Noelle McCarthy: Night among roses just wilted away

Noelle McCarthy

This week's story of a Palmerston North hotelier who's decided to ban the entire population of Wainuiomata from his motel made me very uncomfortable. Not on behalf of the good folks of Wainuiomata at being herewith excluded from the delights of the Supreme Motor Lodge, but rather for myself.

The whole sad saga reminds me of my own tawdry record pertaining to motel rooms in the greater Wellington region.

Steve Donnelly, and his motel manager Malcolm Glenn, say they've had enough of sports teams coming over the Wainui Hill and trashing the place. The loud music, the bad language, the spitting.

The way Steve sees it, it's the denizens of Wainuiomata who are solely responsible for the upset and pillage, so he's told the whole lot of them to get lost.

Now I have a certain amount of sympathy for Steve - he's Australian for one thing, which gives you an idea of how bad the carry-on must have been to upset him.

Plus, he showed no compunction in firing Trev Mallard out the door when he tried to get a bed for the night. No, Steve's not all bad. I feel for him, but I'm grateful nevertheless that my own behaviour a few years back hasn't occasioned the same blanket ban on Irish guests by a certain establishment in Lower Hutt.

To explain. A few years ago, I was a guest judge for the New Zealand national final of the Rose of Tralee. The Rose of Tralee, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a pageant held every year in which women of Irish extraction from all over the world travel to county Kerry and compete to be crowned The Rose.

It's not your regular beauty competition - it's more about Irishness than good teeth.. The diaspora being what it is, the girls from overseas usually put the homegrown versions to shame.

The Yanks especially go all out, turning up in all sorts of mad hand-sewn Celtic embroidery, high-kicking their way through convoluted Riverdances, speaking fluent Gaelic to a compere who hasn't two words of it to rub together - that sort of thing.

Anyway, the Irish societies here in New Zealand hold their own heats to choose a Rose to represent us, and I was invited down to help judge the final. A TV producer thought the competition would make for a nice story, so I arrived with a director and a cameraman in tow.

Over the weekend I judged the competition, which was great fun, and I got to meet some wonderful representatives of Hiberno-Kiwi womanhood. We filmed the final and we picked a winner and I got a lovely commemorative glass bowl and it was all going fine until myself and the director repaired back to the hotel for a late-night snifter.

I don't recall the point at which one glass turned into several bottles, nor do I recall whose idea it was to "go and explore". I do, however, have a dim memory of flying through the hotel corridors on one of those big gold trundlers they use to move your suitcases, hooting at the top of my lungs in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

I also remember the horrified faces of the two young ladies on the early shift as they watched me career past them like a drunk tobogganist. Back in the judges' chambers, there was plundering of the minibar, and a shameful bout of smoking inside.

There was hooting and roaring, and an awful lot of laughing. Thankfully we lacked the means to blare music, but I couldn't swear to the fact that we didn't sing. I am not sure at what time the festivities finally subsided, but I know I came around the next morning to an irate knocking, a murderous headache and a scene of such apocalyptic carnage that I just about passed out all over again.

Faced with such destruction, and weighted down by such shame as I have never felt before, I did the only thing possible in the situation. I legged it. I called a taxi, flung my keys on the checkout desk and got out of Dodge.

I still feel bad about it. I had wonderful hospitality shown to me by the Irish Society of Lower Hutt, and I repaid them by turning my hotel room into a dockers' pub. Judge indeed!

And so I read of the wrath being visited down on the unruly burghers of Wainuiomata, and I feel for them. I remember the fag ash in the shower, the empties all over the bed, and I feel for Steve Donnelly as well. The looting, the soiling, the destruction, the disarray.

Well, we reap what we sow. Now the sports teams of Wainuiomata High must find somewhere else to rage, just as I am sure the good people at the Angus Inn, Lower Hutt, will never have me under their roof again.