The train stands still at Kiltimagh Railway Station. You can't tell if it's coming or going. For years, people flocked to greet the six o'clock train each evening, to see who had come to visit whom. In Jerry Walsh's old bar down on the main street, next door to his club and his undertaker's parlour, photos on the wall show returning Yanks. Not Yanks like Bill Clinton, you understand, but local folk who left the town from this railway station, went over to America and made good. You could put a picture of Bill Clinton up on that wall, and he'd melt in seamlessly beside the fire-fighters, boxers, big Chicago cops, and billionaires from Boston whose parents drove a horse and cart. Perhaps that's partly why he got such a good reception over the last few days. Brawn, money, charm and power were the virtues to which you might aspire. Along with remembering the folk back home.
But Bill Clinton is actually an American, not a Yank. The term Yank was specially reserved for Irish-Americans, all other Americans being more or less a separate breed. Until this phase of the peace process, the image of the Yank pitted against us cunning natives spun so many yarns the jokes never ran dry. Irish America was a potentially powerful political seam, but the premise was that we owned Irishness, not them. Perhaps the name was appropriated when James Cagney starred in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Certainly by the time Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor went Singing in the Rain, Yanks were Irish-Americans who might spend money visiting Ireland, but were no more than tourists in what we knew to be `our' culture, never mind having one of their own. We were snobs about being Irish: Yanks might buy into Irishness, but we alone had permission to interpret it. The copyright was ours. So we decided what the Famine, the Easter Rising and the euphemistically-named Troubles did or did not mean - for them as well as for us - and raised hell when they saw it differently.
We might hate their sentimentality, but we understood their economic power. If they were Irish-American, then we had more purchase on telling them what symbols made sense for them and for us. After all, they made a mess of naming their children - Colleen, Shannon, Erin - so how on earth could you credit them, even if they did come back to support their daughters at the Rose of Tralee. Michael Flatley's Lord of The Dance caught the fracture perfectly. Might a (vulgar, medallion-wearing) Irish-American (with dyed hair) claim credit for renovating Irish dance?
Transforming the popular perception of Irish-American identity within both Ireland and the United States started before President Clinton's visit, but it took this trip to drive the changes home. It's difficult to reconcile that even-handed maturity with the kind of myths and nostalgia elaborated in the recent television history of the Irish in America, The Long Journey Home, which read Irish history as a monolithic struggle between what it called "the potato people" and their oppressors, and Irish-American identity as the onward march of an unconquerable spirit.
Both need renegotiating. It's patently clear the culture has moved well on from the crawthumping heroism of movies like John Ford's The Quiet Man in 1951 turned John Wayne into a returned Yank who gave us natives our proper comeuppance, but won his full entitlement by marrying into the pedigree tribe. Brian Friel's 1964 and 1967 dramas Philadelphia, Here I Come! and The Loves of Cass Maguire translated the tensions in the conflicting relationships between `native' Irishness, emigrant-Irishness and returned-Yank-Irishness into a far more muddied mix. Thirty-something years later, Martin McDonagh sent them all up, all together, and then made money on Broadway for so doing. The prospect that the diaspora should network for Ireland has always been acceptable, but the idea that any parts of it might have say in the meaning of the place was, and remains to some, outrageous. It is still a one-way relationship. Yet watching Kiltimagh change from a place in the middle of nowhere with a main street so sad you wanted to leave as fast as possible, to a place as bustling as Dingle is like an out-of-body experience. In the Raftery room at Walsh's, a radio station plays songs which must predate the fabled old Waltons radio programme. In the club next door, music comes from the Verve and Super Furry Animals. Busloads of extremely cool young people were queuing up for admission last week, when the last dance before school was about to start. You couldn't move on the pavement there were so many of them.
The speed of the cultural turnaround there stops you in your tracks, and not only because you can now buy cappuccino and sip it in an outdoor cafe on one of the rare days it doesn't rain, an unthinkable prospect 10 years ago. The shift in identity and confidence goes far deeper: some of the reasons why were teased out in a segment devoted to IRD chairman, Brian Mooney, on RTE's Ever Ancient, Ever New.
But it happened in part because Yanks were admitted to the town's history on more or less the same footing as the people who lived there. You can see it in the railway station, now the town's memory bank, a thriving local museum. Wealthy Yanks like Bill Flynn, whose mother left there for America, or Tom Flatley, who made millions in the United States and then endowed the town where his parents had once driven a horse and cart. Ordinary Yanks too, who never made much money but whose sense of place could incorporate an idea of Ireland as readily as it could that of Cincinnati, or St Louis or Philadelphia, PA.
If our jokes about Yanks let us undercut their success, their nostalgia for what we knew was our place, not theirs, made them vulnerable. Yanks were rich but thick: we were poor, but we were cute too. Over the last few days, the image management we've just witnessed has carefully turned us happy "potato people" into a digital tribe, swapping the weaponry of pike and armalite for that of joystick, wedge and three-iron.
Whether that is an accurate representation of the new Ireland is debatable. But the nationalist narrative which governed Irish-America has finally and formally ended: the energies of both Irish America as a series of communities and the United States as a world power are redirected as de facto stakeholders in new elaborations of Irish and Irish-American identities in a way history has never witnessed before. The question is how they will be managed. On recent evidence, golf and technology are shaping up to become the shamrock politics of the new millennium.