The Magnificent Mollusc
TRAVEL: A weekend away: County Galway

ROB RYAN on the September revelries of the annual International Oyster Festival, where last year he cracked the secrets of this local speciality.

As delicacies go, Ostrea edulis, our native oyster, it is a strange animal - it changes sex every so often, is highly susceptible to disease or poor water quality, and between May and August is, due to spawning, absolutely inedible. Come September, however, O edulis settles down and is ready to grace the gourmet's gullet once more.

For 36 years, one of O edulis's few remaining strongholds (the less capricoius O gigas, the pacific oyster, now dominates in restaurants), Galway in the west of Ireland, has commemorated this annual rehabilitation by hosting an International Oyster Festival.

Arriving in Galway on the Thursday evening, the day before the official start of the festival, I find myself toasting the result of the day's contest to find Ireland's Champion Oyster Opener. The winner is a local lad and, on the basis of that flimsy excuse, the pubs are crammed even tighter than usual, the stout is flowing freely, and Galway's narrow, winding streets are full of local musicians playing on guitars, hammered dulcimers, fiddles and bodhrans. There is a feeling that the pattern for the weekend has been set, with oystering a secondary consideration to roistering.

I must admit, however, bringing with me a worrying ambivalence towards oysters and that other essential ingredient of this weekend, Guinness. For a crash course in the appreciation of both entities I have been strongly advised to skip Friday's opening festivities and drive 10 miles south from Galway, past the village of Clarinbridge (which hosts its own, more parochial, oyster festival two weeks prior to it big brother's) to the hamlet of Kilcolgan. Here is Moran's of the Weir, a cottage-cum-pub, home of renowned oysters and its affable owner, Willie Moran, himself twice world champion oyster opener. I have been reliably informed that Willie will convert me into a lover of slimy shellfish.

Moran's boasts a fine location, on the edge of the estuary, where you can watch the oyster-catchers, swans, shags and herons working the water while Willie regales us with tales of the days when this was a great salmon river, before drift-netting decimated the population. His place never seems short of a hefty plate of the pink stuff, though.

Willie has a simple recipe for converting the skeptical, and he takes me out to his oyster b beds on the edge of the Atlantic, part of the 70 square kilometres that supply Galway. Shortly before the shoreline, he stops the car and, before we set a foot on the beach, he swears me to secrecy abut the location of his prized beds. Satisfied that "me tongue will be held", Willie wades out, and I follow as close as I dare, aware of the water lapping at my shoes (nobody warned me this conversion involved baptism).

"Some say the best way to taste an oyster," he says, knee-deep in water and scooping a hapless shellfish from the bed, "is straight from the sea." He deftly flicks the animal open. "And I'm one of them." There is a blur of shell as the oyster is sucked out of its home. My turn.

Once the salty, slightly chewy mass slides down my throat, I realise that these are not the measly, gritty specimens I have sampled in London, but truly magnificent molluscs.

Duly convinced, I am ready for Saturday. The events start with a parade through the town and the symbolic consumption of an oyster by the mayor. If, like me, the word "festival" conjures up for you visions of over booked hotels, crowded restaurants and impassable thoroughfares, think again. The festival never threatens to swamp - with plenty of elbow room, even watching the marching bands and papier mache whales and oysters, the sort of thing I usually flee from, is an unalloyed delight.

Attention quickly turns toward the weekend's raison d'etre: the International Oyster Opening championship of the World. This is held in the marquee down on Spanish Quay on the edge of the River Corrib, so called because it was during the 16th and 17th centuries that Spanish merchant ships would dock.

Entry to the marquee costs £25 which entitles the holder to a lunch, a dozen oysters (not quite as good as Willie's), Irish coffee and, rather recklessly, unlimited Guinness - guaranteed to turn my original ambivalence towards that brew into ardour.

The contestants for the championship represents the UK, Ireland, the United States, West Germany, France, Sweden and Switzerland. The aim of an oyster-opening competition is to prise 30 of the stubborn devils apart, displaying them on a tray for judging. Marks are then deducted for broken shells or damaged meat.

It is hard to imagine that such an arcane skill can generate feverish excitement, but when the opening-knives fly, the atmosphere is unashamedly partisan - each country seems to have a vocal coterie of fans in tow. The best openers finish at about the two-minute mark, but as penalties can make all the difference, nobody is claiming victory. The trays are hauled off for scrutiny and the contestants try to look composed as the judges, segregated in their own small tent, send for more Guinness to aid their deliberations. When it transpires that Ireland has just pipped the US to the post, the cheer threatens to lift the marquee off its pegs.

The trophies are presented that night at a formal banquet held in the Great Southern Hotel on Galway's main square, where John F Kennedy was once given the freedom of the city. I use the word formal because black ties are the order of the day - but very little else about the dinner deserves that adjective. It is quickly established that the time between courses is spent standing on a chair, twirling a napkin in the air and belting out songs such as The Wild Rover and Molly Malone with the bands. I sneak a look at the invitation. Yup, the word formal was definitely there.

As the tunes on offer degenerate further into trusty rock 'n' roll reruns. I loosen the bow tie and head for the town. The throb of music in the streets from makeshift stages, and the demeanour of the revellers, scotches the theory that the exuberance at the meal was due to spiked drinks - the whole place is behaving as if Armageddon is on its way, but the soundtrack to termination is a touch more traditional out here: I find a bar with a good fiddle player and curl up in the corner.

Sunday involves a short drive along the coast to Salthill, the nearest Galway has to a Coney Island or a Southend, with its promenade and modest funfair. As it has all weekend, the sunlight shines pin-sharp in wonderfully clear, unpolluted air.

The final rendezvous of the weekend occurs at noon in CJ's, a huge bar in Salthill, where Irish coffee is served, and for those who have something to prove (or a misguided belief in the purported aphrodisiac properties of all that zinc they contain) a last plate of oysters.

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Sunday Times, November 27, 1977

Where tomorrow never comes by Cal McCrystal

...If anything can draw me away from such surroundings it is the oyster. A former favourite haunt of mine was the famous oyster bar in New York's Grand Central Station. This now comes second to Moran's Oyster Cottage at Kilcolgan, Co. Galway, where two dozen of the heavenly bivalves slide down easily, pursued by home-made brown bread and a good chablis. I now fully understand a refernce to the same area made by a traveller in 1832.

"In former days, and those, too, not very distant from our own time," he wrote, "to approach a justice of the peace without a 'trifle for his honour' would be an offence of passing magnitude; a basket of chickens, a cleave of scallops, or an assload of oysters, harbingerred the aggriever and the aggrieved." And I'm sure Willie Moran, this year's world champion oyster-opener would go along with that.....

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