A challenge... to believe in fairies!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"I believe in Kali! That's why thugee is so important in my life."

[devogue]

This won't work in Ireland, as the following, barely believable article (with a wonderful postscript) proves:

John Walsh On Monday: Irish road side-tracked by the fairies' right of way

John Walsh


Monday, 20 September 1999


I'M VERY glad to hear that the Irish Motorway Fairies imbroglio has been successfully resolved. It's a curious story. In Co Clare in the Irish Republic, the county council met to approve the construction of a motorway that would bypass the towns of Newmarket-on-Fergus and Ennis.

The bypass would cost pounds 100m and the council had begun considering objections to it. But among more predictable, Swampy-ish protests was one from a local folklorist and seanachai (or storyteller) called Eddie Linehan. He pointed out that one of the obstacles scheduled for destruction was a white thorn bush - but it was no ordinary shrub. It was a fairy bush.

The councillors knitted their brows. Come again? they said. The thing is, said Mr Linehan, in a district called Latoon, outside Newmarket-on-Fergus, there stands a fairy thorn bush that's a marker on a fairy path. It's a spot where the Kerry fairies used to stop and consider their next move, when marching off to do battle with the Galway fairies. It was a rest, regrouping and reconnaissance centre for the small folk. Woe betide anyone who cuts the tree down (they'll die roaring) or builds a road over where its roots had been. There would be, said Mr Linehan, an increase in misfortune and death to road users at that very spot. He knew it was the real thing, because a local farmer claimed he'd seen white fairy blood on the tracks.

Instead of having Mr Linehan forcibly removed from the council chamber, briskly sectioned and sent to St John O'God's asylum, the Clare planners took his objections seriously. On the one hand, here was a hundred-million- quid civic enterprise, of benefit to all road users; on the other hand, an uncountable and invisible flock of homeless and vengeful sprites, swarming around the ashphalt and causing trouble...

They thought about it, made a feasibility study, and discussed how best to "incorporate" a small bush into their sprauntsy new motorway, short of having the whole six-lane highway swerving like an adder to get around it. They got their best engineer onto it.

On Friday they finally announced that, while the field in which the bush stands has been dug up to become part of the motorway, the bush has been spared and a special fence built around it to make sure the fairies can still come back every year for what appears to be their annual sales conference and pep talk.

Charming, my goodness, how Irishly charming. This is the kind of whimsical tale that used to have Flann O'Brien squirming in his civil servant brogues. English people, however, find this kind of stuff irresistible. There is a bridge just outside one of my favourite Irish towns, Clarinbridge (home of the famous Oyster Festival every September), which Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon crossed on their trip to the West in the late Fifties. They were told that it was considered rude not to get out and chat to the fairies that lived underneath the bridge. So they did so, bless them, before continuing on their journey.

The Irish themselves, of course, reserve the right to buy into such mythmaking or deride it, as it suits them. Hence the reply W B Yeats got when he met an old peasant, in Sligo in the Twenties, and asked if he believed in fairies. "I do not," said the man, "What do you take me for? What kind of ignorant fecker would believe in the Little People? Believe in witches and goblins and leprechauns? Go on outta that. Don't be ridiculous. I do not believe in them. Not at all...". There was a pause. "But they're there," the man concluded.

[Animavore]

I believe its called cottaging.