The greeting extended to tourists is now as likely to come from a Pole, or a Lithuanian, as from an Irish person. Liam Browneconsiders the changing face of Ireland of the Welcomes - now that our visitors stay.
In May 1932, Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland, attempting to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Her intention was to emulate Charles Lindbergh and land in Paris but during the flight her plane suffered mechanical problems and she had to put down at the first available opportunity. After 14 hours flying, she spied landfall but had no sure sense of what country she had reached. Ireland, possibly, but she couldn't be sure. Identifying railway tracks below, she followed them, reasoning that they would bring her to a town or city. They did - to my home town of Derry, where, after repeated circling in a vain search for an airfield, she put down in a field just outside the town.
A local farm worker wandered over to her. She knew she had just made history and as she clambered out of her plane all that remained was to clarify the country in which she had landed. "Where am I?" she asked him. "You're in Gallagher's pasture," he replied, as if stating the obvious.
The story, even if apocryphal, has a ring of truth to it. In this brief exchange two worlds and two world-views collide. Earhart epitomised the future; she had, quite literally, dropped out of the sky. She dealt in countries and continents, in a shrinking earth. The farm worker by contrast was focused on the local and the locale, the fields about him, this being his livelihood.
Arrival in a new country always brings confusion. But Earhart, like many before and after her, received a rousing Irish welcome. She was one of the most famous women on earth and in the course of her brief stay the town came out en masse to welcome her. Crowds followed her every move, people smiled and waved at her, men threw their hats in the air whenever she appeared in public. But a mere 24 hours after she landed, she was gone, never to return.
The concept of hospitality, the "Ireland of the Welcomes", has always been predicated on the assumption that in due course the visitor will return to their own country. Being hospitable is, after all, an exhausting business. Today, with all manner of nationalities deciding that, rather than just visit Ireland, they want to settle here and call it their home, hospitality has to morph into other qualities - tolerance and acceptance, for instance.
Herein lies the acid test, how friendly are we really? And of course ironies abound; with so many immigrants working in the service industries, visitors to Ireland are more likely to receive an Irish welcome from a friendly Pole, Lithuanian or Filipino. It might take a while before they actually encounter the indigenous Irish.
A country, like an individual, can suffer from poor self-image. Irish hospitality must, in part, have grown in response to external criticism, an attempt to confound the visitor's expectations. As if to say, sure we're not that bad really. But the tone in Ireland today has changed. Where once an apology given to a tourist for some inconvenience, for some lack of facilities, would be suffixed with a weary "welcome to Ireland", now, as we try to explain away the building development, the traffic levels, the sheer pace of it all, "welcome to Ireland" is said almost in wonder, as if we can't quite take it in ourselves. The apologetic tone has long gone.
With the change of pace, our days now seem to be careering along, out of control, with us clinging on for dear life. As if some god has a finger stuck on the fast forward button. And the shrinking world that Amelia Earhart believed in has inevitably come to pass. Around the same time that Earhart was landing in Derry, a young Aidan Higgins was accompanying his father on a day-trip to Dublin (as described in his wonderful memoir, The Whole Hog) and finding himself overcome by the smells and strangeness of the city; the aroma of fresh-ground coffee from Bewleys, for instance, provoked in him thoughts of Africa, of heat and wildness. And Higgins had only travelled from Celbridge in Co Kildare. It's hard to imagine Dublin today producing the same sense of wonder in any Irish child. Children, like the rest of us, are sophisticates in the art of travel.
Not that many years ago, to walk down a main street anywhere in Ireland and hear Russian, Swahili or Farsi being spoken would have induced a frisson of otherness, of the far reaches of the world. We are becoming harder to astonish and surprise, at a time when we probably need to be taken out of ourselves more than ever.
The innocence of a young Higgins may have gone for good, but Irish life has probably never offered more opportunities to be astonished and surprised. It has never seemed more various, or more, in the words of Louis McNeice, "incorrigibly plural".
Liam Browne is programme director of the Dublin Writers' Festival and his first novel, The Emigrant's Farewell, was published recently in paperback by Bloomsbury (€10.99)