“Well, I was at Mass last week and the priest had the kids up on the altar singing the carols. And there was one little one, about six years old, and black she was! Black as the ace of spades! Singing away, God bless her. Do you know, you could hardly tell her hair from her face, she was that black. Grand little thing. Singing away.”

She is in her mid seventies, and is intrigued by Ireland’s first wave of immigration. Her husband joins in. “There was a fella in the South Court when we were in last month—was he Cambodian? Or Mexican? Jesus, I don’t know now.”
    “Wasn’t he Albanian?”
    “No he wasn’t. He was either Cambodian or he was Mexican. Awful nice fella, anyway.”
The local Bank of Ireland is installing new video monitors, says their daughter, my neighbour. A small Nigerian gang has been carrying out branch robberies, and they smile up at the cameras with pure mischief. “Sure they know feckin’ well we can’t make out their faces on the black-and-white film. Clever, you see.”

There were always a few immigrants in Limerick. We knew them all by sight or name. The Dutch grower, the German staff at Krups, the Hong Kong restarant owner, the Sri Lankan engineer, the Czech teacher. The Regional Hospital hired African, Indian, and Pakistani doctors, whose kids showed up in Mungret school for a year or two and set my mother teaching Limerick five-year-olds about Ramadan and Eid. Once, about ten years ago, she went to great trouble to find Asian figures for the Christmas crib—not easy in Ireland—only to have the sole Indian child in her class ask, “Teacher, why aren’t they pale like us?”

The last five years have seen the first round of concentrated economic immigration to Ireland, the first non-white faces who weren’t on the Irish soccer team and didn’t wear white coats. Middle-aged Romanian women in bright shawls sell The Big Issue and beg for change. Nigerians seek asylum. Filipina nurses make up the staff shortages caused by lousy wages and conditions, and they take endless crap from their Irish sisters. People arrive from Iran, from the Ukraine, from China. A Libyan immigrant recently flustered our legal system when he applied for a visa for his second wife. Meat-processing plants in the west of Ireland imported Polish workers to do the blood-and-guts factory work the Irish will no longer do. I looked twice the other day when I passed a shop labelled “Russian Deli” in downtown Limerick; not since the pogrom of 1904 have we seen borscht and latkes here. And my heart gave a Brooklyn skip when I heard three different languages on Cruise’s Street on Christmas Eve, and I wanted to say, welcome! You’re welcome! to fellow misfits. I wonder if they are lonely here.

Are they welcome? I don’t know. The economy no longer roars, and there are ugly letters to the newspapers about These People taking our benefits and living it up on our taxes. Coming in deliberately pregnant, don’t you know, and being fed and housed instead of deported back to wherever the hell they came from. And then they take up all the private beds in the hospitals, because without medical histories the doctors don’t know what diseases they might have…

We are certainly more generous to our destitute immigrants than the United States ever was—which is not hard—but you get the feeling that these policies are by oversight rather than by design.

It’s not the foaming letters to the Irish Times that intrigue me. It is the unselfconscious reactions of the locals to our new visitors and citizens. In my careful, Ivy League New York world, we rarely even said “Happy Christmas” for fear of causing cultural offence, and so I am gobsmacked when an elderly friend blithely catalogues all the Africans she has seen in the last month. Her great interest has no malice, as far as I can make out (though there is plenty of racist malice elsewhere). It is the curiosity of a woman who would have put her childhood Lent money in the Trócaire box to help the Black Babies far away. “Black as the ace of spades,” she says happily, and I glance at my plate, rigid as the WASPs George Carlin used to parody.

“This was the year in which Ireland woke up in the wrong bed with a crashing hangover…If 2002 was a head-banging cocktail of champagne promises and acid betrayal, 2003 was the sober, paranoid, stomach-plunging, pocket-pinching postscript.”
—Kathy Sheridan, The Irish Times

“I’m tired of the media telling me I never had it so good…tired of the culture of “me”…tired of Boston and Berlin…tired of computers and email and mobile phones and TV programmes where tall, thin people tell me what I should wear and what I should eat and where I should go on holidays.”
—Letter to The Irish Times

I am uncomfortable in Ireland. I pick on the place, finding irritations everywhere. The weather. The grabbiness. The foul drinking habits. Joe Bleedin’ Duffy on the radio. And my peevishness is backed up: in all Europe, Ireland has the highest cost of living, the highest spending on alcohol, and the shortest life expectancy. Street violence and gangland murders make the news every day. My friends talk about crippling mortgages and out-of-reach childcare. Volunteerism is way down. We have discovered the thrill of racism.

I have been feeding on this stuff for two weeks now, reading the articles and eliciting the complaints with the private glee of a returned Cassandra. Gone to the feckin’ dogs, the whole bloody place, is all I want to hear, because I am unable to cope with an Ireland that is thriving. My begrudgery, of course, has little to do with Ireland, and everything to do with me. I am back in my parents’ home, unemployed, broke, kicked out of North America, and waiting out an interminable divorce. So naturally, I’ve been blaming Ireland.

The country has changed vastly in the decade I’ve been gone, and I experience a strange reversal of the tall-poppy syndrome. This time it’s the returned Yank who says, who do they think they are with their mobile phones and their three-car garages? Vulgar, I sniff, like a hometown spinster looking at a Long Island engagement ring. We need to “retrieve our misplaced hearts, rescusitate our Mammon-ised Irish souls”, says the Irish Times. But the truth is more complicated than the grumpy newspaper articles admit. They forget, or will not allow, that Ireland is also a far kinder place than it was twenty or thirty years ago.

I learned this since I came back. No one has set the parish priest on me for my fallen woman ways, nor gloated at a high-flyer temporarily crashed. They could not be kinder, my Limerick family, friends, and neighbours, who welcome me with openhearted support and love. They are sorry my marriage failed, and they say this clearly and kindly, not in the whispers that are the Janus face of gossip. They are glad, I think, that the bold Ranger Tim makes me happy.

Contrast this with the experience of Paul Durcan, poet, described in his passionate defence of our Taoiseach (Prime Minister), who is separated, and his (now former) partner, Celia Larkin.

“I was once married myself and to a wonderful woman and we have two smashing daughers. Alas, bad luck hit us and we had to separate. It could happen to the Angel Gabriel. It could happen to you.

That was the worst time of my life—which won’t come as any surprise to Bertie or Miriam Ahern or to any of you who have had the misfortune to see your marriage go on the rocks.

These days I live alone in a cave in the Dublin docklands. But my wife, I am glad to say, has a partner. They have been together now for at least twelve years.

Myself, I would have given anything to have got married again or to have had a permanent partner but no such luck has come my way. In this intolerant country it’s not easy for a separated man or a separated woman to meet a new partner and harder still to meet a new spouse.

When I cry to God—as I do, being human—I ask forgiveness for my un-natural situation. It is totally un-natural and therefore, wrong for a man or woman to have to live alone and to be isolated from all intimacy.

Also, being separated, I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of badmouthing, malice, exclusion. Some of my own family treat me as a criminal or as a second-class citizen because I am separated. I have committed the crime of separation and, therefore, I am morally reprehensible and I am not entitled to first-class rights or normal courtesies.”

Paul Durcan is a generation older than me. I had left college by the time divorce was legalised, and knew only two couples who had separated. Contraception was legalised just a few years before, when AIDS forced the country to accept condoms, and Gay Byrne, our high priest, unrolled one to gasps on the Late Late Show. That Ireland, the country in which Paul Durcan’s marriage broke up, demanded an awful, bitter silence as the price of being left in peace. It was an abuser’s paradise then, so secretive that even children blamed themselves and kept quiet. Fifteen years ago, if an aspect of your life didn’t fit the pattern for a happily-married breeding pair, the code was simple: shut up or leave.

But we hide less now. Over kitchen tables, generations of stories spill in homemade truth and reconciliation ceremonies. One friend describes how when she was five years old her mother instructed her to pretend to granny she was four, to cover up her hidden, unplanned birth—only to discover, thirty years later, that her grandmother, too, had hidden a child, now in his sixties. Another college acquaintance, we discover, had to work as a prostitute to support her child. I know a family imprisoned for twenty years by the bizarre rituals of the mother’s untreated mental illness. Can you imagine the loneliness and grief these people bore? Yet another woman, reunited with the lovely daughter she gave up at four days old, had never in thirty years told a single person of her baby’s existence. How could she, in a country where Eileen Flynn was publicly fired from her teaching job as late as 1982 for brazening out an unmarried pregnancy? At the time there were whole religious charities dedicated to covering up pregnancies and their infant consequences.

These days more than half of Irish babies are born outside what is revealingly called wedlock, and the Taoiseach brought his radiant, unmarried partner to the White House. And out pour low-key tales of alcoholism, depression, hidden babies, closeted loves, hidden abortions, sexual abuse, prostitution, bullying, lonely separations, and violence in the home. Outed are our priests, who preached a hard, unforgiving line against these sinners while maintaining their own secret families on parish funds, or worse.

So many lives finally make sense by the light of these confessions, which are heard and passed on with genuine sympathy, as far as I can tell. “The poor woman/fella, and isn’t she/he great to get on with things,” is the general reaction to slip-ups and misfortunes, not the delighted, judgmental crowing of another time. In this great national unburdening, the only ones received with the coldness once shown to every fallen soul are the bishops and priests whose hypocrisy is now public. There is bitterness towards these men who demanded impossible moral standards they didn’t keep to themselves; a sense that they forced us to live in unnecessary darkness.

We have lost some of our charitable instincts in this grasping, brash country. The compensation is an openness and tolerance I haven’t seen before. The place drives me mad, but it humbles me, too.

On Christmas Eve I get to meet Ríona, who regularly posts comments here (I’ve never met most of the people who do). She’s a Seattle-based Microsoftie, and wrote to me in May when she found my post about San Juan de Chamula, in Chiapas, which she had just visited too.

A Ríona (REE-uh-na) and a Dervala can start with the assumption that the other is Irish, but we quickly discovered more in common than that. We went to the same secondary school—Crescent, in Limerick. (She was six years ahead, so we weren’t there at the same time.) My father taught her. My sister and her brother “went out” briefly, as kids. She worked with a classmate of mine at Microsoft. We had followed the same career path—from literary publishing (briefly, in my case) to software. We are reformed Prada tag-hags who learned to drive at an advanced age. Her eccentric upbringing, from Canada to a cottage on Achill Island (immortalised as Craggy Island in Father Ted,) parallels the kind of adulthood I’m trying to make. And we share an interest in far-flung travel, from Chiapas to China.

So how ‘bout that. In truth, it never surprises me to discover connections with Irish people. There are only four million of us, all related, and professionals of a given generation follow a fairly set path. The bonus here is finding a kindred spirit in my very own home town, a rarer bird entirely. “You can’t miss me,” she says cheerfully on the phone, “I’ll be with a six foot five inch American with very white teeth.”

This site has provided all kinds of unexpected gifts like Ríona. I’ve made new friendships with old colleagues who got to know me in a different way through these posts. I’ve renewed friendships with schoolfriends who followed Google here. Old friends who feel in touch even when I spend Christmas in Cambodia send long letters they might not otherwise write. Brand-new friends who click with these stories share their company, their time, their job connections, and their warmth. Conversations roll into my inbox from all timezones, and leave me stunned at the number of cool people in the world, from Cape Town to Castleconnell. This is my only fixed address, and I’m truly grateful to be able to welcome people here.

I enjoy old magazines as much for the ads as the articles. The pomades from another century; the barely-mobile phones in 1980s Atlantic Monthlys; racy tinned pineapple in 1950s Woman’s Own. Returning to Ireland after a gap of nine years, I get the same sense of a period snapshot in the new lineup of TV, radio, and newspaper ads.

The Lemsip hero thwarts an office coup because he rises like Lazarus with help of this syrupy flu goo. “Because these days you can’t afford a day off,” is the tagline, or something like it. There are several of these spots, all depicting a new salaryman culture where only the strong and the drugged survive. In the same category are the pricey hangover cures that don’t even need water—just dissolve the crystals on your tongue and and you’ll stop sweating gin. Great. Ireland already seems to be lurching unhappily between The Office and Glengarry Glen Ross. All we need is this kind of Reagan-era propaganda to make Dublin a really swell place to live.

Other ads peddle nostalgia cures for this new and grabby Ireland. Erin Hot Cup—a dehydrated soup mix—claims to transport you back to an era where people still had time for each other, which is not a bad deal in exchange for downing some MSG and dried onion flakes. The monks of Roscrea have a new CD out, marketed as a spiritual antidote to Christmas excess. Barry’s Tea has a long “Christmas memories” spot that’s bearable the first time; the fifth airing makes me want to strangle the smug barrister remembering the toy train set he got from “Santa”. Note that ordinary Irish people say “Santy”, not “Santa”, unless they were well-off enough to get train sets.

Daytime radio plays endless ads for home security systems, in between debates on whether the country could afford to hire Giuliani as a zero tolerance consultant. There are prime-time promotions for Formula One-style racing lessons and helicopter courses, unimaginable a decade ago. And the back page of today’s Sunday Independent was a full-page colour ad for Lejaby underwear, the fancy stuff that won’t hide Guinness cellulite at all. (Ireland is getting sexier. Hold-up stockings are sold on every tights (pantyhose) display, however humble. In prudish New York they are only to be found at $50-a-pair Wolford’s or Victoria’s Secret, even though tights are an abomination worse than visible thongs.)

Elsewhere, there’s a trend for bad fake American accents in the ads—worse than my own, which at least is involuntary. It may be a desperate attempt to win back the hordes who now choose to do their Christmas shopping over there. With a puny dollar, $300 return flights, and bad value at home, there has been a 30% increase in pre-holiday flights to New York, and Irish retail figures are down significantly.

The advertising constants, unchanged in a decade, are the public service spots for some great Irish charities—Concern, Refugee Trust, St. Vincent de Paul. People are still hungry, stateless, and desperate, and though Ireland takes more and makes more now, it still gives. I hope.

This is the Gargantua road at Lake Superior Provincial Park, wearing her winter coat. When I hiked the Coastal Trail in August, the hedgerow was thick with blueberries and mushrooms. Ranger Tim, who has a Voyageur’s heart and is slightly nuts, camped here this week and sent the photo as my Christmas card. It arrived with the greeting: “May Santa bring you the clarity of spirit to behold your blessings, and rejoice in them.”

I pass that wish on to you. I don’t find Christmas an easy time, which puts me squarely in the majority of over-sixes. So I’m grateful for this snowy reminder that today was the solstice, and it gets brighter from here.

Nick Denton is the brains behind Gawker. Well, there are a few sharp brains behind it—writer Elizabeth Spiers and her successor Choire Sicha, for two—but Nick is the publisher.

Gawker found its audience from the start. It was the New York peanut gallery, drawling sarky commentary on the tiny group who get to declaim from the glossies. It was Winona Ryder in Heathers. Graydon and Tina and Anna “Nuclear” Wintour were studied closely, on first-name terms to take the piss out of those who assumed we were on first-name terms. There were more than enough disgruntled grunts to send in tips on what Anna was wearing in the Condé Nast elevators, or not eating for lunch.

Score one for the little people. Like the old English aristocracy, the New York media Borg knows when to open the steel doors for bright outsiders. Gawker has become the “go-to spot”, says The Sacramento Bee, and the talented Ms. Spiers has vaulted to…um, another blog, but this time it’s New York magazine’s fretful attempt to get/stay real.

Now Nick wants to start a travel blog. He’s already got a gadget blog and an entertaining porn blog going. Nick is brains and charm in a brown velour package, and his strategy is well-defined. Identify lucrative categories for Google-style sidebar ads. Find new writers, keen and cheap, to build low-cost content in return for exposure. Build word-of-mouth, and wait.

My friend Halley wrote to Nick to suggest me as his travel writer. Then I did the same. I have free time, a professional background in city guides, and thousands of words written on stumbling around Southeast Asia and Latin America. My grubby backpacker stories weren’t what he had in mind, but he agreed to meet me for coffee on my last day in New York.

It would have been a dream job at 25, especially when I had a go-getter husband to take care of minor inconveniences like rent and immigration visas. Before I was grungy I was slick. Before I was a hippie I was a yuppie. I spent my twenties obsessed with magazines, and can parse their grammar with the best of them, even though now I’d rather read a good blog than another yawn of a style rag. I wanted Nick to believe that I was capable of prose more saleable than essays on the chicken buses of Laos. His requirements were specific: city travel, within a direct flight of the US. Schrager-slick, but not above deal-hunting. Raunchy was good. Funny was good. Short was good. I told him I’d give it a lash.

I started with London. Easy, right? I used to live there, I have friends there, and I was visiting for a couple of weeks. On my intermittent dial-up connection I trawled every listings and vistors site I could find. I shelled out for i-D and Wallpaper*, Time Out, the A to Z, and various Hoxton art mags. I read the guidebooks standing up in Waterstones, and pestered my friends for ideas.

I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried to write an arch blurb on Schrager hotels or pole-dancing classes in SoHo, I came over all Buddhist. On my keyboard, raunchy warped into convent-prissy. Funny came out cheesy. Three sentences on the hot and the cool were more painful to produce than my Medievel Spanish finals. I was bluffing: I don’t shag around in international capitals. I dance only at weddings, and the first round of those has already dried up. I haven’t stayed in the Mondrian or the Royalton since the years of expense-account slumber parties with my pal Leelila. A starving twenty-three year old editorial assistant can pretend that everyone has thousand-dollar Murakami bags, but I can’t. These days I’m not hungry enough to add to the wanting.

Maybe I should have tried harder. An evil voice in the back of my head said, you could sweat this much over software specifications that pay four times as much, and save the laptop for the writing you love. My samples were dreadful, confirming my recent diagnosis that I suck. I didn’t even send them to Nick. Instead I wrote and apologised for wasting his time. So here endeth the career.

Poor old Limerick. The city’s national image is now embodied by the young gurrier giving two fingers to the world outside the courtroom where his murder charges were dismissed when every single witness suffered mysterious memory loss. It was a stabbing, of course: Limerick’s unaffectionate nickname for years has been Stab City. A Stanley knife is the weapon of choice when you can’t afford guns, and it is as effective at silencing canaries as it is slicing carpets. I remember the wormy white knife scars that boys would display when I was in school: close to the stomach or the upper thigh, usually. Occasionally around the jaw. They weren’t fighters, the ones I knew, they were just set upon at pub closing time for being too big or too small, or just there. If this was Wesht Soide Shtory, then I wanted to be in America.

It’s the city of Angela’s Ashes. A good chunk of those millions of readers seem to have interpreted the book as a documentary on modern life in Limerick, rather as though Gangs of New York were a portrait of 21st century NoLiTa. Yes, Limerick was a shithole in the thirties and forties, especially if your father was a battering drunk. And the city that obeyed when the Redemptorist Fathers called for a boycott of the tiny Jewish population almost a hundred years ago should feel shame, even if it did inspire Joyce to set his Leopold Bloom wandering Dublin on that same date in 1904.

But money and demographics have changed Limerick as much as or more than the rest of the country. Your Dell computer probably comes from here. Bríd Dukes slogged to build a good arts centre in the 1980s, and the Belltable is now a fixture on the repertory theatre and exhibition circuit. Ed Walsh, president of the University of Limerick (whose university status he fought for in the 1980s, to the patronising amusement of the old-school schools), understood American-style fundraising at a time when other Third-Level provosts just waited for the government to toss money into their floppy hats. He built a fine campus and churned out business and engineering graduates. Many stayed, including my youngest sister. My school friends have families here now, and some work in the foreign companies drawn in the 1990s by clever tax-incentives and an educated labour force. House prices, that barometer of Irish happiness, have climbed steadily. The crumbling city centre has been rebuilt and the British chainstores sniffed out full wallets and moved in. Limerick had always turned her arse to the lovely Shannon; on the docks shivering prostitutes paced in front of the abandoned flour mill. Now the sex workers have moved indoors and the docklands have been rebuilt with smart flats and upmarket bars.

I have few booster instincts myself, though I admire them in others. I never considered coming back to improve things once I left at eighteen. I married a Dubliner, for one thing, and they can’t see much here beyond knife-wielding culchies. My old flatmate reported the dismay in his Dublin civil service office at the news that the department was being tranferred to Limerick as part of a decentralisation program announced in the budget speech last week. Decentralisation makes some sense, even if in this case it’s a crooked vote-getting scheme. The island is in danger of tipping into the Irish Sea as a third of the population crams itself into Dublin. Dublin is the most expensive city in Europe—more than London, apparently—and for your money you get dirty streets, unaffordable housing, snarling traffic, and public transport not much better than LA. On a civil servant’s salary you might think people would be glad to get out, but this transfer is as popular as Cromwell’s order to go to hell or to Connaught. Seethings of mass resignations and legal action greet every mention of Limerick. I don’t think that the threat of rural Cavan or Longford would be as unwelcome: with Limerick, it’s personal.

It’s also not fair. I sympathised with Pádraig’s colleagues at the time—this home town never held my affection—but now I’m back I see that was unfair. The schools are good, the traffic is easy, and it’s mostly free of yuppies yapping about décor. You can get cheap direct flights to New York or London from Shannon airport, twenty minutes out of town. Houses are half the price for twice the room. The restaurants can’t be much worse than Dublin’s, and the city is surrounded on all sides by the most beautiful countryside in the world—Cork, Kerry, Clare, and Galway. “It’s come up a lot,” Limerick people keep telling me, and as far as I can tell, they’re right.

Ranger Tim sends this picture of Beaver Rock, the cove at Lake Superior where I spent the summer this year. Top left is the rock that names the cove. “My” log cabin was just to the right of the beaver’s head.

Ranger Tim is back at his soul-home, Lake Superior, and I am envious.

Evil Ryanair, Northside taxi-drivers, thirty five cups of tea, rashers and sausages and butterfly buns, and best of all, seeing Caitriona and Dan again for the first time in two years. While Mrs. Palmer feeds the three of us into a stupor, we are catching up on their lives in Tehran and mine in my rucksack. Bliss.