Dirt From The Old Sod

By John Elson

TITLE: WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE

AUTHOR: ROSEMARY MAHONEY

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 307

PAGES; $21.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: Stories of Ireland today are recorded in vivid detail.

The Boston-born author of this quirky, observant chronicle spent her 17th summer on Martha's Vineyard, working as a domestic for Lillian Hellman. The playwright, who by many accounts was a world-class harridan, once told a friend in her employee's hearing, "Well, I see the little Irish girl has set out the wrong dinner plates again." Mahoney's reaction was classic. "The remark -- which amounted to an epithet -- conjured images of a feckless, carrot-topped rustic with a camel's long lashes and a blush that traveled from throat to freckled hairline, awash in a sea of plates the likes of which she had never had the privilege to be confused by before."

Hellman did have one thing right: Mahoney is Irish and proud of it. In 1991 she spent 10 months on the old sod, sipping Guinness in drafty pubs and listening to people who often sound as if they had just strolled in from a Brian Friel play. Steeling herself for the unknown, Mahoney nervously checks out a lesbians-only night at a seedy Dublin bar. (Asked if she's gay, she lies and says yes.) She also attends a cell meeting of the fanatically Catholic Legion of Mary. Espied by the legionnaires as a potential recruit, she is asked to help out at a catechism class for a gaggle of foulmouthed, streetwise little hoydens, whose recitation of the Hail Mary sounds "taunting and lewd, like a jeering chant from an angry crowd at a football game." After one lass gives a jaunty account of Christ's miracle of the loaves and fishes, Sister Keating, the teacher, asks, " 'And what do we call that, Jane?'

" 'Dunno, S'ta Keatin'.'

" 'You do know, Jane. Try to remember.'

"Jane wiggled a loose tooth in her mouth. 'Picnic, S'ta Keatin'?' "

Mahoney's main interest was discovering how life might be changing for Irish women, who have been all but invisible in what may be Europe's most repressively patriarchal society. She found some hopeful omens in interviews with three of Ireland's leading feminists: the country's first woman President, Mary Robinson; poet Eavan Boland; and abortion-rights activist Ruth Riddick, who inspired the book's enigmatic title. (One conservative Catholic lady is quoted as saying of Riddick and her ilk: "Oh, those women! Those women encourage whoredom in Kimmage" -- a lower-class Dublin neighborhood.)

These interviews, alas, seem rather stiff and dutiful. Mahoney's impressions of everyday life, by contrast, are as bracing as May mornings in Corofin, the West Clare town where she lived alone in a darkling castle worthy of the Addams family. She is puzzled by the chronic lateness of the Irish, for whom a 7 o'clock appointment can mean any time at all. She delights in their colorful nicknames -- Mickey the Bridge for a man who lives near one. Irish men are often regular churchgoers, she notes, even though they might lurch into the pews for a Saturday-evening Mass roaring drunk.

Mahoney has an infallible ear for the spoken word and an eye for telling detail. Whoredom's vignettes are encased in prose so pellucid and evocative that readers may want to stop and reread passages just to savor their rhythms and imagery. Take a look back at Mahoney's reaction to Lillian Hellman's remark about "the little Irish girl." You could do a ton of reading before catching a sentence as fierce and fine as that one.