Save Ferness!
Nanny-state, do-gooder laws have consequences. Yes, this is about alcohol.
When I first came to Ireland, my early impression was that it was the kind of country guys in my dorm at college might have come up with if assigned by a political science prof to put their own values and culture into a founding national document. Laws were treated as suggestions. In Dublin, people double-parked their cars everywhere with no apparent consequences. Unlike Seattle, where I had come from, people crossed the street wherever they damn well pleased. The concept of jaywalking as a traffic offense did not exist. Also unlike Seattle, the pubs were full of people smoking. Everyone seemed to drink prodigious amounts of alcohol and then get into their cars and drive wherever they wanted. It felt like glorious anarchy.
Over time—and suspiciously parallel to my tenure here—things changed. It became more Seattle-like. Not the jaywalking. People still do that everywhere and all the time and without consequence. But the other stuff. Cities started clamping cars that were parked illegally. The government banned smoking in indoor public places. I was sure the notoriously and fiercely independent-minded Irish populace—which spent eight centuries resisting colonial occupation—would never stand for it. But they meekly shrugged and muttered something about how they were meaning to quit anyway. They accepted it the way they accepted the sudden confiscation of all their pound notes to be replaced by something called the euro. The way they hardly noticed when all the road signs denoting miles were taken down one night and replaced with ones using kilometers. Coming from a country where any discussion of the metric system has hard-liners reaching for their firearms, I was amazed. Oh yeah, and under penalty of law we had to start separating our recyclables from our rubbish.
You can argue that this is all for the good and it is just the normal process of a country becoming more civilized and responsible—like maybe some of the guys in my old dorm had to (eventually). Perhaps, though, the most far-reaching change has been the gradual tightening of the drink-driving laws. The penalties have gotten stricter and stricter. The upper blood alcohol limit has gotten lower and lower. Random breathalyser checkpoints are not at all uncommon. Horrifying ads showing graphic and heart-rending consequences of drink-driving (and also texting and other general inattentiveness) keep popping up on television and in cinemas. Of course, the knock-on consequences were easy to predict. Country pubs have been going out of business, right and left. Local customers find it it safer—and cheaper since taxes on alcohol keep going up—to just stay at home to have their few drinks.
Of course, every new problem created by the government solving a problem is really just another opportunity for the government to solve another problem. Now the new problem is “rural isolation.” To combat it the Irish government has announced fifty new local bus routes in rural areas of nineteen counties which will operate between between the hours of 6 and 11 p.m. In a radio interview the Transport Minister pushed back against wags dubbing it the “drink link.” He said, “It’s for communities to get together, go off and play bingo, if they want to go to the pub they can. It’s not all pub-orientated.” The most vocal critics of the drink-driving crackdown have been two politician brothers in County Kerry who both represent the same constituency. The elder (but less senior) brother, Danny Healy-Rae (who happens to own a pub), has argued that there is more danger of drivers falling asleep after a big meal than from being drunk after a few jars. Among his numerous colorful quotes: “Nobody caused a fatality by having three glasses of Guinness drank.” Last night he got into a shouting match with a junior minister (and fellow Kerryman) in the parliament over the fact that the Transport Minister had called Healy-Rae a “road traffic terrorist.”
So why am I going on about this on a movie web site? Because you never know when a government policy will have unintended consequences when it comes to film heritage. You see, the United Kingdom has apparently been going down the same path as Ireland in cracking down on drink driving. In yesterday’s edition of The Times it was reported that the pub and dining facilities of the Pennan Inn on the northern coast of Scotland (43 miles north of Aberdeen) will be closing in August. After that it will be run as a guesthouse until it can be sold by the owner, Peter Simpson. He said, “Being a rural pub, we were hit very hard by the drink-driving changes. We would get people coming in from a run in the car and having a drink before going on their way. You just don’t get that now.”
The article’s accompanying photo of the pub, with the blue harbor sign and iconic red telephone box, is instantly recognizable to film fans. This is the mythical fishing village of Ferness, where American oil executive Mac MacIntyre arrived with the mission of buying the whole place on behalf of his employer to be the site of a refinery. Despite the locals’ willingness to cash in, the deal did not happen. There was something bewitching about the place, and it cast its spell not only over Mac and his Scottish colleague Ben but eventually over his astronomy-obsessed boss Felix Happer. Mac was played by Peter Riegert. Happer was played by Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster. Danny was played by Peter Capaldi who, 25 years later, would play a Time Lord who travels in a blue telephone box. The pub’s owner Gordon was played by Denis Lawson, whose other gig at the time was playing the pilot Wedges Antilles in every installment of the original Star Wars trilogy.
So, yes, the collateral damage of various governments’ determination to make roads safer looks likely to include the stunning location used by Scottish director Bill Forsyth for filming the classic Local Hero.
But perhaps all hope is not lost. After all the Pennan Inn is up for sale. Who wants to join me in pooling our assets and buying the place? If we did that, then we could just live there. We would not even need a car because we would have absolutely no reason to drive anywhere ever. We could just hang around the pub drinking pints or glasses of scotch or whatever you like and watching and re-watching Local Hero. #BestRetirementEver
-S.L., 10 May 2018
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