After over a year of living in Ireland, Frenchman Thomas Hubert finally loves the Irish way of life - right down to the roads and the pleasures of Dublin Bus . . .but then, he brought his own wine supply and he's already finding romance
Irish friends and colleagues often ask me why I left Paris, where I could be drinking fine wine all day on a sunny terrasse. I love my country, but the sun is as rare in Paris as it is in Dublin. As for wine, I imported a nice little selection.
Alva MacSherry recently told readers of this newspaper about her new life in France. Her story mirrors mine: this is my second long stay in Ireland, and certainly not the last one.
Of course, there is a wonderful romance with an Irishwoman - I'm not French for nothing. But this alone would not be enough to make me love Ireland as much as I do.
Although my experience is very Dublin-centred, I have travelled from Wexford to Galway and from Cork to Belfast. What I have seen in each place is that Irish hospitality is not a tourist myth. I won't spend too long on the well-known fact that you can sit in any pub and start chatting to the locals - do not even try it in France. But Irish kindness is so deep that I have experienced it even in the harshest conditions; namely, on Irish roads.
I'm the first to complain about their state, an à la carte choice of potholes, traffic jams, deceptive signposting, roadworks and unmarked bends. Even so, Irish drivers flash their indicators when you let them overtake and smile at you when you yield. More incredibly, pedestrians in the west wave as you pass them by. Locals once followed and stopped a French friend who had mistakenly turned into a dead-end in Co Kerry, just to tell him he was going nowhere.
In Dublin, too, I enjoy the buzz of voices on the bus each day, and I have enthusiastically adopted the custom of thanking the driver after each ride. Have you ever commuted in Paris? Well, just think of the last funeral you attended . . .
Being surrounded by welcoming people would not help much if I could not work. On that side, Ireland has a lot to offer. The boom has helped: I could hardly believe it when I got my first job in Dublin after about 45 minutes of research. When you apply for a job in France, you first have to write formal letters, explaining why you would love to be, say, a hotel receptionist. You will get an answer for every letter you send, mostly to tell you how wonderful you are, but unfortunately la maison hires only fully qualified engineers for the job.
Maybe one or two managers will interview you, to tell you it is a pity you haven't got 35 years of experience in five-star hotels around the world, otherwise you would have been perfect for the job.
When I decided to look for work experience as a journalist, I wrote to French and Irish media organisations. The French ones reacted as anticipated, but I got interviews with four of the Irish ones. More surprisingly, they all offered me some sort of job, even though I'm barely out of college - and not a native English speaker. Since I started working, I've been amazed at the number of young people in newsrooms. The Irish are aware that the future lies in young people, and they trust them.
Ireland's reasonable, efficient bureaucracy makes all these opportunities readily available. I saved hours - if not days - by completing the Irish paperwork associated with college, work, accommodation and taxes instead of its French equivalent.
Yet the Republic is not perfect - which country is? I mentioned the roads. The crucial lack of rail transportation is another problem. I commute only by train and metro in Paris, and I would happily do the same here if they were available. The uselessness of Irish banks, too, is an endless nuisance. Opening hours are a joke - my French bank is open until 7 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday - and the level of service is worse. For some obscure reason, I'm not even entitled to a Laser card.
But a lot of things are changing, mostly in a positive way. Take Dublin Bus, which has dramatically improved its service: the buses are new and frequent and Nitelink is brilliant. It had to be said. Some things have changed more deeply, too. I remember St Patrick's Day two years ago: all the people I was meant to meet let me down, and I ended up strolling alone through an orgy of booze and commercialism. I spent that night with a French friend in the deserted student residence at Dublin City University, wondering about the future of a people whose main goal in life seemed to be spending easily earned money on beer.
This year, I find Ireland less nouveau riche. The economic downturn has done its job and the Irish seem to realise there are things in life other than money. The environment, the need for infrastructure, health, immigration, safety, Ireland's place in the EU . . . All these highly political issues - in the noble sense of the word - are back in people's conversation and in the media. They cannot be addressed with money alone; they require political courage and good management.
The next big danger for the Republic would be to miss the opportunity to tackle problems - traditional Irish procrastination. To use the economic slowdown as an excuse to do nothing, for example, as it is already emerging here and there, with help from that magical word "recession".
The definition of a recession is a time of negative economic growth, but the forecast for the Republic is about 3 per cent for this year. This is more than France's average annual growth between 1980 and 2000. Yet France built 1,500km of high-speed train lines during that bleak period and has had virtually no hospital waiting lists. Slower growth is not recession, and certainly not an excuse for bad policies.
