Insider View on Manners

Lucy Madden considers the question of Manners - and, warning that The Gathering’s returning diaspora may cast a more critical eye on us than we might like, hopes that we can remain a mannerly country

During a visit to Berlin at the end of last year my son visited the prison, now open to the public that the Stasi, the secret police, had used to incarcerate their victims. The guides are chosen for having some connection with people who had been prisoners there so necessarily their accounts of prison life are authentic and often emotional.

The group with my son listened in silence to their guide and when she had finished speaking, the quiet that ensued was broken by a long, loud sound. A young Spaniard was breaking wind, clearly making no attempt to hide it. At this rudeness, the guide rebuked him angrily, but he and his friends shrugged shoulders and walked away, leaving her in tears.

This account reminded me of a visit some years ago to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam; its few rooms so redolent of the horrors that had occurred there that most visitors must be moved to silence. Not so a man, English speaking, who was there on that day with us.

He strode through the house, sneering at the memorabilia and loudly voicing his anti-Semitic spleen. On this occasion other visitors remonstrated with him, but this only served to encourage him and were it not for his eloquent delivery, we might have thought him mad rather than disrespectful and rude.

Unacceptable behaviour but isolated incidences, you might say; but are they? Everyone is sensitive about the history of their country and few would deny that it behoves visitors to respect this. Mostly they do, but now that we are beginning the year of The Gathering, perhaps we should prepare ourselves for the returning diaspora to cast a more critical eye over the country than we might anticipate or like.

What, for example, is to be said about the sad state of our towns and villages with their empty premises and ghost estates, the rise in crime or indeed, the flag issue in Northern Ireland? Whichever way this influx goes, we must be prepared for a critical assessment, like it or not.

One aspect of Irish life that has survived, just, the trials and tribulations of recent years is the friendliness, so often attested to on these pages, that is encountered all over this island. What has changed, though, is the attitude of the customer who expects more value for his money...

When we started working in hospitality, some decades ago, there was a more defined etiquette about arrival and departure times. Just try arriving before 5pm in France! Nowadays visitors will turn up very early in the day and departure is a looser arrangement, usually to get more value for a one night stay.

Today guests are more likely to bring their own drinks into our reception rooms, ask about bringing their own wine for dinner, (this in spite of us paying for a wine licence) or litter the hall with the debris of their fitness regimes. You see this shift in behaviour everywhere with people in restaurants clamped to their mobile phones or you may sit on public transport in the pervading aroma of your neighbour’s burger or Chinese take-away not to speak of the stench of popcorn in the cinema and rustle of crisp packets at the crucial moment.

Then there is, no doubt, an increase in the number of visitors who stalk the land in search of something about which to complain. One of the worst offenders known to me is an elderly relation whose mission in life is to find fault. This is a man who presumed to tell Michel Roux in his restaurant that he served his wine too cold.

He is the guest that everyone dreads for whom nothing is ever good enough and will say so, no sotto voce for him, sparing nobody’s feelings. He travels the world addressing everyone in his path in English and when he is not understood, repeats himself but louder. I would like to think that he and his ilk is a dying breed and that travellers act in an orderly and appreciative way in the countries of others.

We may be tried by our guests but must avoid being gratuitously rude. We are still a long way from the rudeness encountered in New York, where a friend asked a policeman for directions and was told “Go get yourself a map, grandma.” Nor is it likely that a hotel guest would be told, as was a friend of ours in the south of England, that she “smelled of smoke” by the sommelier.

I like to feel this could not happen here and we remain the mannerly country we always were, but we must prepare to be tested, as tested we may be, for returning Gatherers may cast a colder eye over us than we might like.

Together with her husband Johnny & family, Lucy Madden runs their magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan as a country house which is open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers Guild.