roles in The Tudors and Veronica Guerin – along with his wife, the founder of Landmark Productions, Anne Clarke, and their friend, Nova Scotian Ron Stockton.
“We were on the boat at 11,” Clarke says. “We were one of the first people out.”
Back in Glengarriff, this was Jason Moriarty’s first season running Moriarty’s cafe in the village. A sign in the window declares: “All coffee €2 until Friday.” The promotion was started to encourage a Glengarriff victory in a local football final, and then when the local team lost, the “jokey rivalry” meant he stuck to his word.
A former Tube driver for 25 years, Moriarty’s new endeavour is a world away from the London Underground.
“At the end of September it kind of dropped drastically,” he says of activity in the village. “I may actually go down to [opening] Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”
It is “winter survival mode”, although his preference would be to stay open most days.
“Just because it doesn’t look nice in the village when everything’s closed. It’s nice to see some lights on and have somewhere for people to go. I’m going to struggle on for a few more weeks, and I’ll make this decision after sometime in November.”
The village is also home to a small number of people in council emergency accommodation, and earlier this year Independent Ireland councillor Danny Collins claimed at a local authority meeting that “every Tom, Dick and Harry” was being sent down from Cork city. He also raised concerns over alleged antisocial behaviour.
Moriarty thinks otherwise. “I don’t think it’s as bad as some people make out,” he says. “If someone causes a problem, they’re on the bus.”
Some new places opened in the village this year and more changes are due in 2027, not least the landmark Eccles Hotel coming under new ownership.
Ultimately, not many places in Ireland can compete with Glengarriff for scenery.
As MacCarthy at the Weavers of Ireland shop – which will stay open through the winter – says: “Where we’re located, it’s just a magical area, really, with the high mountains, the beautiful inlets.
“There’s some days when my girls go off on the bus at eight o’clock, and I’m going: Jesus, could I make tea and go back to bed for an hour?
“You know, there’s some days that it’s just so wet. But then there’s days that are just so gorgeous that you forget the days that were bad.”
- This is the last in the series After the Sun, examining how tourist places cope when the holiday season ends
Source: The Irish Times · Noel Baker in Glengarriff
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