The News from Ireland

In many ways, it seems much the same as last we left it, in September 2006.

And yet...

When we mentioned the weekend crowds thronging High and Shop Streets - the main commercial drag in Galway City - our friends Michael and Jo said, "Yes, but they're not buying."

This was echoed by the young clerk in Anthony Ryan's who helped us with our purchase of a warmer shirt for my husband - Jim hadn't packed for the unseasonably cool weather. Business, he told us even though we hadn't asked, was really off, what with the economy.

At dinner with our friends Michael and Jo, they filled us in on the doings of their children. One daughter and her fiancé both work in banking. They have been on tenter hooks for months. Redundancies - Irish for lay-offs - were announced in March, but the pink slips have yet to be slipped in. July, they think. These two have always worked in banking. Unlike in some other industries, these types of jobs won't be coming back, and there aren't many places to go with those résumés.

Another of Michael and Jo's daughters bought her house five years or so ago for 270,000 Euros. Between her down payment and what she's managed to pay off, she owes 140,000 on it - which is now the house's value. Fortunately, her job - at least for now - is secure. Still, how disheartening, and at least she's not under water, unless you think about the 130,000 Euros she's out...

Michael himself has a construction business. It was booming - of course - during the champagne bubble years - but there's little of it now. Michael was nearing retirement age, so he's okay. It's the younger men that he employed who are hurting - and leaving Ireland. We've seen some of the "leavers" in Boston. The construction/deconstruction going on next door to us back at home is manned largely by Irish guys. (We saw the the remnants of the construction boom during Friday's drive from Shannon to Galway. Even though the trip is now mostly on the highway, we did pass a number of abandoned projects, scaffolding still up but nary a working man in sight.)

Suicides in the country are up, Michael and Jo tell us. Some people just can't see a way out. The older folks, they say, have it easier. They grew up poor, in the pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland. They never really trusted the prosperity, they never thought it would last. For the younger people, though, it's especially devastating.

Liz, our landlady for the beautiful, we-could-live-here, completely modernized coach house we've taken for the week, talks about the hits that the well-to-do professional class have taken, financially. The doctors, she tells us, are the only ones doing brilliantly. (But even the medical establishment, we see in the papers, is under some siege, as government cutbacks set in.)

Liz talks about the crazy unseemly greed that so many people got caught up in during the go-go years, the oneupsmanship, the egos. An auctioneer (real estate) of her distant acquaintance ended up ruined, and killed himself in spectacular fashion. Not content with a private suicide, he knotted the rope around his neck, secured it to a beam, and threw himself out the upper-story window of one of his failing properties.

Yet there are things that have palpably raised the national mood, however temporarily...

The Queen visited the country last week - her first trip over. She and Philip were well and warmly received. The Irish and the English have a curious relationship, of course, but with so many of the diaspora Irish living in England (our friends Michael and Jo lived for years in Manchester; when they were first starting out, there was no work in Ireland for them), the Anglo-Irish relationship has gotten more fluid. And, as far as we can tell, the Irish take a back seat to no one when it comes to Royal Watching. There seems to be pretty widespread and genuine affection for Queen Elizabeth, and although there was some grumbling over the 30 million Euros that went in to her security, people seemed proud that the visit had gone off so well, and that the Queen enjoyed herself.

In the wake of the Royal Departure, Ireland got another boost. Leinster, one of its rugby teams, scored a big win over Northampton in the Heinekin Cup. The pubs were thronged on Saturday to watch the match and, even though Leinster is not Galway's province (which is Connacht as in "to hell or Connacht", which Oliver Cromwell once declared was where Ireland's Catholics could go), there was joy spilling out into Galway's narrow and winding streets once the match was won.

The pièce de résistance, of course, was Monday's blow-through visit by Barack and Michelle Obama.

You could not go into a shop or pub without the visit being closely monitored on TV or radio. One shopkeeper - in one of the many charmingly old-fashioned little corner markets that still dot the retail landscape here - was bursting his buttons that the U.S. President was here. "Imagine, him coming to this little country. We've only four-and-a-half million people. Why, Poland has 90 million and he's not going there." This shopkeeper had one of those "map of Ireland" faces, a real old-timer. And it looked like his green-grocers shop had been there forever. The interesting thing was what he was selling. Sure, he had the usual cabbage and carrots, but he was also selling all sorts of exotic teas. Indian sauces. (Chicken tikka, anyone?) Italian pastas. All sorts of gourmet foods.

We bought a bottle of Prosecco and a Green & Black dark chocolate bar - the same brand you can get at Whole Foods.

This is not your grandfather's Ireland, that's for sure.

The affection for the Obamas, the pride and enthusiasm with which their visit was received, exceeded that for the Queen. (And this is not just the Yank in me speaking. There's no denying that ties that bind the green with the red, white, and blue.)

Is féidir linn, Obama told the crowd at Dublin's College Green. Yes, we can.

Sure, it's just words. And it's not as if Obama can lay hands (or words) on and cure the Irish economy. Hell, if he's going to cure an economy, let him start with ours.

Still, it's nice to see the small, palpable elevation to the Irish national mood, no matter how temporary it is.