Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
It's deep January, and a chunk of the Irish population have taken their shorts, sun cream, Barry's teabags and cholesterol medication to the resorts of southern Spain and beaches of Bulgaria. By the time they return, their tans will be richer than the mud of the Irish winter they left behind. They're gone and they won't be back until June - which is great for those of us left behind, because we were getting sick of hearing them going on about it.
Our lust for foreign property is obsessive, and oppressive. The fear of missing out is pervasive. So the radio is filled with ads for cheap properties in small villages only 200 miles east of Gdansk. New Ryanair routes are greeted as magic portals to quick riches. It has become a way for those who bought their home at the right time to buy another one, somewhere sunnier and cheaper. Meaning that if you're still in Ireland and haven't yet raised the money for a two-bed house in a housing estate built deep in the heart of several other housing estates, then it's not much fun to hear that half your friends have a large apartment in Smolensk and that it's value has trebled since they bought it last month.
We now view the map of Europe less as a geographical guide and more as a giant estate-agent brochure. The continent is swarming with Irish people, searching for property bargains among the ruins of run-down villages, entranced by the foreign property dream. Where the Irish see "rustic", the locals see "ruins". Where the Irish see "cheap", they see "economically depressed". Where the Irish see "happy retirees", they see "gullible sandal-with-sock wearers who've read too much Peter Mayle".
You would think that people who are intent on escaping from Ireland for half the year would be dismayed at having to share their dream with thousands of other Irish who all had the same dream. Mediterranean resort towns teem with them. The Dordogne has been trampled by them. Entire social circles have moved to the same apartment blocks and created vast ghettoes of Irish middle-class retirees, whose days of sun-dappled idleness are spoiled only by how "the milk just isn't the same here".
The Irish have become the landlords of Europe, and someday soon we're going give the entire continent a month's notice before kicking out the residents, levelling the place and building an exclusive development of 19 million apartments. It will come complete with 7,000 bars that have Sky Sports, several hundred Christy O'Connor-designed golf courses, and a charming local waiter, Guillermo, whose warm Iberian welcome masks his raging resentment at how foreigners have ruined his village and pushed up property prices, and yet have never even bothered to learn how to pronounce his name correctly.