Hassan Hashim, owner of the Sunset CafΘ in Tibnin, would like to open a Lebanese takeaway cafΘ in Ireland. The Irish like his shawarma very much, especially the huge meat and chicken dish with pickled vegetables and chips.
Hashim has broken but perfectly understandable English. "The Irish are best people and so close for us," he says. His cafΘ, perched on a steep hillside on the edge of the village, looks over towards the village of Braachit where Hiayam Haidir, proprietor of Rosie's Super Store, expresses similar sentiments but in English that has a clearly discernible Galway accent.
Speaking of the departure of the Irish Battalion from south Lebanon this week, Haidir, known to Irish troops simply as Rosie, says: "They tell me that I have a Galway accent, but there is some Athlone in there." She was a star guest on Gerry Ryan's Monday radio show.
Tayssif Dakin, proprietor of "Dunnes Stores" ("family shop, everything for gift"), has an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Irish troops' deployments in relation to his life as a merchant. "I started with Irish when Recce Coy (Reconnaisance Company) came to Al Yatoun after Dutch Battalion went. Recce Coy became BMR (Battalion Mobile Reserve)."
Dakin, married with three children and from the village of Haris, has sold goods to Irish soldiers for 22 years, since he was 17. He estimates that, in all, local traders established 112 shops to cater to the needs of the Irish Battalion, providing a remarkable range of goods and services.
Now the Irish are gone, Dakin feels he might go to Sierra Leone or some other African state where the Lebanese are the dominant trading force. Maybe, he says, anticipating the prospects for a smaller trader like himself in the events that will follow September 11th, he will try Afghanistan. After all, there will be UN soldiers there sometime and they will need watches, cigarettes, sportswear, jewellery for their wives and pirated DVDs. He asked his partner what language the Afghanis speak and was told "Pakis".
Beside Dakin's store is another called "ILAC Centre". Another, called "Bright Star", bears the legend on its plain concrete faτade: "Unisex All is yours. Forget not your wife and kids. Sports Wears Adidas Nike." Next door again, with the perfect grocer's apostrophe, is Perfume's Shop ("gold silver for better value").
Ninety per cent of these stores, Dakin says, will close now that the Irish are going. His neighbouring trader is travelling to Eritrea in the New Year as he knows the Irish are sending a sizeable contingent (203 soldiers) there and he wishes to assess the trading prospects.
Outside the gates of the Irish Battalion HQ, Camp Shamrock, there were until recently 13 shops, the remaining traders vying last week to dispose of goods from fake Rolex watches to pirated software and DVDs, cheap jewellery, cigarettes and very dodgy perfume: the stuff that soldiers all over the world buy.
Shops like these grew like limpets at the gates of all 27 Irish positions. The traders were attracted by the relative wealth of the Irish troops. The neighbouring battalions - Fijian and Ghanaian - are poorly paid and have nothing like the European soldier's spending power.
The presence of the Irish Battalion's 570 troops became central to the desperately depressed local economy. Fifteen families alone were dependent on the full-time work of supplying Camp Shamrock with services from laundries to cleaning and gardening. The outlying smaller positions, where soldiers are more stretched, had local cooks and cleaners.
The dominant Fawaz family, whose patriarch is the local Muktar, has grown wealthy from its involvement with the Irish. The family head, Shakil (known as Jack) Fawaz, runs a construction company which has had lucrative UN contracts and built the Irish camp. Other family members are interpreters and traders dealing directly with the battalion.
Estimates vary as to how much the Irish Battalion has contributed to the local economy, but it is obviously a significant amount. Michael Smith, the Minister for Defence, has put the amount at US$1 million a year. Others see this as the amount spent per six-month battalion tour. Hassan Hashim of the Sunset, who has possibly picked up some of the talk of the economic benefit to his community from his customers, put it at $500,000 a month.
Whatever the estimate, the departure of the Irish Battalion is clearly a severe economic blow to this generally poor area. Although there are two- and three-million-dollar palatial summer homes belonging to expatriate bankers and diamond merchants here, the majority of the mainly Shia population scrapes by on meagre earnings.
There are mixed feelings among the Irish about the effect of their departure. Some of the traders have done very well. Dakin, the "Dunnes Stores" proprietor, after bemoaning the financial disaster that would beset his family, then left his store in the hands of an assistant and drove off in a reasonably new Mercedes.
Many of the soldiers are sceptical about the pleas of poverty, an attitude that might be prompted by the fact that over the years the local traders have often encouraged them to over-spend and have not always provided them with the bargains they hoped they were getting.
Still, most Irish soldiers who have served here have brought home high-quality jewellery, mostly 18-carat gold that cost a third of what they would pay at home.
And some of the traders now out of business are facing the same hardship as Rosie, who ran the tiny provisions store adjacent to the post in Braachit, supplying the soldiers with sweets and groceries. She is proud of the savings she has accrued but is clearly not a wealthy woman. She was genuinely upset at the departure of her Irish friends this week. They have always treated her with great respect, she says. Arrangements were being made last week for her to get a visa to visit a country whose accent she has adopted but which she has never seen.
The countryside around here will be a poorer place in a number of ways for the departure of the Irish soldiers. The headquarters of the Irish UN Battalion in south Lebanon happened to be located, for strategic military reasons, in a holiday resort. Almost 3,000ft up in the Tibnin is a place where people from Beirut, Tyre and Sidon come to escape the sweltering heat of summer.
The population swells in the summer from 2,000 to 8,000. The tourists bring the town's main income, then leave. In the summer, city teenagers in western clothes stroll in little groups along the village streets and cedar-lined roads beneath the massive remains of the Crusader castle. In the autumn they are gone, vacating their summer homes and leaving the local economy to return to its meagre enough agriculture.
The eruption of Lebanon's 25 years of strife, invasions and civil war destroyed Tibnin's serenity as well as its summer income. What must once have been a pretty village was wrecked. Many houses were destroyed by bombs and artillery shells. Bereft of tourist income, the village fell into terrible disrepair.
Then the Irish soldiers came as part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon. They found a mutilated village and people scarcely able to sustain themselves. There were orphans begging in the streets and people living in cellars as the war raged around them. Horrible weapons, such as phosphorous shells, cluster bombs and mines, lay about the place. Some of the mines dropped by aircraft were little green devices that the soldiers called "Kermits" because of their likeness to the little puppet frog.
Children too saw the likeness and picked the things up - with awful consequences. (The mines are still taking their toll. Since the Israelis withdrew from here in May last year, 22 people have been killed and 155 injured by mines. Last Sunday a local man, Ali Abdunabi, married with three children, stepped on a mine and had both his legs and a hand blown off.)
When UNIFIL came here 23 years ago, the people reached to the soldiers for protection and, certainly in the case of the Irish Battalion, it was given. The Irish soldiers, who display a resilience, resourcefulness and generosity of spirit that is never fully appreciated at home, dug into the UN's, the Dublin Government's and their own pockets to help people out.
In their time here, the engineers and logistics units built or refurbished an estimated 500 houses wrecked by artillery fire or aerial bombing, particularly after the huge Israeli bombardments of 1993 and 1996. On those occasions, the entire population of south Lebanon was forced to flee northwards for safety, only to return weeks later to be confronted with devastation.
The Irish Battalion would identify the homes of the poorest, who could not afford to rebuild, and do it for them. They supplied generators for electricity, diesel and water.
They acquired an old commercial building at the crossroads in the valley beneath the village and converted it into an orphanage. It was a bleak place at first, and wan, frightened children stared out of dim rooms at visitors. While local people might adopt the boys and provide education for them at the local school, the peasant culture of the surrounding area discriminates against girls. They tend to remain inside the orphanage where they are educated and cared for until they are old enough to leave.
Still, during last week's ceremonies to mark the closure of the Irish HQ, the ministerial party that visited the orphanage were met by 61 delightfully happy little girls. They sang and applauded their visitors. The infants held up their Teletubbies drawings. They were obviously happy and well cared for, and had plenty of schoolbooks and cosy, clean classrooms.
Camp Shamrock's medical unit has also, for the past 20 years, been the main general practice for the poor of Tibnin and the surrounding areas. The doctors and medics give two surgeries a week, visit outpatients and run surgeries in the outlying villages.
The medical team from Camp Shamrock saved many lives here and many medics risked their lives rushing to help the injured and dying in the conflict around them.
Officers of the Irish Ordnance carried out a major de-mining exercise in the aftermath of last year's Israeli withdrawal, working in treacherous conditions at great risk to their lives. As a result of this work, hundreds of people were able to return safely to homes they had been forced to flee 21 years earlier.
The "humanitarian" work was central to the Irish philosophy of peacekeeping. Kindness on a scale and practical fashion that only a highly-trained military unit like an infantry battalion can provide has its reciprocal benefits. There is an ulterior motive, of which the soldiers are well aware. If you are kind on this scale, the people you help will inevitably help you. Most particularly, if they knew of a potential threat to Irish soldiers they would pass on information.
One officer put it this way: "You might be stopped on a pretext or someone might come up to the surgery and they would tell you, 'keep out of this wadi ' or 'avoid that road'." This information, he said, saved Irish lives.
In recent years the UN, albeit mainly through its own faults, has had a disastrous press. It has failed miserably in the former Yugoslavia and been massively embarrassed by missions like that in Somalia. It failed to stop the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi.
The UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) mission in south Lebanon may not have prevented any of the war and atrocities that these people have seen here, but the troops, particularly the Irish, hung on doggedly and helped to alleviate some of the pain of the victims, the innocent ordinary peasant farmers and traders. Peacekeeping might not actually bring about "peace", but the Irish Army's version certainly has a vision that is both practical and humane.
This week the pain of departure was evident among the soldiers. An estimated 30,000 tours have been completed by Irish troops and place names such as Haris, At Tiri, Braachit, Haddatah and Tibnin are as familiar to many Irish soldiers as the towns of their own country.
Perhaps one of the most poignant of all the departing soldiers' stories here was that of Corporal Frank Kearney, originally from Dublin but now living in Co Down with his wife and two sons.
Kearney has completed 10 tours, serving a total of five years here since 1990. He has served the last five tours consecutively, returning home on leave for only three weeks between each six-month duty. He is the battalion's environmental officer, responsible for the upkeep and appearance of the camps.
When he first came to Camp Shamrock it was a barren, rocky place bereft of any greenery or landscaping. He taught himself the horticulture of local plant life and propagated and planted the garden in the parade square and beds all around the barracks buildings. There is always greenery in the camp and always flowers in bloom. It is actually, due to his work, a pleasant place. The agave cactuses and flowering shrubs he planted in the parade square garden are now taller than he is.
He was given five days to prepare the landscaping around the memorial to the 46 soldiers who died on duty in the cedar grove beside the Catholic Church in Tibnin. With his four local gardeners and assistants, he created a lovely, restful setting in only four days.
"When I started this job I fell in love with the place," Kearney says. "There are huge problems keeping it right, but I have a lot of friends. There is a lot of rock here, so I built the rockeries. My wife was very supportive and I get home for three weeks every six months. They let me do my own thing and I just get on with the work. It was a pleasure. It breaks my heart to leave."
His extraordinary dedication has required great forbearance from his wife, Angela, who has had to bring up their two sons on her own. Frank's favourite plants are the roses and one of them is growing beneath a little stone plaque, on the site of the mess hall, which states simply: "Angela's Rose, January 1999".