An Irishman's Diary

I MET a former colleague the other night who, bucking the national trend, has just emigrated to Ireland. Well, maybe that’s overstating his situation slightly. In any case he had spent the past two years in Berlin and now, for the foreseeable future, he was back.

Wondering whether he had somehow missed the news about the bad end to which the country had come during his absence, I also questioned his sanity in choosing this of all times to forsake what everybody keeps saying is the coolest city on earth, not to mention one of the cheapest.

But he told me, frankly, that he had missed Dublin. Berlin could be cool in different ways, he said. It was very big, for one thing. So compared with here, it was hard to meet people.

Now it so happened that when he was making this point, we were standing at a street corner, near the doorway of a pub. And almost on cue, another friend – a mutual one neither of us had seen for a while – now emerged from the same pub. Then a couple of her friends followed, until amid exclamations and handshakes and introductions, we were blocking the whole footpath.

For a moment it was like being trapped inside a Fáilte Ireland ad, promoting Dublin’s charms. But the pub contingent soon wandered off. And his point illustrated, my friend admitted that one of the things he might miss about Berlin was that you could live there for half-nothing.

To this end, he had already become involved here in a kind-of urban collective that encouraged some of the same self-reliance. I agreed there could be a big growth in that sort of thing now and wished him well. On which optimistic note, we went our separate ways, Berlin-style – by bikes – into the balmy night.

In a similar vein, the very next day I received a rapturous e-mail from an occasional correspondent who is normally exiled in the US but was back in Dublin for a visit and couldn’t get over how lovely everything was.

She has a cottage down the country somewhere and was ostensibly here to help do it up. Instead of which, she had just spent an idyllic day touring the city’s galleries and libraries and wallowing in the welcome. “Don’t tell [my architect]”, she pleaded. “I was supposed to be out on the Naas Road somewhere picking door-handles.” There was a deliberately eulogistic tone to her e-mail: it was a love letter to Dublin. In fact, I’m not sure it wasn’t intended as a free-verse poem (maybe I’ll bring a sample into Poetry Ireland and have them conduct tests).

So I haven’t yet answered her question – “Why are the newspapers so gloomy?” – partly because it may have been rhetorical, but mainly because I don’t know where to start. Either way, it struck me that this was the first time in a while I had heard two Irish people – apparently unconnected – sounding so positive.

THEN ONWednesday, in another coincidence, I was cycling along Stephen's Green just as workmen began dismantling the sign on the headquarters of Anglo-Irish Bank. Here, in microcosm, was the answer to my correspondent's question. And yet there was no obvious gloom among the crowd of bystanders.

True, one or two passing motorists honked their horns. There was also a smattering of self-conscious applause when the first bit of the sign came down. But it was the sort of moment that people tend to call “iconic”. Whereas, a bit like the time they pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, and rather than fall with a satisfying crash, it just bent over like the lid on a sardine can, it didn’t quite match the billing.

Trying to put the event in context, one of the journalists present mentioned that, around the corner, Colm McCarthy was about to publish his recommendations for flogging Ireland’s family heirlooms as a small down-payment on the bank debt. Meanwhile, the order in which the letters of “ANGLO” were removed further helped to dramatise the crisis.

When the A and N were gone, there was just an unhealthy “GLO” left, as if in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. Then that was reduced to a “LO”, which sounded like a Biblical intro to the terrible thing that had come to pass. And at last there was only the O: a pictorial representation of the hole into which we are now shovelling vast sums, in hope of appeasing the gods who govern our fate.

But when another observer, surveying the audience, asked “Where’s the anger?”, we had to admit there didn’t seem to be any. The weather was just too pleasant. For office workers on their lunch-break, this was a piece of free street theatre. The mood was cheerful. If there’d been a lawn provided, they would have been having picnics.

I’m sure the outbreak of positivity to which I was subjected this week was only a localised phenomenon. No doubt it’s a short-term thing too: a temporary reaction to the late-spring rise in temperatures, which always afflicts Irish people with a surge of irrational optimism, so that we think we’re Mediterraneans and take to dancing (or drinking, anyway) in the streets.

But it’s hard to be gloomy on such days. The European financial crisis has, after all, been characterised as a problem in which the prudent “north” must bail out the feckless “south”. Bizarrely, we’ve been lumped into the latter category. And now, for the first time since the IMF arrived, at least we have the right weather.