Maureen Stevens left Ireland a long time ago and has lived abroad for two decades. But her recent move to the “world’s first bitcoin city” in El Salvador has still been a culture shock. She left Spain where she lived for years and made another move aged 60. “The contrast between where I had been and where I now found myself was jaw-dropping,” she writes. “I live on a dirt road with clucking chickens and skulking street dogs. My senses have taken a while to adapt, but adapting they are. Everything is different from what I’m used to. It’s a sensorial readjustment.”
Peter Flanagan lives in England and writes that he finds “the Irish attitude towards Britain isn’t one of static resentment. It hardens and softens again over time according to the developments of the day,” be it Brexit or the recent bellyaching about Kneecap.
One of the colonial links between Britain and Ireland is being broken in by a shake-up in the House of Lords. A total of 92 hereditary peers will have their seats abolished under incoming legislation, among them the handful with titles from the Republic. London Correspondent Mark Paul spoke to a number of them, including Patrick Stopford, 9th Earl of Courtown.
He became the 9th Earl at 21 when his father died. He recalls drinking in a pub in Inch, Co Wexford, soon afterwards. A local man asked him: “Are you the new lord now?”
“I told him: ‘Yes, but I think those days are long gone, aren’t they?’ He laughed and said he wasn’t so sure.”
Paul also spoke to a Carlow-born baronet to help guide him through the Byzantine notions of Britain’s nobility and class structures.
Jockey Johnny Allen lives in Australia. He moved there in 2012, having grown up in Araglin in north Cork. He has amassed more than 1,000 victories during his career, including 19 group one winners, and he says racing is a much bigger industry in Australia. He says: “I suppose when I came out here first, I assumed I’d go home at some point. However, the longer you stay, the harder it becomes.”
Meanwhile, columnist Laura Kennedy lives in Canberra. Some Australian friends look “as though I’ve told them that my dog just died” when she tells them where she lives as it’s a more clinical and less cool place than Syndey or Australia. But Kennedy’s grateful, as while things aren’t necessarily better in Australia than in Ireland, “they are easier”. Meanwhile, Orlaith Delargy has found things a bit harder in Spain where the bureaucracy involved in getting an EU citizen card has her reflecting on studying Kafka in college.
Michael O’Dwyer from Dún Laoghaire works as a jewellery designer in Stockholm. He commutes from Sörmland, about an hour’s drive away, “the equivalent of driving from Aughrim to Dublin”, he tells Deirdre McQuillan. He says it “can be difficult to persuade [Swedes] to see the value of expensive high-end jewellery. They will drive a nice car and have a nice house and go on fantastic holidays, but there is an old philosophy called Jante’s Law, unwritten but powerful, that holds that it is rude to show your wealth.
“You could be on a train and sitting beside a multimillionaire and you would never know,” he says.
Thanks for reading.
