Happy out in Spiddal
The phrase “You’ll not win much money playing cyards but” has piqued the interest of a reader. Photograph: Getty ImagesCommenting on the National Museum’s reaction, farmer Thomas Dunne – in whose field the axes turned up – declared: “They’re horrid happy over this whole discovery.”
Having dinner in a Spiddal hotel one evening, a friend and I were asked by the waitress: “Are ye happy out?” For a moment, I thought she was suggesting a move to an indoor table: we were on the terrace and the air was starting to cool. He used to hear such constructions from his maternal grandfather, who lived on the Cooley peninsula. And I’m sure I’ve heard the “sentence-ending but” there too, although I also think of it as a classic Derry/Donegal thing.
As for the “y” sound after “c” , I believe it’s a vestige of the slender “c” in Irish, as in the words ceist or ceann. It’s definitely a habit in many Ulster counties. But strange to say I don’t think it’s as widespread in Cyavan.On the subject of axes, Bronze Age and otherwise, I’m reminded that you can axe someone in Ireland without doing them serious damage.
He was a Fianna Fáil senator and Dublin lord mayor, who also ran a coal merchant’s shop in Pearse Street, attached to which there was a clock that had been long stopped.And because Clarkin was from Mullingar, his malfunctioning clock chimed with one of Myles’s running themes: the neglect/ruination of Dublin by culchie politicians.
For a time, Myles even used ACCISS as the title of his column, instead of the usual Cruiskeen Lawn. When axed – sorry, asked – about it, he said the regular sign had been “taken down to be repainted”.
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