Christmas in Ireland

[Christian Murphy]

I needed a couple of days back in Germany to get a sense of my trip back
home to Dublin. The overwhelming impression I get here is that it is
bright: I look up at the sky and it's blue and white (no coincidence
I presume). I've heard rain during the nights (those nights where you
have a lot of time to mull things over as compensation for loss of sleep)
but I haven't seen it or felt it.

So, yes, it was dark and it rained. And it was windy, but it was a
sort of an exhilarating wind, one that makes you feel present, feel
that you have a purpose in life, even if it's only not to fall over.
Seeing trees felled in your path made you think of a bully who had kicked
over another kid's toys and was standing there smugly. The strange
thing was that you could sympathise with the bully. It was never cold,
and though you'd be getting rain drops slapped into your face it wasn't
like a real winter wind that would rob the heat from your body through
three layers of clothing.

We went down to the Forty Foot same as every year to admire the bright
pink bathers who this year where braving the waves past a "Seas Dangerous"
sign. They all looked so frail there in the elements but the eagerness
of those heading there with towels under their arms was infectious.
The water, like the clouds, wasn't really dark, but it was a kind of a
grey that seems to absorb light as if in an old oil painting.

It was busy as you'd expect. Starting at the airport and ending at the
airport there were crowds everywhere: cars on the road, people in the
DART and bouncers at the doors of pubs after eight. People were a bit
more aggressive than I'd remembered (but then memories are unreliable
and liable to take on emotional colours), rushing to get the last places
on the train, for example. Shopping is an experience, but much improved
over the years. You have half a chance of resting your feet and having
a bite to eat or a cup of tea or coffee: there are simply more places
than there were.

Christmas is really a time of binging. You binge on the shopping
(although now that everyone's grown up that's difficult: a fridge can
only hold so much food, no matter how much ingenuity you put into it).
You binge on friends and relatives. And you binge on TV. Ah yes, I was
able to see enough episodes of the Simpsons and the X Files to last a life
time (well, at least another year) in the original without subtitles!
There wasn't really that much on (no more exciting Christmas film
premieres) but who cares: it's good passive, vegetative entertainment.
Definitely the most voyeuristic programme was the documentary about John
Harbison, the state pathologist. This is the Ireland we all think we
know, because everyone knows everyone else. Really, it's a wonder that
anyone ever disappears at all.

I went to the "High Skills Pool" jobs fair at Jury's Hotel. It was
small (like everything else -- tables and chairs in coffee shops, roads,
seats on public transport) and it was packed. Biggest impression was
"my God, there's a lot of jobs in telecomms, why am I not in that sector"
but they were hiring software people. (Unfortunately a lot of that was
in localisation and testing but there were some interesting jobs as well
by the looks of it.)

I was pointedly told by one gentleman that there were positions available
at all levels, _including_ entry level. (Thanks, but I thought most of
the spots were gone by now!) Some of the people on the stands seemed a
bit too eager (pulling desperate grinning smiles and "can I interest you
in XXX, sir" if you show any signs of weakness). Having done a couple
of circuits of the place and even talked to a few people I was surprised
to be out again after only half an hour.

There were a lot of articles in the papers about globalisation and
Europeanisation and the dreaded C*lt*c T*g*r. (Of course you have to
splurge on papers as well, even if that means going up to and as far
as the Daily Telegraph when nothing else is available [eek].) One
point that struck home (made I think by Fintan O'Toole, much unloved
by some sci regulars) was that Irish Europeanisation has meant
learning from the Brits. A lot of Irish have been abroad compared to
people of other countries, but if you look closer, they've been to the
"near abroad", that is, Britain. And who's buying up large chunks
of the retailing sector in Ireland and modernising it? British
companies. Our much vaunted multinational sector is overwhelmingly
American. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily, but we shouldn't
cod ourselves about how world-wise and open-minded we are.

All criticism aside, Ireland's a better place than it was twenty
years ago. Who remembers queueing up for petrol in '79 or the dark,
dark years in the early eighties when it looked like everything was
kaput and we might turn into a mullah republic? The country's in the
mainstream now and making a success of it. Like someone else wrote in
the papers, the reason we got independence was so that we could have a
seat in Brussels.

In the news you'd see how it took more than a week to reconnect some
of the houses to the national grid. Pictures on TV showed heroic ESB men
going out and doing the right stuff twenty hours a day and a Cork man
who was so dumbfounded by happiness and the cameras that he could only
repeat formulas ("well, you know") to prove he hadn't lost his tongue.
But after that there'd be stories about the plants owned by Seagate and
AST and rumblings of the fall of Eastern Tigers on whom we thought we
were modelling ourselves. In the papers I was surprised to see it was
Lemass who coined the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats". Well
the tide was very high on the Liffey on Friday as I was taking a taxi
to the airport and the paper was full of stories about Lemass (thirty
years being the time after which most state papers are released).
Wasn't that an optimistic time like now and did people not think they
had created a new and better Ireland?

Now I'm back in Germany, a country with very different concerns, where
Ireland, if it is mentioned, is referred to as a tax haven. Munich
is a nice city but it's just not the same.

Regards,
-christian

--
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