Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
For hundreds of years, give or take the odd catastrophic famine, we were happy to get along on a nice "hang sangwich and a lovely cup of tay". It's all coffees and paninis now. This is a country where it used to be acceptable to hang tea bags on the washing line, so you could use them again later. Not now. A new cafe opens somewhere in Ireland every 20 seconds. They gobble up the lovely old shops you used to admire, and which you now miss. Although you never actually bothered to go into them when they were open. Because they were full of tat.
Perhaps the reason there are so many Italians in Ireland these days is because they're coming to gasp at what we've done to their national drink. Ireland has a coffee culture, too. It's just that ours involves city streets filled with skittery, zombified office workers, white trainers over black tights, desperate for their morning fix. They scamper along the paths, sugar sachets gripped between their teeth, cappuccino froth bubbling from the mouth of the cup.
In Italy, by the way, they laugh at anyone who buys a cappuccino after noon. It's only espresso in the afternoons. Although perhaps we would drink a lot more espresso if it didn't come in such small servings. Damn rip-off Republica!
But you'll always find yourself drawn to the newest branch of Cafe Fiesta, where they force you to speak their inane language. You won't have a regular coffee, you'll have a grande skinny half-and-half mocha frappuccino. To go. It's called Starbuckish, and so many people speak it, at least a couple of times a day, that they're going to have to include it on the list during the next census.
It's always worth going to a new cafe, for nothing else if not to watch the initially perky staff descend into defeated twitchiness at having to make nothing but cappuccinos all day. It's the new production line. Lift the cup, twist the steam nozzle, scoop the froth. Repeat about 500 times a day. Increasingly, though, they seem to be lathering on the froth to try to get it done quicker. The cups actually seem lighter with the coffee in than without.
You can see why everyone wants to open a cafe. With the cost of a cappuccino, that must be the most expensive foam on the planet. It is frothy gold, topped with delicious chocolate-substitute powder. Some day soon we'll be paying €2.50 for a cup of flavoured steam. Except that we'll know it as a skinny tall mocca steamaccino.