Don’t ask an Irishman what he thinks of the current state of his homelands financial Situation unless your prepared for a verbal onslaught that rivals Tea Party rhetoric. After the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the so name boom in the Irish economy, the country is troubled once again. This is not in the same style as the infamous “Troubles” that brought civil unrest too such a potent level with death and destruction layered with religious ideology and murderous political upheaval. It just stems from greed. Flat out Greed. Everybody gets the disease and now the Irish truly understand it.
Irish citizens are a highly self aware people. There is enough historically significant oppression, poverty, famine and ruthless in-fighting to go around for every generation to look inward. With the lives of so many innocents lost in the strife of the past, it seemed as though a blessed corner was turned in the latter ninety’s when the country joined the ranks of the prosperous with a serious march into the 21st century as a global powerhouse. All Ireland is now in disgust at the level of money grabbing that took place over the period of the Celtic Tiger. Just a mirror image of what has happened in the United States and the United Kingdom over the same period of time, although to a spectacularly higher degree.
Ireland has no time for glossy-green sing song speech patterns anymore, for its sink or swim. The sounds of fury and the reality of tough times are apparent everywhere, From homeless and beggars camped out under ATM’s on Grafton street in Dublin to the miles upon miles of empty office parks ringing the major cities of Cork, Dublin and Limerick. It all came and went in a blip. Future musical lyric over a pint of Guinness no-one can afford more aptly will descend into… “They took my hills and leveled em… too build a house of cards”.
Travelling Ireland at any time of life, one needs to be in touch with the history of the country to have a better perspective of your own journey through it. There is such severe beauty in this small island, that it is hard to contain it all and you can easily find yourself denying (especially if you’re Irish) the struggle and toil that lingers at its surface.
Push all the shallow needs aside and you find, buried deep in its heart and in its hills, real Ireland, a country that always shines under a weather beaten sun.
A land and people unaffected by mass consumerism and some ridiculous notion that bigger stuff and more things piled on top of that bigger stuff is better. In the West Country and in the south, there are those who did not lose their way, still living on the land, proud and pleased at who they are and what it means to be Irish. Not in the least bit ashamed of what has happened around them, just carrying on as though an economic collapse meant nothing. The hearth is still warm, food is still abundant and only your own hands can make it happen. I have been to Ireland on many occasions and this time I ventured further out the cosmetic door. I took the chance to dig a little deeper and perhaps gain a little more insight into my own history with this country. I had not been here in a few years, at least not since the Celtic tiger was swinging a powerful tail.
I was forced to swallow hard.
The striking similarities to Western Wisconsin and the loss of the family farm are so readily apparent you could not close your eyes long enough not to distinguish the difference. Whole acreages swallowed up by earth movers and cookie cutter homes only to be abandoned at one fell swoop when a housing market so ridiculously over-inflated went bust. Everyone wanted in; Buyer, seller, banker, taxman and lawyer. The shovels, with barely time enough to cool are now being picked up by those who had no interest in any of it. Sensible people with no choice but to plow forward and clean up a problem they did not create, like they always have and always will.
The people of Ireland will continue on and its beauty holds no shame, but it does lend one to question foreign interference with the “Big Bailouts” now seeming inevitable from the European Union and country’s within that union that are just as directly responsible for lending the money that was grubbed. There is a funny little quip that anyone Irish is familiar with, that “its all about the suffering”, a remnant of a religious culture that seemed to think it can offer eternal salvation if you suffer enough in this lifetime.
Time will sneak by and the country will regroup because as a people they are tough.
As unfortunate as the fighting Irish symbol can become sometimes, it does characterize the best part about the people of Ireland; they will persevere once again. Just as another old Irish saying goes… God helps those who help themselves.
