ASK Ireland's immigrants what they like about living here and initially you get the answers we've come to expect the slower pace of life, the friendly nature of Irish people, the feeling of relative safety and, most often, the great conversations to be had with strangers in pubs.
"The way I can walk into a pub here and have an interesting hour long conversation with somebody, I've never met before is unique, says Glen Poor, a product unit manager with Microsoft WPGI from Seattle who has lived in Ireland for three years. "This is not something I've experienced in any of the many other parts of the world I've travelled in."
But scratch the surface of these compliments and our immigrants' opinions become more complex and revealing. Aine O'Connor runs a support organisation for returned emigrants which also gets calls for help and support from non nationals.
"Many people who come to live in Ireland find it quite a closed society," she says. "I can understand how that happens, because I'm sure if I hadn't travelled I would have developed a nice busy life for myself, one that would leave little room for outsiders. Not everybody has the same experience but many say that Ireland is a monocultural society and not very open. It can leave newcomers feeling very isolated."
Glen Poor agrees. "Ireland is just the same as any other place in the world when it comes to getting beyond that initial friendliness and forming more intimate relationships. It takes a long time to make a real friend in Ireland, just as it does anywhere. Depending on education and experience, some people in Ireland are insular, some are more open. But it can be hard to break in, particularly for somebody like me, a thirtysomething with no family."
Ben Lander is a Swedish writer whose new book Irish Voices Irish Lives interviews Irish priests, pig breeders, poets, historians, psychologists and various other assorted characters in an attempt to "negotiate his way through the complexity of Irish society today". Lander travelled widely for many years, including yearly sojourns in Ireland before meeting his wife and settling here in 1993. He thinks Irish people are far more insular than they believe themselves to be.
"There is this perception that Ireland is European now and certainly things are more open than when I first visited," he says, "but still the water is the border. In all my years here, nobody has ever asked me about my country, what it is like, bow the society works, questions like that which in Sweden we would always ask a stranger. It is a sign of intellectual poverty, I think, this lack of curiosity about others." Writer John Ardagh, author of Ireland And The Irish, put it thus: "The Irish are keen to be part of Europe, but their gaze is mainly at themselves.
Ardagh also says that Irish people "know what they think, and they don't want to be confused by the facts", a reference to our liking for hyperbole or, as one incomer put it less flatteringly, an "irritating tendency to boast", particularly prevalent, they say, among taxi drivers and barmen.
Another noteworthy characteristic which many immigrants refer to is the loquacity of the Irish. We love to talk and we talk very well, is the general verdict.
"The whole unique Irish lexicon has been a joy for me to learn," says Glen Poor. "Words like `cog' and `twig', for example, the cockney slang, the whole playfulness with words. When I came here first I used to sit and listen in the pub and say to myself `what on earth are these guys talking about'. Now I know enough to relish these conversations."
When asked what they least liked about Ireland, almost everybody cited unreliability in its myriad forms: workmen who don't show up, poor time keeping, erratic shopping hours and an intricate black economy that incomers find impossible to negotiate.
"In the US we don't have this under the table nixer economy that operates here," says Glen Poor. "I wanted to buy a house but I gave up because I had this feeling that there is a whole way of dealings that I don't know how to do. In Ireland everything is down to who you know and cash under the table. For an immigrant that's very difficult because there is no rule book you can read."
Our liking for alcohol also draws disapproval. "I have never seen so many people so very drunk in one place as you see in Dublin city centre each night at closing time," said Ann Warquin, a French engineer who has lived in Ireland for five years. "The first time I witnessed this I was shocked and a little frightened. If I am in town on a Friday or Saturday night I still find it incredible to see young men and women stumbling along, hardly able to see where they are going. I do not understand why so many Irish need to get so drunk so often."
