ANGUS CACTUS
A comedy giant has awoken, rolled over on his side, adjusted his pillow, and gone back to sleep
About the book, To Hell or Sligo: concepts
There is a thin line between truth and fiction, and you won’t find it here in this tall story told about a ripping yarn in which fact and fiction are inseparable because both are equally absurd.
PT Barnum said that when faced with the mundane reality of the truth, ‘always print the legend.’
I have always been amazed at the lengths that Sligonians will go to embellish a story when telling it. These stories grow legs and achieve a life of their own as they are retold again and again by different folk who each add a new abstract layer to the original truth. In the end, the Sligo story becomes so much prettier than the truth.
This book is to honour the art of Sligonian story telling. Within ‘To Hell or Sligo’, lies some real Sligonian stories which were related to me, all apparently true, and more than likely half made up. Now I have added by own layer of embellishment and mixed them into a fictional story which includes real people mixed in with a range of fictional characters. To protect the living, I have changed many of their names, and to honour the dead, I have kept their names the same.
A tall tale about buried gold brings an unhinged set of characters to a mad town and pits them against even stranger locals.
I don’t know whether Sligonians still tell stories about ‘blow-in’ newcomers living off the fruits of gold buried by their ancestors, or even whether there are new versions of this story. These were always my favourite tall stories along with those anecdotal stories which featured nefarious outsiders being unexpectedly thwarted by brave or obstinate locals. Of course, this all had to go into the storyline.
To Hell or Sligo is also a homage to favourite comedy film plots. Those are: In Bruges, Pineapple Express, and the Ealing comedy, The Lady Killers.
To Hell or Connaught
The English civil war which established Oliver Cromwell in power as England’ dictator (or protector as he liked to call it) was actually just one of series of conflicts that made up the wars of the three kingdoms, involving England ireland and Scotland.
Following the successful Irish rebellion of 1641 which restored ruling power to an Irish catholic confederation, the country became entwined in the ongoing wars between the English parliament, the king, and the scottish.
After a decade of fighting, Cromwell took his new model army to Ireland in 1649 and set about his own personal conquest of Ireland in which a devastating victory over the catholics and royalists, soon degenerated into a program of ethnic cleansing.
By 1653, 600,000 had perished in the war, and the land from three of its four provinces was prepared for further plantation amongst cromwell’s soldiers. They already knew that the parliamentary purse was empty and had been promised land in lieu of wages. The 850,000 catholics that survived the war were forced to vacate this land for this purpose.
In 1653, catholic nobility and clergy that had not fled the country were to killed on sight. Slave traders from bristol were given license to choose men, women and children for
transhipment as slaves to the west indies. ...
The Bective
I lived in Bridge Street for many years, and always felt that the road was missing a proper name. Every other main street in Sligo was either named after saints or famous nationalists from history. Yet my residence was on a street named after a convenience, and would have probably been named after a pub if only one had been built there.
My limited historical research tells me that the land on the northern side belonged to a farrier blacksmith by the name of McDonald until someone built a hotel and a pub guarding the entrance to the bridge.
The hotel in Bridge Street had several owners and was called the 'Bridge House Hotel' but also went by the owners name:
1912-31 Ramsay's Hotel
1950 Frizells Hotel
1970 Kelly’s Hotel
1978 Bective Hotel - (Gilsenan’s)
It was demolished and built over with the Waterfront House in 1999.
Paramilitaries
There is a scene in Monty python’s Life of Brian in which Brian is selling snacks to members of People’s Front of Judea. He mistakes them for the Judean People’s Front, and as a result, he earns a lecture on the different combatants involved in the paramilitary resistance to the romans. They explained that they were the true representatives of the struggle, whilst everyone else were ‘splitters’. nd
Sligo Town & County
Some photographs of the town and surounding countryside.
Gleniff horseshoe pass
The beautiful Gleniff horseshoe pass is the setting for many scenes in the book. The cavenous cave of the mythological Diamuid & Grainne looks out over it.
Sligo in the 1980's
The Bective Hotel, as well as Sligo, were places full of character and full of life in the 1980s. The lifestyle and many of the characters are gone now, but I wanted to record them for posterity as well as bring them back to life.
My family arrived in Sligo when I was a teenager, and I left when I was in my mid-twenties. That intervening time which I spent in Sligo town and county marked the best years of my life.
I couldn’t imagine a better place to have spent my formative years. However, when I arrived I thought it archaic and lost in time. I was more used to the urban and cosmopolitan environments of London and Belfast. Yet I would probably have never visited Belfast if it wasn't for a friend I met in Sligo.
Just like a salmon spawned in its rivers, whenever I left Sligo, I always loved the feeling of returning home. It represented freedom for me. Freedom of the countryside which often seemed open ended and ownerless, and freedom of the constraints of polite society.
Sligo was raw underneath its veneer of polite society. The people from the west of Ireland only paid lip service to rules or the law. Even the local Guards who upheld the law would turn a blind eye.
My first breathalyser was a guard smelling my breath and telling me to drive straight home. One of Sligo’s motorcycle cops was the first person to suggest that I avoid traffic around the one-way system by riding my motorcycle down the footpath between the town's two bridges.
In 1978, most of the town’s shops had family names above their doors. They packaged everything you bought in brown paper and tied it up with string. Today when I walk about in large retail and shopping centres with high ceilings and every corporate logo on show, I yearn for the simplicity of life back then.
Sure employment was low-tech back then, but so was our leisure pursuits, but they were both real and fun.
Sligo is still a wonderful town on the edge of the world, but it has changed incredibly over the years. My desire to write this book was to capture the essence of what it was like living there