OPINION:IN SEPTEMBER 2002, in my first "Letter from Sydney" in The Irish Times, I wrote about what I thought Ireland had become and why I had just emigrated to Australia with my family. I wrote about house prices, greed, naked profiteering, litter, traffic, bad service, the cost of eating out and more, writes PÁDRAIG COLLINS
The article caused a bit of a stir and I did several radio interviews on the back of it. It was then reprinted in a Sunday paper and I did another radio interview.
Many people agreed with what I wrote, but there were calls to radio stations saying I was a whinger and good riddance to me. The Evening Heraldpublished a story damning my views and RTÉ set up an interview but conveniently forgot to mention they had another guest on who was speaking against me. (I wiped the floor with him anyway!).
Two months later I was still getting texts from friends saying “Marian Finucane is talking about the economy and mentioned you again. People are ringing in calling you a whinger!”
The last sentence of that Sydney Letter was: “The flight from Dublin may be a mere trickle at the moment but the Government had better watch out lest it become a stream.”
I got back to Sydney this week after my first trip to Ireland in 20 months. I was amazed at the changes. When I was last home in June 2008, Ireland was just about to vote No to the Lisbon Treaty. Even friends who would normally need no more impetus to vote for something than the fact Sinn Féin was against it, voted No.
I thought that was a mistake, especially as there were already clear signs the Celtic Tiger was ailing (jobs were being lost and trade figures were down).
I followed closely what subsequently happened in Ireland, but it’s one thing reading about it from the other side of the world, quite another to experience it. So when I came back recently, I was shocked by the air of despondency.
It really felt like the 1980s again. Some people told me it’s worse now because people have such high debt levels and that at least in the 1980s, the banks were still lending to businesses. Tales of emigration were everywhere, including within my own family.
Amid such terrible economic times, the Northern Ireland policing talks infuriated me. Are they suffering from attention deficit disorder in Northern Ireland? No one anywhere else in the world cares any more. Get over yourselves. The only Northern Ireland news filtering through in Australia in recent months concerned the Iris Robinson affair and the sexual abuse allegations about Gerry Adams’s brother.
I couldn’t help thinking the entire spurious “crisis” was confected to distract people from the trouble in Peter Robinson’s and Gerry Adams’s private lives and that Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown showing up only encouraged the DUP’s and Sinn Féin’s pathetic, self-indulgent “look at me” behaviour.
But maybe the Taoiseach and prime minister were playing their own games, thinking the circus in Stormont took people’s minds off the economy. If so, it was a momentary distraction. It still looks like a headlong lurch back to the 1980s for both countries. Back to mass unemployment and emigration in Ireland, and back to a Tory government and Thatcherism in the UK.
The ludicrous debate about the Angelus also caught my attention. Ireland is in the doldrums, most of the rest of the world is stalked by recession, war or disaster, but a shrill handful of anti-free speech begrudgers want the Angelus banned.
Couldn’t they just boil the kettle during that minute? Or cover their ears with their hands while shouting “la, la, la, can’t hear you”? Is there anything they’d like us to do with the other 1,439 minutes each day?
Some revelations on my trip home, such as how deep the Munster rugby phenomenon has penetrated, were pleasantly surprising. I watched the Leinster versus London Irish match in my brother’s bar in Adare, Co Limerick. The entire bar, to a man and woman, was shouting for London Irish.
It wasn’t just people going for the exiles which struck me; it was that the game was being watched in such great numbers. When I was a kid the rugby fan base in Adare didn’t extend too far beyond my family and the Wallaces. (And most of the Wallaces went on to play for Ireland and the Lions.) There must be something the Government could learn from the success of Munster rugby.
I had forgotten about a core aspect of Irish pub culture though. Australians have a reputation for swearing a lot, but it’s undeserved compared to the Irish.
I had to shield my eight-year-old daughter’s ears from a conversation in which I learned that the “Limerick senior f***ing hurling team” is having a few difficulties with the “county f***ing board”.
Taking my daughter up to show her my old school brought another surprising revelation. So surprising that I actually took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, just like a cartoon character, in case the last remnants of jetlag were playing tricks on me. But my eyes did not deceive me. The kids really were playing cricket on the same CBS hurling pitch where I got belted for playing soccer.
I started laughing and my daughter asked me why. I tried to explain it to her but the concept of being hit by a teacher for daring to have some fun was beyond her ken. I wish it was beyond mine.
Looking around for someone who might understand my astonishment, I started talking to a man dropping off his child for school. He was Polish, and also didn’t quite get the idea of being hit for playing soccer. That was multicultural Ireland right there in a nutshell – watching cricket in a Christian Brothers’ School with a Pole. It also made me realise how awful it was that the Brothers would stop us from doing something joyful and healthy just because our chosen game was deemed “foreign”. They should have been happy we were exercising.
(The euro has been getting it from all sides recently and I want to add my tuppence. Or rather take it away. Can someone please point out to the European Central Bank the worthlessness of the one and two cent coins? Australia got rid of theirs 18 years ago. New Zealand followed suit and has now got rid of their five cent coins, too. Trying to figure out which was which when paying for things made me feel old, as did a conversation I had in London before flying home to Ireland.)
My holiday home included a trip over to London. Out for a meal in a Bangladeshi restaurant in Brick Lane, I heard an Irish accent at another table. I turned around and said hello.
The young man spoke to me in a manner I recalled as being a respectful tone reserved for older people. I felt like saying to him that 42 isn’t all that old really, but realised that when I was his age I thought it was ancient. He was a recent law graduate from Dublin who was working in a bar in London.
I didn’t realise it then, but it was an indication of what I would encounter time and again over the following weeks.
Pádraig Collins is a journalist based in Sydney from where he reports for The Irish Times