Two separate visitors to Dublin remarked to me recently that the city is like a miniature London. This seemed to me not only a gross obliteration of cultural differences, but also wrong. If you're going to compare Dublin with another European city, Paris is the obvious choice.
Both cities have similar small back streets to explore, second-hand bookshops, cafés and, nowadays, a river to walk beside. Both cities belong to republics, not a monarchy (believe me, it does make a difference to think of oneself as a citizen rather than a subject, but I'm speaking to the converted). Above all there is, both in Ireland and France, a valuing of the intellectual which is largely absent from English life. "Literature plays a considerable part in the consciousness France acquires of itself and its civilisation," Ernst Robert Curtius wrote in 1930. The same could be said of Ireland and you get a sense of this as soon as you arrive in Dublin airport, where photographs of Irish writers crowd the walls.
State of the nation
In this country teachers of literature are also commentators on the state of the Irish nation. They are too numerous to list here but we know who they are - Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, Terence Brown, Luke Gibbons, Edna Longley, to mention only a few. Their comments have wide currency in the Irish media, particularly during the summer school season. Literature becomes tied into the life of the nation in a way that it isn't in England, where the observations of English literature specialists tend to remain buried in academic journals.
It's a process that began before the founding of the Irish state: as Declan Kiberd points out in Inventing Ireland, Ireland existed in the minds of its writers before political struggles made it a concrete reality. In the 19th and 20th centuries, writers narrated the Irish nation in a way that hasn't happened much in England since Shakespeare. Our loss. England is possibly the only country in the world where the adjective "clever" is used regularly as an insult.
One obvious new link between Dublin and Paris is the momentous change to the euro. Change is the right word, for my pockets are now bulging with it. I keep handing over crisp new euro notes and receiving a handful of tiny coins in return.
As no sane person can be bothered to count the stuff when paying for another purchase, a day later I find my purse full of the annoying things. This new coinage is definitely ageist. I defy anyone over the age of 40 to be able to distinguish between the one cent, two cent, five cent and 10 cent coins without the help of a magnifying glass. The patience of my local shopkeeper is wearing thin. I am looking forward to the summer when Dublin is going to be full of English people anxiously fumbling among their euro while the Italians, French and Spanish fall about laughing. Tony Blair has only to sit tight. One summer holiday in Europe and the English will scurry back home clamouring for the euro. I predict a referendum in the autumn.
English apathy
Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee falls this year. A number of English commentators have remarked that, so far, there aren't many signs of people in the UK preparing to celebrate. The obvious exception is her grandson Harry, who seems to have started celebrating early and to have forgotten, as adolescents will, how to pace himself. Apart from this notable exception, commentators agree on the remarkable degree of apathy around. Things may change before June, of course. Wisely, the Queen is leaving it up to her subjects to decide how much or how little they wish to mark her 50 years on the throne.
All this has led me to wonder what does, nowadays, bring the English together as a nation to celebrate. Landmark dates connected with the two World Wars can still do it, but these aren't so much celebrations as sober occasions of remembrance and thanksgiving. Football? Cricket? All too often, for an England supporter, there's not that much to celebrate, and anyway these sports leave a large percentage of us cold. If you follow the Church year, you still have the big celebrations - Christmas, Easter, saints' days - though, let's face it, Pancake Tuesday hardly measures up to Rio's Carnival. Flour, eggs, water and a squeeze of lemon say a lot about the British attitude to pleasure. Perhaps it's something to do with the lowering effect of the British climate.
Margaret Thatcher memorably said there was no such thing as society, but it seems to me a terrible thing when a nation loses the imaginative symbols which create a sense of shared community. People lose interest and begin to withdraw from national life; witness the low voter turnout in the UK during the last election.
Possibly nationalist Ireland still has enough of a sense of shared nationhood to come together to celebrate, though recent debates over commemorations of dates in Republican history show fractures beginning to emerge. There's always St Patrick's Day, of course - but again, there's the weather. . .
Right to life
Some people would argue that it is Ireland's ban on abortion that defines the nation, marking it out from its secular, pagan neighbour in its care for the right to life of the unborn. Perhaps. Personally I get a bit cheesed off with the notion of England as a dumping ground for those whom Ireland has decided to exclude from its healthcare. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, instead of focusing on the unborn, this nation used its undoubted compassion and care for others in a commitment to make its state provision for those born with mental and physical disabilities the best in Europe?
Other people might take Enfield as a symbol of modern Ireland. This unassuming town, which we frequently pass through on our way to visit relatives in the midlands, is typical of many in Ireland. It's a town of new housing estates, high computer ownership, rail access, fancy bars, a flashy Chinese restaurant. There is one thing, though, that marks out Enfield: an obstacle-free main street which nevertheless creates the biggest traffic jam in the western hemisphere for no reason we have ever managed to work out.
For those who claim that in a newly secular Ireland we're losing touch with the mystery of life, Enfield provides encouragement. Where better to contemplate that mystery than stuck in a queue half-a-mile outside Enfield knowing that when you finally arrive in the town after a 20-minute delay there'll be no answer as to what caused it? Where better, despite our mint-new euro coins, to ponder the inevitable defeat of progress by the Irish T-junction?