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Cara, July/August 1990
Wildness
in the West
At the Galway International Oyster Festival, now in its thirty-sixth year, more than the mountains of molluscs come out of their shells. MARY DOWEY captures the flavour.
When the jazz band decides to march through the streets and the traffic is held up for over an hour, the garda sent to restore order is grabbed by a girl with dancing eyes and spun into a jiving session on the footpath. "The Russians have been missing for a day and a half," somebody signs in the big marquee down by the Spanish Arch, where the pale brown waters of the Corrib foam like a sympathetic mixture of champagne and Guinness. Odd things happen at the Galway Oyster Festival. "Don't get me in your picture," says a redfaced man relaxing in front of a plate of empty shells, "I'm supposed to be in Wexford"......
.....But the real star of the show is Ostrea edulis, the Galway oyster. "No food compares with an oyster. I don't give a hoot - that's definite. You like them, you love them." Willie Moran, world oyster-opening champion in the early Eighties and holder of the Irish title for six years, delivers his judgement in Moran's pub beside the oyster beds in Clarenbridge - a spot much favoured for indulgence over this weekend even though it now has its own festival a fortnight before Galway's.
"We're the sixth generation of Morans here," he says proudly, describing how the family cottage, prosperous looking as never before under new thatch, gradually yielded room after room to the business of seafood and drink, "and we have a seventh!" "With all those oysters," says an onlooker, "I'm not surprised."....
Cara, July/August 1990, Vol 23, No 4
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