What a difference 50 or so years make

If all went well, I arrived in Shannon this morning, 6 a.m. Irish time. So if all went well, I'm now in Ireland.

I've lost track of how many times I've been here. Somewhere between 12 and 20. Some trips I can hang a date on. I know I was last there in March 2019, and before that May 2018, and before that June 2014. I was in Ireland during the spring of 1985, which marked my second visit there. And I'm pretty sure I was there in September 1997, because I remember being in pub where the radio was playing Candle in the Wind/Goodbye England's Rose, Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana. It was shortly after Diana's death, and the barkeep rolled his eyes and snapped the radio off. Good man!

I first set foot in Ireland in early May 1973, stepping off the overnight ferry from Holyhead in Wales that set us down in Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin, in ghastly weather - lashing rain.

I remember feeling immediately at home.

My friend Joyce and I had spent the prior couple of weeks in England, Scotland, and Wales. Other than the weather and the food, we much enjoyed our time there. But it all felt pretty foreign. Which, of course, it was. I mean, what was up with the waxed paper they used for TP?

Ireland seemed different.

In Dún Laoghaire, when we queued up for the bus into town, things seemed more normal.

I don't really remember if the toilet paper was any better, but the people jostling to get on the bus - including an old lady prodding people in the butt with her umbrella - was familiar. A lot more like folks crowding to get on the T than Brits politely waiting their turns.

And everywhere we looked, there were people who were the spit and image of the people I grew up with. I have no idea why this surprised me. After all, I'd grown up in a largely Irish American neighborhood, and had gone (through college) to schools staffed largely by Irish American nuns - schools were the preponderance of my classmates were Irish American.

I'm a half-breed: Irish (father's side), German (mother's). But I grew up in Worcester with my father's family. In Worcester, which seemed to have every European ethnic group known to man, other than Germans. My German family was out in Chicago. Anyway, we listened to Jimmy Dooley's Irish Hour on the radio, not an oompah-band polka show. Our family did watch Lawrence Welk, and that, if you don't factor in the baked goods and the chicken paprika, was as much of a nod to my German heritage as our family ever summoned up, other than when we were out in Chicago, or a Chicago delegation was visiting Worcester.

Anyway, Ireland just plain felt like home.

On our trip through Europe, Joyce and I hit twenty or so countries. I promised myself that there were three places I had to return to: Paris, Yugoslavia (as it was then), and Ireland.

I've been to Paris four or five more times. Haven't checked back in on Croatia or any of the other countries Yugoslavia became. Maybe some day. (I would like to get back to Dubrovnik...) But Ireland, well. Been there, done that plenty of times.

Heart's home?

Yeah, in a way.

In 1973, Ireland was pretty poor and depressing, but it was beautiful and the people we met were great. 

When we got off the bus in Dublin, we had no idea where we were going to stay. We were standing, soaked, by a phone booth, trying to figure out how it worked -  Insert coin first? Start dialing, then insert coin? - so we could line up a B&B, when a man came up to us and told us we needed to get out of the rain.

Tom took us into a tea shop, bought us tea and scones, and apologized because he couldn't invite us to stay at his house because his wife had just had a baby. But, he told us, he had just the place.

He called a young woman he knew and asked her to put us up for a few days.

Indeed she would, in a very modern flat in Fitzwilliam Square that, among other modern niceties, had excellent heat. After a few weeks chilled to the bone in England, Scotland, and Wales, having central heat was quite a welcome experience.

We stayed several days, courtesy of Geraldine Murtaugh (who worked in the tourist industry), buzzing around Dublin seeing the Book of Kells, the Guinness Brewery, and the Brazen Head Pub (founded in 1198!). And hanging with Gerry and her friends.

That flat in Fitzwilliam Square turned out not to be indicative of the digs we'd find elsewhere in the country. We ended up hosteling through the country (and the rest of the countries we went to) and, while the hostels were fine, they weren't warm. And the weather was cold and rainy throughout our time there.

The weather didn't help, but there was also a sort of depressing, dreary undertone to Ireland. My Irish grandmother's words - "If Ireland were so great, we all wouldn't have had to come over here" - kept echoing in my ears. There was a general sense of sadness. Of repression. Of oppression.

One of the depressing aspects to the country was that all the people our age who we met were either planning on leaving Ireland, or somewhat apologetic/embarrassed that they were staying. When we met older folks - the age of our parents - they would tell us about their children in England, Australia, or the States - often in Boston.

When we were on the ferry back to England, waiting for it to weigh anchor, we struck up a conversation with a guy our age, a fellow from Newfoundland. Like us, he was backpacking around Europe.

Joyce and I were obviously American, but Rick looked like he could be Irish. 

While we sat there waiting to take off, a middle aged woman, wearing an armband with an acronym on it (I've forgotten what the letters were) approached us and asked Rick if he were Irish. She was a social worker, interviewing Irish young folks who were leaving the country. In my recall, she was trying to convince them to stay, but that can't possibly be true. There were no opportunities in Ireland. The young folks had to leave.

As it had been for so very many decades, one of Ireland's greatest exports was its young people. (In my family, in the 1860's/1870's, those young people were Matthew Trainor. Bridget Trainor. Margaret Joyce. John Rogers.)

And then things began to change. 

When I got back there in 1985, things were looking up.

In 1973, Ireland had joined the EU, and the EU had plowed a lot of money into the country. The roads were improved, as had public transport. The shops were nicer, the food betterr. Everything seemed a bit more open, looser. 

In the years of the Celtic Tiger, the economy grew tremendously, the people prospered. American companies were investing - high tech, financial services, pharma. When I was working for Wang, I remember arriving at Shannon, only to be greeted by a big blue WANG sign, prominently displayed in the terminal. 

Ireland was hit badly - worse than most countries - by the Great Recession of 2008. 

Visiting the country was back to being depressing: all those half-built "ghost estates", torn plastic sheeting flapping in the window cutouts.

There was a very Catholic sense that the good times had been too good to be true, and what was now happening was more normal, more what the Irish deserved.

And yet they bounced back. And while they were bouncing back, they were jettisoning a lot of the social and cultural baggage that had been keeping them down. Most notably, the people were getting out from under the grip of the Catholic Church, which had pretty much been running the country since the Republic gained independence from Britain in 1922. 

The Ireland that was deciding it was no longer interested in letting the Church run the show, was more prosperous than it had been, better educated - it was only in 1967 that free secondary education was introduced. Prior to that, most working class kids left school at 14. (If they made it that far.) Then there were the scandals: so many stories of abuse of children at the hands of priests and the Christian Brothers who ran so much of the school system. So many stories of the young women shoved into a lifetime of servitude (and mistreatment at the hands of nuns) in the Magdalen Laundries, sometimes for having a baby out of wedlock (sometimes their father's or their brother's), sometimes for the crime of being bold and uppity. There were scandals about the country's orphanages. The scandal of the bishop of Galway having fathered a son by an American woman.

With amazing rapidity, the country became less priest-ridden. 

Divorce was okayed. Birth control. Abortion. And in May 2015 - a month before SCOTUS decided Obergefell - Ireland voted to allow gay marriage. These days, fewer people go to Mass. Fewer identify as Catholic.

The Ireland I landed in this morning - if all went well - is a different country than the one I first visited in 1973. 

I loved it then. I love it now. But what a difference 50 or so years make. 

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The remarkable transformation of Ireland into a modern society is brilliantly chronicled in Fintan O'Toole's recent book, We Don't Know Ourselves. Part memoir, part history, O'Toole examines Ireland from the late 1950's - he was born in 1958 - up to current times, through the lens of his own experiences.