Pete McCarthy

Pete McCarthy was born in 1951 in Warrington, England, to an Irish Catholic family, and spent much of his career as a television presenter and comedy writer — credits include Absolutely (Channel 4) and various travel documentaries — before writing McCarthy's Bar (2000).

The book was based on a rule McCarthy invented for himself: never pass a bar with your name on it. In Ireland, McCarthy's Bars are not uncommon, and the journey that resulted — through rural Cork, Kerry, and Connacht, ending at the McCarthy heartland of Roaring Water Bay — is simultaneously a personal investigation of his Irish identity and a sequence of encounters with the inhabitants of the bars he was obligated to enter.

The comedy is warm rather than satirical — McCarthy was affectionate toward the Ireland he found, which was changing rapidly but had not yet entirely lost the distinctiveness that made it worth writing about. The book was a phenomenal success in Ireland and Britain.

The Road to McCarthy (2002) continued the Irish theme internationally, following the McCarthy diaspora to Montana, Alaska, and New South Wales — anywhere the name appears on a map or a bar sign.

He died of cancer in 2004, aged 52, before he could complete a third book. His friends, who included Bill Bryson and Tony Hawkes, established the Pete McCarthy Memorial Award for comic travel writing.