`Come dance with me in Ireland," said Mary Robinson; so I did. As tens of thousands of my fellow countrymen do each year, I packed my bags, took wife and daughter (but not cat, due to the absurd quarantine laws) and moved back to a country I had left nearly 20 years before. My emotions were a mixture of curiosity and vindication, with an undertone of foreboding. The first two because Ireland had apparently changed beyond recognition, in ways that I approved of, and the latter because I had enough well-informed friends on the ground telling me that nothing much had changed for the better. A year later, it's time to draw up the balance sheet, a phrase particularly apt in the new Ireland.
I started off with the best of intentions. I had determined to conduct myself like a Martian holidaying on Planet Earth. I would have no preconceptions about my native country, but take it as it now was, in all its pristine post-Catholic, Celtic-Tiger glory. Once back in Ireland I would never begin a sentence with "When I was in . . ." From Anthony Clare I had learned that it was taboo to refer to your experience outside Ireland. I would respect that. The past, after all, was another country.
In the beginning I had enough problems just trying to absorb the look of the place. I had spent enough time in carefully detailed imitation Irish pubs in various European capitals being nostalgic for the authentic Irish pub. But in a classic case of life imitating art, the average Irish city centre pub now looks like a Budapest cafe trying to imitate an Irish pub. Confusing. And in the same vein, you will meet people who talk like the actors in Fair City.
The diary I kept in my first months back in Dublin is full of the strange sights and sounds. I noted that in the southern suburbs of the city you will see more hard-faced, dyed blondes in jeeps than in the middle-class ghettoes of South American capitals. The schoolgirls on the DART seemed to be speaking a foreign language, in which tortured Home Counties vowels struggled to reach an accommodation with turns of phrase derived from Australian soaps. The really worrying thing was that people seemed to speak like this on RTE too. What had happened to the Dublin accent? Even Joe Duffy had been gentrified. At one stage I resolved to kill the next person who said to me: "No problem".
In those first months I felt like a character in a Saul Bellow novel. Everywhere visible, on the one hand, was a burgeoning underclass racked by drugs, gangsterism and poverty, and on the other, spectacular wealth, vulgarity and indifference. I was disorientated, saying all the wrong things and trying to figure out what attitude I should take to this, what tone I should use in addressing other people.
The problem is - and I'm as aware of it as any other returning emigrant - that the tone of the outraged innocent is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Already my 10year-old daughter, who a year ago hardly spoke a word of English, sounds as if she has spent her first decade commuting on the DART. My friends might be amused at the beginning when I kept asking "Who is this Marion Finucane you keep joking about?" but a year down the road I'm expected not just to know who she is, but to have an opinion about her. I slowly began to realise I was going to have to treat Ireland like just another foreign country.
Surviving in a foreign country means developing strategies for analysing the society and dealing with it. The first thing you learn is to forget the scenery and the folk dancing. You learn a society by entering the belly of the beast, by getting married, going to hospital, buying insurance. Most instructive of all is your interaction with people such as bank managers, solicitors, civil servants. You observe these people, their clothes, the phrases they tend to repeat, the ways in which they might treat you differently to other people.
The crucial learning moments are those moments when you say something and they go blank. The blankness means you have touched upon a fundamental value so absolute it is not seen as a matter for debate or questioning. It is simply not on the playing field. In this way you can figure out what the underlying values and structures of a society are. You may not want to conform, but at least then you know what it is you are not conforming to. I soon found myself in a position to apply these techniques, with regard to the vexed matter of housing. In an article in this newspaper written shortly after I returned I wrote with a kind of amused horror about the Irish housing situation. A year later I find it increasingly difficult to see the funny side of it.
Obviously there is a massive housing crisis on the way, but what is disturbing and baffling is the unwillingness of the Government to do anything radical about it. When I returned, friends advised me not to even consider renting a property, that buying was by far the easier option. A year later, I see what they mean. The rights of tenants in Ireland can only be described as dating from a Victorian age. I remember as a schoolchild learning about the battles the Irish peasantry fought for such things as security of tenure. It is hard to credit the situation more than 100 years later. In some ways it's worse because not only are tenants unprotected by laws, they are seen as having few moral rights.
Trying to make sense of this leads me to think that there may be some truth in the post-colonial model of Irish society. The abused becomes the abuser. Few peoples have relied on the kindness of strangers as much as the Irish, but we are not covering ourselves in glory in our treatment of economic immigrants. Similarly, Irish law seems bizarrely, in the light of our history, biased in favour of landlords. Discussing the situation with an estate agent, I pointed out that one house I was interested in was still empty three months later because of the outrageous rent being asked. Why not control the market to enforce realistic rents? The estate agent replied, with the air of someone delivering a clinching argument: landlords would then simply not rent out their property. You don't need to be an expert in the field to know that in some European countries it is a criminal offence to keep residential property unoccupied. I suggested that such a law in Ireland would surely ease the housing situation. The blank look appearing on the agent's face taught me that I had hit upon a fundamental non-negotiable value.
Shortly after his election, Germany's finance minister, Oscar Lafontaine, pointed out that "property entails duties as well as privileges". Ireland, the Cuba of the capitalist world, is obviously not yet ripe for such revolutionary ideas. This touching, naive faith in the sacredness of the free market would be as laughable as Fidel Castro's speeches, if seen from a safe distance. In the belly of the beast, it is less amusing.
But surely, to compensate for all that, friends from abroad ask, there is the exuberant cultural life? Though classified as an Irish writer, I didn't have much experience of that until recently. In the 1980s I came to Dublin to make a documentary about U2. I wasn't a very dedicated documentalist, and I gave up after 24 hours. I had to, because the people I interviewed, the usual talking heads, simply refused to answer my questions. It wasn't so much the content they objected to - it was the scepticism of my tone. This was my first encounter with the hysterically positivist, feel-good tone which is now so characteristic of Irish life, and which I thought was restricted to the cultural stage.
For years my only contact with Ireland was the odd Irish newspaper and Channel 4 documentaries. This led me to into some strange misapprehensions. One example is that mythical beast, the Irish film industry. To read Irish journalists (though the print ones are marginally better than their electronic colleagues) you would think Ireland in those years was churning out cinematic masterpieces. What France was in the 1960s, and Germany in the 1970s, Ireland would be in the 1990s. I eagerly seized the opportunities provided by international film festivals and late-night German TV to see those films - which, curiously enough, never seemed to make it to the cinemas. I soon realised that either they were nuts, or I was. I remember one particularly massively hyped film which I persuaded some colleagues to go and see at a festival. They left after 20 minutes but slagged me about it for years afterwards. I don't blame them. It wasn't just that it was bad - it was so obviously bad that those journalists who praised it must have been deliberately misleading me.
A year later I have more sympathy with their dilemmas, and I can see that I'm coming down with the disease too. Cultural Ireland is a small place. A year ago I wouldn't have hesitated to name that film. Now, I'm worried that the director's mother might handbag me in Grafton Street.
I saw this process in action for myself with the hype which preceded the release of Pat O'Connor's Dancing At Lughnasa. By then I had learnt to pick up the signals - and it was amusing to watch media people bend over backwards to avoid saying what they really thought of the film. But in the long run, this kind of thing is not doing the Irish film any favours.
Why the broader neurotic need to accentuate the positive, and the dismissal of the critical voice? It would be charitable to ascribe it to a revulsion at the begrudgery and envy which so bedevilled Ireland, but it has swung too far in the opposite direction. Ireland may be rich in comparison to how it once was, but it is still a very small, rather insignificant part of a much larger economic whole. The current prosperity owes much to outside factors over which we have absolutely no control. Nothing strange or unusual about that. But the obsessive upbeat hype is a kind of superstition. There is a sort of underlying belief that despite all the glaring inequalities and inadequacies, if we keep saying we are a great wee country, we will become one.
The media overkill surrounding pop bands such as U2 and Boyzone is not just about the feel-good factor. I have nothing against them personally - as a boy from the mean streets myself, I am willing to say more power to your elbow. But I do object to being asked to take them seriously. On the musical level they are not very interesting, slightly more so as late-20th-century cultural phenomena, but their chief interest is purely commercial. Ireland is a country where the bottom line is literally the bottom line. The adulation is not for their artistic achievements, but for their financial ones. Because this is the heart of the matter: money. In the New Ireland, money is the morality, the spirituality, the Mecca.
I don't know why this has come as such a surprise to me, but it has. Soon after arriving back I glanced at an article in a woman's magazine, where a representative gaggle of Irish girls claimed that the most attractive thing about a man was his bank balance. It says much about my innocence about Ireland at the time that I thought they were joking. It is not even that girls in other countries would be very different - they just wouldn't admit it in public. I don't know if this is a new phenomenon. After all, Yeats railed at the Irish middle class's obsession with adding the ha'pence to the pence. It may just be that this class, once tiny, has grown exponentially and spread out to plant the southern suburbs of the city with Sineads and Daras. They are still saving but have dropped the praying bit, and what is clear is that no amount of new cars and designer suits will fill the moral vacuum at the centre of Irish society.
Why am I so disturbed by this? They say about prison that it doesn't change people, it just makes them more of what they are. The same is true of exile. The problem is, I am not a Martian: I'm from here, and I can't help being involved. Secondly, I can't just abandon the values and ideals I have acquired over the past decades spent outside Ireland.
In a recent letter to The Irish Times, an Irishman living in Finland talked about how he would like to return, but objected to the litter on the streets. I found it an eloquent letter for a number of reasons. I have been back long enough to realise how eccentric it must seem to many people in Ireland. Yet I know exactly what he is talking about. The filth of Irish cities, in the light of our new-found wealth, is a symbol of Irish indifference to the public realm, to that republic which is a realm of communal values which go beyond the traditional Irish recipe of simple nationalism mixed with economic self-interest. A year later, I'm still looking for the values I can share with my fellow countrymen. James Joyce once wrote: We cannot change the country: let us change the subject. However, he never came back.
