When, some weeks ago, the children went back at school I was left with an aching feeling of loss which prefigures, I suppose, the dreaded time when they will fly the nest for good.
We spent some time in America over the summer and the three males of the family came back sprouting metal extensions to their hands. Gameboys, palm pilots and the like are cheaper in the US apparently, so why wait for Christmas? They sit around the kitchen hunched over their machines, giving the occasional frustrated sigh or grunt of satisfaction.
I feel as if I'm living in another century. When I inquired what a WAP phone was, three pairs of eyes rolled simultaneously to the ceiling. I swear I'm going to tiptoe downstairs some night and chuck all those metal things in the bin. Then perhaps we can get back to proper conversations.
American view
Back in August in Maine we met a tour guide who, on learning we were from Ireland, informed us that his Rotary group arranges for Irish children to come out every year for a break. That's what Ireland meant to him - not the Celtic Tiger, not the newly sophisticated Dublin of five-star hotels, but traumatised children.
It is an image that will only have been reinforced by the recent pictures of primary schoolchildren accompanied on their first day at school by British army troops on the ground, helicopters overhead and grown-ups yelling appalling abuse at them. What burdens we inflict on our children.
Before the summer began I dropped my son's schoolfriend back in our neighbouring Ballymun flats. Even then I was alarmed to see small children playing feet away from heavy machinery. Now one of those children has been killed. All in the interests of a better transport system.
After the horrific events of September 11th Americans have their own traumatised children and adults to deal with. I'm sure the nation will pull together. The Americans have such energy. Whenever I visit the US I am always conscious of how thin and reedy and uncertain English voices sound, compared with the clear, forceful American accents. The recession was already beginning to bite and there were newspaper articles on how to cope.
If someone in your family loses his job, it was suggested, why not organise a family party to make him feel supported? The slogan was, "Hey! You never get laid off from the family." This is the American way. In a crisis, instead of whimpering in the corner like normal people, they rally round and find something positive to do.
It is perhaps only when we are abroad that we discover our nationality. Declan Kiberd wrote recently: "One can as little survive without a nation as without a gender". On the other hand, Virginia Woolf, not so recently, walking down Whitehall and seeing a nation still ruled by men, declared: "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country."
Class problems
I confess, when I think of England, I veer towards Woolf's side, not so much for reasons of gender as of that perennial English problem, class. Growing up in an obscure town in the north-east of England during the 1960s we all, boys as well as girls, felt as cut off as Woolf from the centre of power. They did things differently down south. They drank gin instead of beer, ate lunch instead of dinner, dinner instead of high tea. They sent their children to boarding schools from which they emerged to rule the nation. We weren't going to get a look in.
So when my nationality comes up and I say I'm English, I feel it conveys all the wrong messages: the monarchy (I'm a republican), the empire (my ancestors, like so many Irish, had to emigrate to Canada to find work), the Houses of Parliament, the City of London (where none of my family ever worked).
It takes a crisis to provoke awareness of the nation inside oneself. During the first World War Roger Casement discovered his loyalty lay with Ireland, whereas during the second World War Elizabeth Bowen found her sympathy with England greater than at any other time.
Living in Ireland makes me feel my Englishness. I see people vaguely offended by something I've said and then discounting it because, after all, I'm English and don't know any better. I can read the reactions of English people. I sometimes have to work at conversations over here. The rhythm of life is different. People are relaxed here where they'd be uptight in England (in a shop full of noisy children, for instance). I'm distanced from the simple reaction, the easy understanding.
Eavan Boland has written movingly of her attempt as a woman and on behalf of other women to write herself into the public life of the nation. In the course of this, she argues, the identity of that nation may become altered. But as a foreigner have I the right to do this?
Tired old jokes
Twenty years ago being English in Ireland was largely a matter of keeping your head down and trying not to wince at tired old jokes about the English spending Sunday washing their cars. Last time round I didn't feel that I could campaign in even the most minor way on the abortion issue. That would be interfering in the customs of another country and, goodness knows, Ireland has had enough of that from her English neighbour.
So am I a member of the Irish nation or permanently part of the English diaspora? I prefer a "both and" position to an "either or". I was born in England, I retain links with family and friends across the Irish Sea but Ireland is where I live now, it's where my children are being brought up. Ireland is the country where I have been in full-time employment the longest (and paid my taxes).
I have written novels set in Ireland and published by Irish publishers. I am in the position of all other immigrants to this country. I retain links back home but I am hopeful I will be allowed to play a full, even an equal, part in the life of this nation. I'm a hybrid. We all are. We all came from somewhere else originally. But we live here now and this is our home.
I like to think that my new home will be rather better than my old at evolving into what Julia Kristeva calls "nations without nationalism", nations which welcome newcomers as enriching rather than damaging the fabric of national life.