James Charles Roy couldn't believe it as he drove west to Galway on a recent visit. He was approaching the outskirts of Athlone, now marked by the "McDonald's" roundabout, which has become a refuelling stop on the N6 for cars and drivers alike.
His immediate reaction was one of horror: "I might as well be in Iowa!"
It is hardly the first time he has said it, and with more frequency during recent years. For he has witnessed much change since his first visit here with his parents almost five decades ago, and his purchase of a 16th-century tower outside Athenry in east Galway in 1969.
"Coming to Ireland then was a bit like Gauguin going to Tahiti - special, primitive, and all the things that people hate to hear about themselves. As for Connemara, it was another level of fantasy then."
Reality has hit him smack in the face, repeatedly, to the extent that the former Time Magazine journalist-turned-writer has recorded it in print. However, The Fields of Athenry, as his recently published book is called, is more than it seems. As he explains in his introduction, it deals on two separate levels with his loss of innocence regarding Ireland, and the historical reasons why, in his opinion, Irish people are as they are.
The set for this drama is Moyode Castle, a ruin he purchased and tried to rebuild on a portion of pastureland three miles from Athenry. It was an area repeatedly touched by the twists and turns of political events over the centuries.
He was riding a BSA motorcycle at the time, which he had bought for $550 in London. He had just quit his job, to his father's disappointment, and was "roaming". His mother had Irish lineage, O'Brien and Hennessy. "Her forebears, with the odour of rotting potatoes in their nostrils, had come over to Boston during the Great Famine. They ended up in nearby Marblehead, but not as masons or fishermen."
His grandparents had been "lace-curtain Irish", he a lawyer, she a "lady of airs", and when he came with his parents it was to the Dublin Horse Show and to drink tea and eat big dinners in the Russell, Hibernian and Royal Marine Hotels.
The only relations they thought to look up were the Blennerhassetts, "an old Protestant family" with "a wayward son in Tralee who went out slumming one night and ended up marrying a Catholic O'Brien, remotely attaching himself to our family tree . . . "
Members of the Protestant Persse family had owned Moyode estate, but fled three decades before the house was burned in 1922. The tower that Roy purchased for £800 at the age of 23 had been built as a folly or ornament for the big house, and the owner when Roy discovered it was a local farmer, Thomas Uniacke.
It took five years for him to confirm the deal, having borrowed the money from his dad. And for 15 years he did little or nothing with it, apart from returning to camp in it.
The desolate ruin infected all his thinking, "mostly superficial, on Ireland and its extravagant history" and he freely admits that he "wallowed in all the great blarney of saints and scholars, Wild Geese and rebels", the "terrible beauty and Celtic twilights" of Yeats. In many ways it was an escape. He had become disillusioned very rapidly with journalism after securing work with Time Magazine.
"I was in Vietnam during the conflict, in the Philippines, in Japan, and it was a fantastic experience, but war reporting is a sickness, and the corporate culture of Time, which steadfastly backed the US involvement in Vietnam in spite of the information its own journalists were sending back, just wasn't for me."
He married an artist, and was fortunate to be able to get involved in her work and to concentrate on writing. He has written several books on Ireland, and his next, on his search for the soul of this country, is due to be published in 2002.
The delays, financial diddles, and "gush of brave talk unbacked by resolution" which he writes about in relation to his plans to restore the tower would be familiar to any property-owner involved in some sort of refurbishment here. He says it caused him to think "as a foreigner". Or as one of those Elizabethan administrators, like Essex, who came to Ireland to make their name and couldn't wait to get out after a couple of months.
He believes that the Calendar of State Papers, reflecting the views of those lord deputies, makes fascinating reading. He puts much of the insincerity, mixed with the decency and friendship, he has experienced down to a history which was a "chaotic froth". There is no clear pattern, just "Shakespearean tragedy".
Moyode Tower has no electricity, no heat, although there is a lavatory and running water.
"When you get over the initial shock of being dirty, you get used to it," Roy says.
In spite of all, he hasn't sold up and doesn't intend to unless the "unthinkable" happens and the route for the expanded N6 Galway-Dublin motorway does run right pass his door. That gets him back on to his pet theme again. "I know I sound like a real Jeremiah, but if you start making this country look like the place Americans left behind, they won't want to come here any more."
The Fields of Athenry: A Journey Through Irish History by James Charles Roy is published by Westview Press.