From Celtic tiger to pussycat

After a healthy Irish lunch I drove blithely off through the streets of Roscrea, I think it was, to find that everywhere I went the populace was cheerfully waving at me, smiling, gesticulating or blowing horns. When I stopped to ask them why, I found that I had left on the roof of my car a wallet containing my entire worldly wealth, cash, credit cards and all. So paradoxically enjoyable was all this, so irresistibly amused and sympathetic were the bystanders, that I came to think of the event as a sort of leitmotif of my visit to Ireland.

For whatever else has happened to the Republic, through it all the populace has remained fun, quick, laughing and kind to foolish visitors. I was pottering around for a couple of weeks trying to sense the present feel of the country, and in most other ways found it impossible to escape the layered changes in the nature of Irishness that have occurred during my half-century of bemused acquaintance with the place. Only the charm of the Irish has defied time!

Not so long ago there lingered relics of the Republic’s very beginnings, the days of the Easter Rising and the terrible beauty, and I often used to come across burnt-out houses of the old Ascendancy, and sometimes living survivors too. I have met no Anglo-Irish gentry this time, but when the other day I was scoffing oysters on a waterfront in County Galway I looked up and lo, silhouetted on the skyline was the gaunt vestigial ruin of Tyrone House, burnt in 1920 along with its attendant chapel, about which John Betjeman once wrote

One extinguished family waits
A Church of England resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates….

Otherwise that lost and enviable ruling caste offered me no memorials, but so varied have been the fortunes of Ireland since its extinction that I could read the Republic’s more recent history in the very landscapes that I passed.