Daily Mail, 12 May 1992

Song of the oyster men
The Way It Is by John Edwards

All those years Michael Moran stood in the door of the pub on the last day of a month with an 'r' in it, 85 of them there had been, and now here it was around again. But this time the cold beata him, so he sat in the window and waited to see the people.

'They'll be here,' he said, watching the tide run out of the Clarenbridge Estuary over in Galway, and soon the river had become really low and the sunset made silver creases in it before it gushed to the Atlantic around a million oysters.

Then the people went to the quayside and took lots of drink to the side of the water, stood in the seaweed and began singing lullabies. 'Go to sleep my lovelies,' this man Joseph something or other started to croon. Every time his voice got the shakes, he oiled up with another pint of Murphy's. 'Go to sleep my lovelies....lovely oysters all....'

They just keep driving to the quay, going down to the Claren and singing their songs at the oysters. 'There must have been a mass breakout from an asylum and we didn't hear about it yet, Michael Moran was told. But he was long gone with the excitement of the singing and the parading and a lovely smile was all over his old face.

Mike O'Halloran filled his bagpipes with breath that had a hint of lager and squeezed out a lament. And this too drifted across the oysters and they were the only things he didn't wake up in the entire west of Ireland.

'Wake them? Mr Moran said, looking right into a golden sky. 'We're not waking them. We're singing them to sleep for the summer. It's the end of the season.' Is this a joke? 'It's very serious', was what he said.

And this went back so far in time in Clarenbridge, they used to open them centuries ago with bits of dinosaur bones tooled into a kind of knife.

He could go back only 85 years, Michael Moran said when there were no cars and people went to the Claren on horseback or in donkey carts and he could tell his stories as someone better known on oysters than almost anyone else on earth.

The pub was Moran's On The Weir and was still the same place the first Moran was born in, in 1781. Maybe even where a man with huge courage first smashed one of those shells and ate the stuff he saw inside.

So the other day, with Michael Moran in the window, everybody in the village was singing and wailing, then all the oysters would know it was time to rest for the summer and nobody would be back to disturb them until September, when the next 'r' came up in the month.

'We'll make them feel great,' Mr Moran said. 'You know that after April the water gets warm and the oysters become milky and start to spawn and they're nowhere near at their best.'

Not an inch was free inside the pub now, just people stepping on shoes. The top of the bar vanished under an ocean of Murphy's. Gerry Grealish opened hundreds of native oysters. They weren't being eaten as if they were going to sleep. They were eating them as if they were going out of existence.

Then Willie Moran, Mike's son, who runs the pub now, went to the kitchen to help Grealish. The oysters got to the bar at £8 a dozen. He opened 30 in 91 seconds, Willie did, which made him world champion and it was something he remembered, but not the best thing he remembered.

'That has to be when Tom MacAlinden from Galway came in and sat right there by the fire and put 15 dozen inside him. And he only stopped because my hands went rigid from opening the things and I thought we would lose Tom with protein poisoning anyway.'

Wasn't it Tim Conran who ate the record? a man asked Willie over the bar noise. 'Oh no, no, Tim only did 12 and a half dozen. He was only cruising.'

The drinking got world class. The pub heaved. And Dick Molloy was with a fellow called Jack and they did a chorus of Galway Bay, and even an oyster had to be tired if it could sleep through this.

'It's a wonderful night for sure' Michael Moran said when he went outside and saw them singing and kicking their legs and holding on to glasses. And all the oysters were down there lying against each other in the lovely clean water, getting a break for a few months until somebody like Tom MacAlinden and Tim Conran came along in September and got through so many they could make a dent in the bed of the river.

Any time Mike O'Halloran waited for another pint, he went carefully to the water and played something new. Amazing grace was the last thing the oysters heard.

'I'm certain they'd be asleep by now, wouldn't they?' he said, because the wind got chilly and made him go inside the pub, where the heat coming off the people was enough to cook a sheep.

Chowder bubbled in the cauldron at Jordan's Bar up the road and they sang there too, and went to Paddy Burke's for the best steaks ever tasted.

Mike Moran stayed until midnight and said he couldn't wait until September because, if putting them to sleep was a party, you should see what happened when they dug them out. 'Oh grand,' he said. 'Nobody goes to bed for days.'

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