GAELTACHT Bartley Costello, eighty years old, sat in his silver-grey tweeds on a kitchen chair, at his door in Carraroe, the sea only yards away, smoking a pipe, with a pint of porter beside his boot: "For the past twenty years I've eaten nothing only periwinkles, my own hands got them off those rocks. You're a quarter my age, if you'd stick to winkles you'd live as long as me, and keep as spry." In the Liverpool Bar, at the North Wall, on his way to join his children over there, an old man looked at me, then down at his pint of rich Dublin stout. He pointed at the black glass: "Is lu i an Ghaeilge na an t-uisce sa ngloine sin." ("The Gaelic is less than the water in the glass.") Beartla Confhaola, prime of his manhood, driving between the redweed and the rock-fields, driving through the sunny treeless quartz glory of Carna, answered the foreigners' glib pity, pointing at the small black cows: "You won't get finer anywhere than those black porry cattle." In a pub near there, one of the locals finally spoke to the townie: "Labhraim le strainseiri. Creidim gur choir bheith ag labhairt le strainseiri." ("I speak with strangers. I believe it's right to be speaking with strangers."). Proud as a man who'd claim: "I made an orchard of a rock-field, bougainvillea clamber my turf-ricks." A Dublin tourist on a red-quarter strand hunting firewood found the ruins of a boat, started breaking the struts out -- an old man came, he shook his head, and said: "Aa, a mhac: na bi ag briseadh baid." ("Ah son: don't be breaking boats."). The low walls of rock-fields in the west are a beautiful clean white. There are chinks between the neat white stones to let the wind through safe, you can see the blue sun through them. But coming eastward in the same county, the walls grow higher, get grey: an ugly grey. And the chinks disappear: through those walls you can see nothing. Then at least you come to the city, beautiful with salmon basking becalmed black below a bridge over the pale-green Corrib; and ugly with many shopkeepers looking down on men like Bartley Costello and Beartla Confhaola because they speak in Irish, eat periwinkles, keep small black porry cattle, and on us because we are strangers. -- Pearse Hutchinson