Esther McCarthy: My magical Cork Christmas movie plot
Esther Quinn Picture: Emily Mccarthy
I have discovered a Christmas movie channel called ‘Great!’. They don’t oversell, but the exclamation point tells us they’re still trying.
The plots, character development, and acting aren’t ‘great’ — but they’re weirdly addictive. I think I could pitch them my idea for a movie next year.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think the American execs at Great! are going to be ‘Excited!’.
Working title: ‘A Corker of a Christmas’.
Opening scene: a statue of a dead male writer in front of Guinness Storehouse (to establish we’re in the metropolitan suckfest of Dublin) and a cheeky cabbie in a tweed cap dropping off our protagonist, a freckleless red head (we’ll have a wig budget) named Sheelagh O’Shaunessy, and admonishing her because she works too bleeeeedin’ hard.
Cut to interior, a bustling office with our cailín striding purposefully through the vast workspace, as three secretaries clatter alongside of her, all talking at the same time, one handing her a bulky report, one thrusting a complicated coffee into her hand, and one, the hilarious camp PA/best friend, admonishing her for working too hard, while urging her to sign a bunch of important documents.
The next bit of the movie involves a phone call, a sick father down in rural Cork, and a few more scenes where we shove it in the audience’s face that Sheelagh is a big deal at work, and far too busy climbing that corporate ladder to date or get the ride.
We cut to Sheelagh, still wearing her power suit and high heels struggling out of the back of a sheep truck (the only vehicle available to transport her from the airport to the rolling green hills of the massive family farm in north Cork).
She’s watched by an elderly man in wellies with mad hair leaning on pitchfork and chewing a piece of hay.
“Bygob, if it isn’t young Sheelagh, back from the big schmoke, here to help her ailing father save the family farm,” he says, helpfully for the audience.
“Fergus!” she exclaims, shooing a lamb, and struggling to pull her designer suitcase off the mucky trailer.
“Our faithful farmhand, who knows me better than I know myself, who drank his own land away, and has a crippling gambling addiction, ’tis yourself.”
She then topples over a mound of manure, thanks to her restrictive pencil skirt and inappropriate Jimmy Choos.
Even though she is a high-flying, hard-nosed career gal, she is also adorably clumsy.
She blows her fringe out of her green eyes, squinting up at a figure silhouetted by the sun (we’ll have a special effects budget).
“Well, Sheelagh Gimmeafeelah, ’tis yourself,” exclaims a blued-eyed hunk, with sensitive eyes and the shoulders of peak Daniel Craig.
“I’m not called that anymore,” harrumphs Sheelagh, rattled at seeing Mickey Óg, the fella she asked to her debs all those (four) years ago, but he never turned up, leading her to flee to Dublin, heartbroken, that very night in her debs dress her dying mother stitched from burlap sacks, lamb tails, and poppies.
“Like hell he is,” fumes our heroine, as she marches into her father’s bedside to explain how she can use her big city smarts to leverage a better rate on the mortgage.
Then there’ll be a whole lot of accidental meet-ups as Mickey Óg also runs the ferris wheel/vegetable shop/vet clinic in the picturesque village square, and all Sheelagh’s childhood friends stop feeding their families to lend her their Aran jumpers, help orchestrate meet-cutes with Mickey, and mopping up the hot chocolate she keeps spilling in Mickey’s side hustle, the artisan coffee shop in the village square.
The local guard will probably get involved by trying to lock up the half-dead dad with a fierce bad cough for lack of mistletoe licence or something, but Stickey Mickey will save the day by waving a fax sent by the camp PA proving the guard is trying to buy the farm cheaply at the village square weekly property auction, because he’s discovered a rare strain of valuable spud in the far field.
We’ll wrap it up with Mickey revealing he never collected her for the debs that fateful night because the baddie guard pulled his tractor over for speeding, and threw him in the village square jail, and is there any chance she’d leave behind the Dublin rat race, come and run the newly profitable farm with him, and maybe get her dyspraxia diagnosed while she’s at it?
“Oh put a Cork in it,” she smiles as he babbles on, and they glance up and realise they’re standing under mistletoe dangled by Fergus sitting on a haystack.
She laughs prettily, trying not to worry about losing her pension and her autonomy, and goes up on her tippy toes in her wellies and kisses him with no tongue, much to Fergus’ disappointment.
