The Emerald Isle

O'Connell Street, Dublin, Ireland

It's New Year's Day, and I'm in Dublin. Flat broke from a week of converting the failing dollar to the high flying euro, but consoled by pints of Guinness that have broken high double digits at this point. There is a saying that it is impossible for two Irishmen to walk into a pub and order just one pint. This is due to the fact that it is terrible etiquette to purchase just a drink for oneself. Beers, cigarettes, and whatever else you may consume in a pub are gifts that are to be exchanged and re-exchanged for the even greater gift of gab. A pub filled with good conversation is termed "good for the craic" (pronounced crack), and we have yet to find an establishment that has proved otherwise.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that the Irish are a stew of characters from all over the North Atlantic, who sip away days in the dark warmth of brightly painted pubs harbored from the shifting rains outside. Their brogue makes their wit as light as it is dark, and if you can match them for a few rounds of good-natured jostling, the ideas that then pour forward are a testament to a people for which literature and conversation are a high art. All art depends on benefactors, of course, and the fact that Ireland is now the "Celtic Tiger" of Europe has maybe spun hours in the pub out of control. Dublin is now more expensive than London. The average Irish person enjoys an income far above most of the world, and as its high tech economy makes it the crown of the EU, its citizens are snapping up fast jobs, fast cars, and fast living.

Couple this with the free fall that priestly indiscretion has wreaked on the Catholic Church, and you have a full blown social extravaganza in a country where birth control was illegal just a little over a decade ago. Along with the cheerful banter yet to be overcome by the rising tide of materialism are chipper Irish women in mini-skirts who, still matching the men word for word in the pubs, have donned a scanty style thoroughly un-Catholic and to whom the Polish woman we are staying with roles her eyes with the word "Irish!"

The mists part about every three hours for a spot of sunshine between the rain drops. On every lawn, hill, wall, and unused driveway there is green. Everywhere—in the crevices of bricks, in the crooks of trees—the island is an eternal spring green, accented by brightly colored doors and brightly colored pubs. Though the internet is lightning quick, half the pubs don't even have music—for it gets in the way of the craic. Outside their front doors in Galway, old men are jumping off the public dive into the December Atlantic, while young men watch soccer matches in the pub, women are loaded with shopping bags, and the population shakes its good natured head at the fact that, this Christmas, slews of Irish did their shopping in New York.

Ireland has an income tax like the United States—low—and a sales tax like Europe—high. The Irish speak English and sit between the two continents. Ireland has severed itself from the English pound, going Euro all the way, yet it remains connected to the States as well: 25% of Americans are of Irish decent, while Irish who have spent time in the States are in every pub. I feel very at home here in this very familiar place. This may be due in part to a bit of family history I learned in the past week. My people come from Waterford County, an early Viking settlement from which the Ostmen raiders would pillage the rest of the island. My middle name, Foley, in Gaelic means "plunderer." Many of my youthful indiscretions are beginning to make sense.

I cannot help but marvel at the fact that my predecessors emigrated from an Ireland that was dirt poor in 1848 and that had also been so for several centuries prior to that fateful day my great-great grandfather had his final run-in with an English tax collector and moved to the United States. Ireland remained poor right on through my own college days. Yet in ten short years, the tech boom has turned England's former whipping post into the Silicon Valley of a continent.

The rustic Guinness Brewery I remember from a visit five years ago, with its hops-covered wooden floors and homey tour guides, is now something akin to Disney World, gutted and redesigned by an architect better known for big city art museums. On the field where not a hundred years ago Irishmen were gunned down for nothing more than playing their native games, an immense Super Bowl caliber stadium now stands to celebrate those very Celtic sports.

Perhaps most intriguing is the Spire. In the middle of O’Connell Street, across from the old post office that stands like a Roman ghost, where in 1916 Irish freedom fighters were crushed with English shells, a metallic needle, no more than ten feet at the base, shoots 300 feet into the air. It is free standing, made with some new feat of engineering that allows its sharp point to shimmer far above the rest of Dublin. As one looks at the chipped yet grand pillars of the old post office, one can still see the scars of war. Turn around, and the sun's rays illuminate the polished metal of the Spire like an electrified wand; so bright, I thought, that on a clear day standing on the English coast, one could detect a glint on the horizon to the west.

(01/02/05)