Pogue Mahone (The only bit of Gaelic I know...)

My mother has this strange misconception that somehow getting up at the crack of dawn in order to set off on holiday makes the holiday all the more exciting. It doesn't. It just makes you tired. Added to this my mother has made it her aim in life to find something wrong with absolutely anything: the airport is ugly; you can't get coffee on Ryanair unless you pay extra; Dublin is ugly.

Actually, Bristol Airport looks like it has come flatpacked from Ikea in a job lot with Exeter and Guernsey and all those other small airports which have suddenly become "International" airports, which means they fly to Ireland and Alicante as well as Aberdeen and Manchester, and Ryanair is literally "no-frills": you don't even get a complimentary sick bag.

As for Ireland, I think my mother expected it to be all green rolling hills and crofts populated by fiddle-playing, potato-eating leprechauns who say things like "top of the morning to you." (These people, incidentally, take leprechauns rather too seriously.) Instead we are flying over flat countryside smattered with what seems like a disproportionate number of graveyards. As for Dublin, it is jammed bumper to bumper with traffic and seems to be largely populated by short, elderly nuns and drunk English tourists on stag weekends, though it also apparently has a sizeable ethnic population that surprises my mother so much that she feels it necessary to point to every Chinese restaurant and express her amazement. What's more, while we're out shopping, one of these happy little Irish folk nicked our hubcaps.

My family originated in Moutmellick, which is in County Laois, but they came over to the UK early in the twentieth century to work in Bradford. This depresses me: Mountmellick is a small town and living there would drive me to distraction, but I don't think Bradford in the 1900s would have been much of an improvement. But I get the impression they were fairly desperate. Wandering round the cemetery in search of ancestors (yes, this is the way I spend my holidays: picking my way through gravestones while the rest of you sun yourselves in the Mediterranean), I realised I was walking on hundreds of unmarked graves. A cheerful "Irish Heritage" signpost tells us that during the potato famines so many died that they were not given proper burials, just thrown into a pit. The sign can only guess how many bodies are there, and it reckons around 300. Mountmellick has a population of 3000, and we only visited the Catholic cemetery. My relatives are also anonymous: wooden crosses don't last long and the only people you can still find from that era are the rich ones who could afford huge stone angels on pedestals.

I haven't been to Galway before and as we have no known family from there I don't have to spend my introduction to it walking over dead people. Instead I go for a wander round the town and bizarrely cross paths with a double decker bus that seems to be populated by men in dresses and bears the proud (if slightly apologetic) slogan "Galway Gay Pride", and by the looks of it all 30 or so of Galway's gay community seem to have turned out for it. On the other side of the road a group of evangelical God-botherers have hoisted up their own banner, which is much larger and more professional, and are singing to them. The vast majority of people are walking past seemingly oblivious to the presence of either.

Galway is nice, I particularly recommend the Cathedral, where I bought a rosary of shamrock-shaped beads for My Catholic, but I am aware that most of you are not interested in Cathedrals and will have been somewhere rather more interesting than the West Coast of Ireland, so I will leave it at that.

I was amused, however, as our jumbo landed (with a bounce, which I'm sure isn't meant to happen) to see a car parked on the other side of the airport fence and a chap in front of it relieving himself. I wonder if he thought he'd found a nice deserted place when suddenly, mid-piss, he realized that 200 bored passengers were watching. Some of us even waved.