I have a confession to make: I am an ethnic philanderer, a serial collector of ethnic minorities. In Barcelona it was Argentines and Basques, in Copenhagen Greenlanders and Poles. In Amsterdam it was Eritreans, then Jews, then Turks. Early this year when Ocalan was arrested, I was able to dazzle my friends with elucidations of the niceties of the relations between Kurds and the Turkish Communist Party, between PPK and PUK. This was the fruit of long metzes and raki-fuelled discussions in backstreet restaurants where I had learned who had assassinated whom at a kebab stand in Frankfurt in 1987, and why. It is hard to conceive of any knowledge more superfluous to my current life in suburban Dublin, but at the time it had for me the aura of a new existential truth.
I first became aware of my collecting tic one night in 1980 while drinking vodka in a Polish bar in Copenhagen. A Polish girl introduced me to her friend with the words: "Here's another Pole for your collection!" I was shocked at my own transparency, but it was true. As soon as an ethnic group had caught my interest I would collect as many specimens as possible, dabble in the language, swot up on the history, read the poets. With its new life experiences, new smells and sounds, each ethnic group was like a small universe in itself. I was like a tireless Don Juan, for whom each new girl, each new conquest, seemed to hold out the prospect of a revelation and ultimate gratification. And as with Don Juan, it ultimately ended in disillusionment. I was thrilled by the Polish defiance of Soviet power, their black humour, their wildness. But however charming as a minority, they were less attractive when viewed as a majority. The more of them I collected, the more I realised I could scratch open a core of nationalism by getting onto the subject of White Russia or the rights of the ethnic German minority in East Prussia. It was all too reminiscent of my little native land. The more I became immersed in the Jewish narrative of exile and oppression and its justification for present-day excesses, the more it began to resemble an old story, and I don't mean the one in the Bible. The Turks and Kurds seemed to spend their time discussing, in a depressingly familiar way, which agenda took priority: social revolution or national liberation. Hell is other people because as we get to know them better, the more we realise how identical they are to ourselves.
AND yet, again and again, a chance encounter, a film, a meal, would be enough to set me off again, pursuing an impossible dream of fundamental difference. Like an ageing roue, his senses sated, it took more and more extreme titillation to tickle my jaded palate. At first I would collect any Jews, then only religious Jews, then only those of Sephardic origin. By the end of that collecting phase, the only ones who could arouse my interest were the small group of Spanish-speaking Muslim Jews in Izmir. About a quarter of Amsterdam's million people could be classified as belonging to an ethnic minority, making it a collector's paradise, but by the end of my sojourn there I was down to a single group - one which, however, possesses features designed to stimulate the most blase collector: the Berbers. An ethnic minority within the broader Moroccan ethnic minority, with their own distinctive language which has hardly been written down, with only a single feature film in which the language was spoken. The women are spectacularly beautiful and the desserts are delicious.
The last factor is a vital one. Like many writers, I regard eating at home as a sin against the Holy Ghost. After a long hard day at home squinting at the screen, I often feel the need to get out and relax, eat and drink in more colourful surroundings. So a prerequisite for my life is cheap ethnic food, with hopefully a little music and dancing on tables thrown in. And twenty quid for a pizza and a bottle of wine in a morgue-like basement is not my idea of cheap ethnic food. Obviously, moving back to Ireland has been tough on a collector like me.
True, nowadays you meet the odd Mexican or Estonian here, but for a collector one is not enough. There are, of course, the thousands of Spaniards, a delightful people who have beautified the Dublin streetscape beyond recognition, but they are about as collectible as Nissan Micras. For a while I felt a flicker of interest in Ulster Presbyterians, their scrubbed deal and whitewashed stone language, their Biblical beliefs, their Black Preceptories. But they, too, are thin on the ground in Dublin and on their home territory no longer an ethnic minority. However, recently, while channel surfing between TnaG and RTE3, I felt something of the old tingle. I am beginning to feel drawn to a distinctive, somehow Berber-like group with lilting yet craggy accents, often raven-haired and blue-eyed, whose names sometimes resemble my own, noted for their hospitality, quiet gaiety and tweed. Yes, Donegal is my next project.