Any Other Business | 4 December 2010

What Ireland lacks now are statesmen who can make the case that recovery is possible

The screen at Manchester airport tells me I’m about to board an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, but there’s a Lufthansa plane at the gate. ‘Blimey,’ I mutter, ‘this bailout’s moving fast.’ I’m looking at the wrong gate, however, and it’s an Aer Lingus stewardess who becomes the first of many people during my 36-hour visit to wish me ‘the best of luck’. Luck looms large in the Irish psyche and it’s what they long for right now — an oil find would help, I hear one passenger remark — plus a bit less attention from world markets and media. For a country whose economy is little bigger than Manchester’s, the glare of global attention is traumatic. The last thing they’ll welcome, I guess, is another doorstepping foreign columnist.

So thank goodness for talkative taxi drivers. The first gives me a vernacular version of Kevin Myers’s recent Spectator rant about the cronyism of the Irish political class. ‘Here’s where one of the big fellahs drinks,’ he says, as we pass Fagan’s Bar in the suburb of Drumcondra, where Bertie Ahern, who presided as taoiseach during the decade-long boom while fending off multiple allegations about his personal finances, can be found supping Bass and contemplating his country’s ruin.

The next driver tells me he’s behind on his mortgage and business is thin. ‘But all I need’s a couple of good months and a bit of luck, an’ I’ll be fine.’ A third points out a sign of hard times I haven’t seen since I was in Eastern Europe 20 years ago: entire blocks of flats, in mid-evening, with not a single electric light on. But he roars with laughter as he tells me about a man from his own flats who was a sand-blaster by trade but claimed to be a builder when the boom came, won some contracts, made out like a bandit, bought a string of racehorses and lived the Irish dream.