The Once and Future Ireland

I’m planning a trip to Ireland. Or wishing I could plan. I might make some plans, but inevitably there would come along a shutdown or a slowdown or an overbooking or a bank holiday weekend. Whatever logistical masterpiece had been concocted stateside would unravel in the face of Ireland’s joyful chaos. It’s inevitable; if you ask directions of one of the 50% of Irish who are young—under 25—you will surely find yourself in impenetrable Gaeltacht. Even if you started out in Dublin! Nothing you trust at home works here: not your plans, and not even the once-mighty American dollar.

The Irish appreciate irony and other literary furbelows, and so they must particularly chuckle that the Americans – those starry-eyed tourists who propped up the economy for decades --are these days irrelevant. Actually, at worst, they’re irritating: their stingy bottoms take up a pub stool where natives and repatriates with fat pocketbooks could otherwise sit.

It true what they say: Ireland (a developing nation when I last visited six years ago) has become the richest country in Europe. It’s a silly time for a penniless Zen girl to visit, but my curiosity is piqued. Are the country roads still narrow and unstriped? The towns still sleepy? The teens still aching for someplace exciting to expend their youthful energies? Of course that undeveloped stodgy charm is what brought the tourists, possibly a rapidly-vanishing phenomenon in our right.

We wanted those tiny roads, with stone walls that flashed by scant inches from our car’s tender side panels. We wanted those picture-postcard views of thatched cottages; those sheep crossing the road; those crinkly-eyed old men in tweed. Even Dublin, with its swank boutiques and up-and-coming restaurants, was a destination because visitors were drawn to the history: the Georgian buildings; the cathedrals; the gracious parks and avenues that kept the Anglo-Irish from feeling homesick during long centuries of occupation. And all those antiquities and oddities were there, compliantly waiting to part us from our dollars. The “Leprechaun” shops along the Ring of Kerry. The Aran sweaters handknit for you by a certain Mrs. Kelly. The tourist trade was done well, and it had to be: whole towns and regions would have crumbled otherwise.

And so they came to Ireland. We did. As if by magnetism, returning. Even if we weren’t full-blooded, had lost our kin, and didn’t know exactly which county or region was ours. That mysterious yet totally bankable feeling of returning home is shared by full- and diluted-blood Irish alike. Nostalgia for the ould sod kisses the cheek of New World quadroon and octoroon, too. Ireland, our native soil, calls to us, a shimmering green jewel in a sea of magic….

Of course the reality of that long-ago life was anything but romantic for those who left their homes. Only the full force of Victoriana, an undiluted syrup forcefully applied in contradiction of all fact, could make life in old Ireland out to be a pleasant thing. The charmingly-huge families crammed into dirt-floored cottages. The soul-killing work. Religious violence and oppression. Poorly-conceived rebellion and brutal retribution. And the famine that obliterated millions, while others fled, and landed in America as refugees, there to enjoy the quaint benefits of hatred and discrimination.

To this day, the Irish national and personal psyche seems marred by that past. Go back to Ireland, listen carefully, and you will begin to see the dark side of this heritage. After a round or three at the pub, having been charmed to pieces by the legendary friendliness of the Irish, it may suddenly strike you that although you’ve told your life story to the fellow on the next barstool, you don’t know a single thing about him. Or that the girl who drew your pint had a funny bruise on her cheek. That the old people glued to their stools along the bar are there because they can’t or won’t go elsewhere. Come to think of it, there’s an awful lot of drinking going on for “nothing being the matter”.

This is the tough hide of the soul, the wounded determination to survive, to hide, to smile when it’s time and celebrate while you can. There and here, the Irish have been tenacious, faithful, and dogged. The alcoholic norm, and the friendliness that conceals rather reveals, are outdated but once tragically-useful means of coping with a pretty depressing set of circumstances. They may not know it themselves, but the Irish have been wiser and tougher than they let on.

Lest this sound simplistic or judgemental: you who are abroad, take a moment to reflect on America’s cowboy past. And notice all the ways the Wild West still marks our behaviour, as individuals and as a nation. To Americans this influence is largely unseen, precisely because it is so fundamental to the national psyche.

So here are the Irish, themselves still, but richer than before, moving forward. Ireland’s long stasis is over. As the money flows, it touches every aspect of life. Slowly the high cobbled city streets, the green hills dotted with cottages, are being crowded out by new construction.

If you don’t like change, and few do, there’s something sad about a picturesque countryside decorated with gigantic new houses for modern “small” families -- only three or four children. Whatever the baggage might be, it now has economic power behind it; prosperity has arrived, with all the promises and betrayals of what money can buy. Whatever depression, shame or inferiority moves undetected below the surface now navigates a bright, uncertain future.

It’s this future that I want to find out about. Accepting that everything changes, that the tiny towns and quiet roads may be gone, that the old people with their shocking innocence will die out, I come instead to see what Ireland will bloom into. Whatever has happened is gone, but it is all a preparation for what is to come.

The future involves everything about the past, every hidden possibility and pitfall, every bright potential in the human heart. The future is where Ireland faces the possibility of becoming a freeway-riddled post-industrial wasteland. It’s where she succeeds or fails in finding a way to skilfully address abuses of—and also by—an exploding immigrant population. The future is where the old ways, the wholesome and infuriating old ways, silently fade, leaving only an imprint of uncertain origin.

This is a switch, from rural to industrial, that Japan did not do well. In the space of a few decades, an agrarian country was brutally transformed into a wasteland. For centuries, isolation and poverty bred a beautiful practical simplicity. Now, lush hillsides have been obliterated, thanks to too much cronyism and too little regulation. Some Japanese really do see this sad destruction as “progress”, a triumph over the wild, the unspoiled, and the mundane.

Even if you can’t plan the specifics, it is possible to meet the future with open eyes. Now–while the past is still strong, while people remember, and the old ways still move the blood—now is the time to think and talk about what Ireland will become. And that’s why I’m going this time. To take part in that conversation.