It begins at the airport when the taximan says: "Will we take the motorway?' And indeed, there is a motorway, with an Ausfahrt for Ballymun and all. The taximan was as proud as a kid with a new toy. But the real shock was yet to come. The physical transformation of Dublin over the last couple of years is stunning, but by definition superficial. A couple of chairs on the sidewalk does not a continental cafe make.
Besides, I had already prepared myself for that kind of culture shock. Like many a returnee I had spent long hours on the phone scouting out the ground. One friend encouraged me to come back but warned me it would be like returning to Mars, that the country was unrecognisable. Another warned me not to believe what I read in the papers. "The dark forces are still in power," he muttered down the line. Both were right.
The first thing the returnee does, of course, is to buy back the family cottage. But a few days in Dublin was enough to destroy the illusion of the Returning Yank once and for all.
An Irish yuppie who sold his Manhattan loft could just about buy a derelict cottage in Fairview. I calculated that for the price of a good-sized family home in a handy Dublin neighbourhood, I could buy a spacious apartment on the Amsterdam canals, as well as a modest farmhouse in the South of France, and have enough change left to commute by TGV between the two well into the next millennium. Another great Irish tradition bites the dust. The estate agents were already blase about our shocked reactions. "Sure it's partly the fault of people like you," said one.
Curiously, the first question each estate agent asked was, what company do you work for? I wasn't quite sure what they were talking about. Why would I be coming back to Ireland to work for a company? In fact, I was planning to swell the ranks of the standing army of 10,000 poets. But soon all would be revealed. We found the house we'd been looking for. As we stood in the living room watching the ferries head out of the bay and the cormorants dive, we remembered another reason we wanted to come back to Dublin.
Then the other prospective tenants arrived. A Japanese corporate couple, who hardly looked at the view as they scrutinised the carpet. It was then that the penny dropped. This was the competition for the returning emigrant. Understandable enough: the corporate client will buzz off to Japan or Canada, but the Irishman might well want to stay in Ireland. Ireland may have changed but the irony stays the same. For years now I've been writing and lecturing about the New Europe, the necessity for removing national boundaries, etc. For years I resolutely refused to accept the role of "foreigner" or "native" but demanded the same rights and privileges for everyone. Twenty four hours back in Dublin and I'm ready to start chanting Ireland for the Irish, and burning the Germans out of Clifden.
And not just that. For the first time in my life I felt the pain of the emigrant. Certainly, the theme of exile has found its way into my work, but I've always been leery of writing directly about the emigrant experience, afraid of swelling the chorus of diaspora whinging, trying to avoid the sociological lie. I know it must be a terrible thing to have to leave for economic reasons but I never felt that that applied to me. I left because I was browned off with Dublin and curious about abroad. I had spent my entire adult life out of the country and never felt a moment's nostalgia or homesickness.
But in recent years I'd grown curious about Dublin again, and I thought it might be nice for my daughter to live in a country where people can pronounce her name, and so I decided to return. And now I was faced with a situation I had never imagined possible: to want to return, and find that you might not be able to; that you might be held hostage by economic forces as tightly as a hostage in a bunker. Next stop the bank, where the welcome was frosty. Again, it was the anomaly. You're Irish, 39 years old, but have no history in Ireland, never paid tax here, never had a bank account. Not quite Irish enough in the sense you're not on the Live Register, but not a foreigner with a multinational corporation behind him either. Not able to vote in Holland, not able to vote in Ireland. Too Irish for some things, not quite Irish enough for others. It's the old story: gael to the gall and gall to the gael. Then I was asked to produce my passport.
Now, Holland is a country where a foreigner can't use a public toilet without showing his passport, and I had looked forward to putting all that behind me. I hadn't expected to be welcomed by the Lord Mayor and driven on an open-topped bus down O'Connell Street. But after nearly 20 years of silence, exile and cunning, I thought this was a bit rich. Mustering what dignity I had left, I walked out of the bank. They seemed relieved to see me go.
The bank next door was friendlier, more flexible and seemed familiar with the problem. Eventually, convinced I was who and what I said I was, they revealed the reason the first bank was so hesitant about accepting my money: government regulations to control the laundering of drug money. Having just come from a country where, in my local bank, I used stand in line behind swarthy men in Armani suits emptying briefcases full of dollars on the counter, this seemed funny. So, not only was I not a bona fide Irishman, I was coming from Amsterdam, thus doubly suspicious.
A Dutch friend of mine once told me how he had arrived at the Dutch border shortly after the second World War. This man had been deported as a child from Amsterdam and survived years in Auschwitz, alone of all his family. He was eventually liberated and bussed back by the Red Cross. At the border he was stopped and detained in an internment camp. Why? Because on leaving the country he had neglected to take his passport with him, and couldn't prove he was Dutch.
Shaking his head, he told me how much that thoughtless, perhaps well-meaning bureaucrat had hurt him. Fact is, returning hurts more than leaving. And returnees are awkward for the mother country. Ireland is proud of its diaspora, as long as it stays where it bloody well is and doesn't push up house prices and confuse banks.
So, imagine my joy when on Saturday morning I bought the Irish Times (with that special ex-emigrant's pleasure at paying 85p for a paper that normally costs two quid) and was informed by Garret FitzGerald (still going strong apparently) that I was part of a positive sociological trend. By returning with children I am "halting the erosion of our population". There's one catch. According to Garret the inflow of returnees "in parts of south Dublin . . . is creating pressure on already over-stretched school accommodation". But surely Garret is mistaken.
For years now I've been hearing from friends that things have changed and that non-denominational schools are sprouting all over like magic mushrooms. Sure it'll be no problem.
Watch this space.
Michael O'Loughlin's last book was Another Nation: New and Selected Poems published by New Island Books in 1996.