Welcome to the June edition of The Irish Times Abroad newsletter. Olympic preparations are well under way in Paris. Those who live there or pass through the city are still getting used to the potential roadblocks and restrictions that will be in place for the duration of the games. Irish woman Patricia Killeen bought her house in Paris in 2000 and back then “little did we know Olympians would be running past our window to train in our next-door Pablo Neruda stadium”. Despite the excitement, Patricia describes the road ahead for Paris’s residents as hazy. “Working from home will be ‘advised’ or ‘obligatory’, depending on one’s employer, activity and location,” she says. She notes that the event will give spectators a chance to taste some of the food from Paris such as bouillons. “My current favourite bouillons are Chartier and the Art Nouveau Bouillon Julien.”
This month, Irish Times columnist Brianna Parkins left Ireland after five years to move back to Australia. “I don’t know how sad I am entitled to feel, given tens of thousands of Irish people emigrate to Australia every year and none of them will have their parents to welcome them at the airport,” she writes of the experience. She said her silent goodbyes to Dublin “from the Georgian mansions, to the libraries, the pubs, the parks, the theatres and the laneways that stink of urine”. She notes that “Ireland teased a lightness and tenderness out of me. I had grown up in a place that required hardness. There was no room for giddiness or curiosity. This country cracked me wide open.”
Catherine Moonan writes about going to Sydney to visit her two daughters who are building their lives in Australia. “It was wonderful to see the two girls – we really miss them from the house.” The writer reflects on how the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic were hard for her daughters’ generation: “They are probably two years behind where they should be in terms of travel and life adventure.” Despite finding it hard to say her goodbyes at the end of the trip, Catherine is happy her daughters are now out building their own lives.
Laura Kennedy compares what it feels like being an Irish person living in Australia versus an Irish person living in Britain. “The grim reality is that while Britain has been, and in many ways remains, important to Irish people by dint of our history, we are not a priority for those lads,” she writes. However, life in Australia also opens up a different perspective, “as Australia comes to terms with its own colonial past, it appears to fall into the same slightly awkward relationship to history that many other western countries now occupy”.
Sarah Moran writes about her experience living in New York and how Irish immigrants are not only accepted there, but encouraged. “Americans’ love of the Irish, while both welcoming and flattering, seems perplexingly unequal to how fun or hospitable an entire nation of people can possibly be.” She observes how Ireland as a nation seems to have fared better in the United States than other countries because “the Irish represent the ideal underdog story, a tale Americans can’t help but love”. People proudly boasting about their Irish roots happens frequently in New York, says Sarah. “Claiming Irish heritage allows one to covertly say: ‘I came from nothing, I worked my way up.’”
Finally, Maura Murray takes us to Galway as she walks back through her childhood. After emigrating to England many years ago she returned to Galway to see her mother in Galway University Hospital, or as she knows it, “The Regional”. Maura recalls the cannons that used to be at the top of Eyre Square and how “a restaurant meal in the early 1970s was a treat”. Despite the familiarity of the town, “shops have closed in Galway, pubs have gone and then I pass the open front door, but it only leads to another that is closed”.
