Next morning I decided to make a return to the dining room in Breaffy House. As a potential landowner in the area I decided that I couldn't keep on hiding from the manager. Plus in my favour too, I hadn't had any further run-ins with the police in the last few days.

"I'll have the full Irish Breakfast," I said to the young lady attending the morning diners who were presumably all residents of the hotel.

"Tea or Coffee Sir?" she asked smiling.

"Coffee thanks."

I sipped my orange juice and read the paper anticipating the big fry-up that was to come. There it was in the paper - a photograph of the tall thin man and this time identified definitely as Minister O'Ryan of the Mayo constituency indicted for drug smuggling. According to the political correspondent writing the story in the Irish Times the minister had been using the diplomatic bag to bring drugs into Ireland - cannabis and cocaine for personal use it seemed. They weren't quite sure exactly how he managed to bypass the normal sniffer detectors - dogs and infra red gas detectors but following a tip-off the forensic people had found significant traces of both cannabis and cocaine in his official car and house. His Garda driver aide de camp was being held for questioning. In spite of the significant evidence that appeared to have been unearthed - evidence that the Irish times was prepared to publish - the minister was still at work in his office and hadn't been arrested yet. He was a powerful man.

"Oh! Oh!" I thought, on reading this and rubbing the back of my head and feeling the still-sore spot where I had been banged over the head a few days ago. I thought I knew exactly how Minister O'Ryan was "bringing in a couple of kees" as Arlo Guthrie put it at Woodstock all those years ago. Whatever about getting onto the aircraft in the first place - presumably this is where diplomatic immunity came into it as a foreign government minister would often be feted onto an aircraft in the country of departure with full diplomatic honours. It was different on the home leg, however, and at least that day in Shannon he had to go though the normal baggage handling procedures the same as everyone else. Even to the extent of having to endure the same long delays as all the other passengers on the plane in fact. The trick seemed to be to simply switch bags - putting his stash into the bag of some unsuspecting fellow traveller when in the transit/arrivals area. Easy to do by just grabbing a bag as it emerged from the carousel or even perhaps behind the scenes before it appeared in the open. The minister's policeman accomplice would be able to ‘access all areas’ relatively easily. When the dupe had recovered their baggage and walked through the customs area and through any potentially troublesome detectors or customs inspections the minister’s accomplice would then simply 'inspect' the passengers bag and 'find' the pouch that they had planted. Presumably they would go through a charade and spin a yarn that they had spotted someone planting drugs in their bags and thanking the dupe for their unasked for help. If the real customs officers caught the dupe that was his or her tough luck they were on their own and the minister would have to write off that particular stash. The recovery of the drug pouch would probably be done somewhere outside the terminal. In my case something had obviously gone wrong in that I had driven 10 miles or more down the road before the had caught up with me. But there had been a major foul up in the baggage handling at Shannon on the day I was chosen as the minister’s dupe. Everything that possibly could go wrong did go wrong behind the scenes in the baggage handling area apparently. My bags did not appear on the carousel as they should have after the 'item' had been planted in it. It looked like my bags were picked up by mistake by somebody else altogether and then abandoned when it was realised that they had taken the wrong bag through customs. I had found my bags abandoned outside in the main terminal area so whoever didn’t spot their mistake until they had actually smuggled the pouch through.

I mulled it all over as I munched on my breakfast trying to clarify the whole thing. Of course, using a Garda accomplice made it very easy for the drug-smuggling minister to recover his bags. Presumably the uniformed Garda, if indeed he was a real policeman at all, would simply approach the unsuspecting courier, search their bags as if he were a police officer who was genuinely in search of drugs. He would then remove the diplomatic bag - which they had stashed in the person's bag - either surreptitiously or else by explaining that they had actually seen someone planting the bag in their luggage. Finally they would actually thank the citizen for their co-operation and that would be the end of the matter as far as the dupe was concerned. A neat operation, but obviously in my case something had gone wrong. The forensic team that had examined my car at the hotel car park suggested too that maybe someone was on to the scam and that they had been under surveillance that day in Shannon.

I hardly tasted my full Irish breakfast - the first one I had actually eaten since arriving with the full regalia: eggs, sausages, rashers, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread, potato cakes, brown bread with butter and marmalade. I wondered how long it would be before I was called in for questioning again. Should I approach the Gardaí and explain my theory? Would the minister send goons after me? The night that I was knocked out and dumped at Moore Hall was obviously linked to the whole affair too. Maybe I would be better simply to take off for a few days around the county and keep a low profile while trying to follow up on a few more leads from my mother's shoebox?

As I drove down the long drive from the hotel, a police car passed me going towards the hotel. If they were looking for me it was too late - I was outa there!

"Thinking of playing handball?" said a voice at my shoulder, startling me. "You look more like a basketball player!" I turned to see a small bespectacled man with a fishing rod in his hand.

"Ah so that's what it is," I said "I thought that it looked familiar - it reminded me of a squash court but not exactly like the ones I used to play in Manhattan."

"Ah the Taoiseach…" I said to wind him up. "You've been fishing?" I said, stating the obvious and pointing to his extra long rod.

"Dapping, for all the good it did me." He said with obvious disappointment and annoyance in his voice. I suspected that I had pressed the button and was about to hear the full fisherman's tale about the one that got away.

"Never heard of them," I said

"Well it's a sad story so it is. The arctic char were left behind by the ice when it retreated at the end of the Ice Age about 12000 years ago. Nearest relatives now hang out around the ice caps up inside the Arctic Circle, way up North where the water is cold and clean. But they survived here," he continued pointing out over the lake with a sad kind of gesture. "They survived for 12,000 years until the middle 1980s when farmers were told to start making silage to feed their cows and to bring them in during the winter and to fill up these big tanks with piss and shite. Of course tanks fill up and have to be emptied so they just dumped it out on the fields. Disaster."

"Sounds disgusting" I agreed.

"Now the trout are disappearing too and there's nothing but coarse fish that the bloody English anglers brought in."

"I had planned to do a bit of fly fishing, " I said a bit tentatively. "Where's the best place to go then? It sounds like Lough Conn has gone down the tubes."

"It's not lost yet we live in hope that the County Council and the Fisheries Board will do something and prosecute the bastards responsible. But the bloody IFA people don't give a damn about the environment I'm afraid and all the politicians care about these days is brown envelopes."

"The what?" I didn't get the brown envelope reference.

"Oh that's what they put the bribes in nowadays before they hand them over! The politicians override the planners and they grant planning permissions in return for hard cash - half of Dublin was built on this system and lots of tribunals to prove it - corruption." He was getting quite animated now warming to his theme. "It's a conspiracy between the farmers and the politicians. The land here isn't worth a damn so now they've turned to ‘farming’ sites." I realised now that there were a lot of things about Ireland I didn't know. Sites? What sort of a crop or animal was this?

"Housing sites - they're just property speculators. They can't compete with New Zealand farmers in price so they just take the subsidies and then try to sell off bits of their land a half acre at a time so that rich Dubliners and Germans can build holiday homes here. Bungalow Blitz is destroying tourism and our lakes and rivers. They are destroying the landscape and scenery that they come here to enjoy in the process. The big house perched on top of the drumlin ridge to get "The View" effectively destroying the same view for everyone else. Of course they claim that they are building the houses for their children who for some peculiar reason won't live in villages - it's against their religion!" he said sarcastically. "Agricultural land sells at £3000 per acre but sites - £50,000 per acre - greed and damn the environment. But that's only the start. The 'children' live in the house for a year or so and then sell them off at another big profit just like any speculator will and leave a leaky septic tank that's covered in water half the year spewing out shit and dishwasher effluent into the lake." He spat on the ground in disgust. "Anyway I didn't catch a damn thing over the past week and this should be the best time of the year. Gotta go. Now enjoy your holiday."

"Nice to talk to you." I said watching him attach his rod to the top of his car and drive off towards Castlebar. I realised that he never actually answered my question about where I should go fishing.

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Next - The tale of the Protestant ancestor from Crossmolina

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