I feel a certain schadenfreude at our nation's self-inflicted plight - and a slight tristesse at the thought of our friendly immigrants dwindling away, writes Ultan Quigley.
THERE WAS MORE good news about the economy this week. House prices are falling. Each day the American conglomerates lay off more lobotomised drones. Petrol is now more expensive than champagne.
Good news? Yes, I believe so. After a decade of stupefied torpor, our sickeningly bourgeois nation - four million slaves on George Bush's global plantation - may shortly be shaken into brutal wakefulness. We should, perhaps, prepare ourselves for a new Celtic dawn.
Some grim intelligence did, however, come my way in the last few days. RTÉtelevision news tells us that the decline in the economy has had a dramatic effect on the nation's demographics. As Irish people head for London and New York in increasing numbers, the rate of immigration from Poland, Nigeria and other points east has plummeted. By 2010 the nation may, once more, suffer from net emigration.
Eager to hide my prickling tears from the women of the house, I picked up my glass and headed towards the window. The sun was setting, storm clouds were drawing in, but there was still enough light to see a dead raven rotting in the undergrowth. I felt a poem rising in my guts.
"If you're going to throw up, try to avoid doing it on the curtains this time," my romantic partner snarled. "Some of us have to get up for work or school in the morning and, for once, we would prefer to get out the door without treading in your filth."
The print and broadcast media - this paper is not immune - have spent much of the last decade demonising new arrivals to this Ireland of the Unwelcomes. Expensively suited youths scowl at cowering Czechoslovakian refugees from the safety of their Porsches and it is left to an older, more thoughtfully Bohemian class of Irishman to extend the proper hand of friendship. I gladly oblige.
The corner of Wicklow in which I live and work was once a grim monocultural backwater. Now, after rising at lunchtime ("the poet's morning", as my partner once described it), I can stroll down the street and encounter a veritable bazaar packed with gesticulating African traffic wardens, chattering Chinese waiters and thoughtful Slavic taxi drivers.
I have made and lost friends here. Every day, for about a year, I used to visit a restaurant run by a gazelle-thighed sage from the outskirts of Kampala. While the sun slowly edged its way towards the horizon, I would drink the old fellow's inky, bitter coffee and recite recent revisions of my verse. The restaurateur's English was not perfect, but there was no mistaking the cumulative emotional response my poetry had upon him. I very clearly remember the evening when, following a reading of the eighth draft of No Tigers for the Downtrodden, my blank-verse epic addressing the bourgeois coup d'état of Ireland, he became so engaged with the themes that he broke down and wept.
"No more! No more!" he said and lowered his head in his hands. His concern at the continuing rape of this once-decent country was unspeakably moving.
"The Philistine phalanx pull on suits and brandish mobile phones as scimitars," I declaimed. "A red-eyed nation, loins that gave us Yeats and Joyce, curls into the crook of a tree and waits for it to become a grave."
I am no anthropologist, but there was no mistaking the meaning of the antic gestures that followed. Still deeply affected, my friend began flinging crockery and cutlery about the room (some items flew dangerously close to my head) while pointing emphatically towards the door of the restaurant. Happy to join in this eccentric African custom, I lobbed a plate towards the deep-fat fryer and made my own gesticulations in the direction of the street. The gape of wide-eyed, grateful astonishment I received was something to behold.
I fear, however, the poem may have had too powerful an effect on my chum. In the weeks that followed, the restaurant began closing at the most unusual times. I would round the corner of the high street, eager to try out a few new verses, and, just as the establishment came into view, the shutters would clatter down. Some time later, he sold the business to set up a carpet warehouse near Navan.
The priests, police and politicians complain about the cultural confusion that results from having people of different nationalities occupy the same street, but poets know that such apparent collisions only spur creativity and empathy. Still, from time to time, sad misunderstandings can occur. This country, despite suffering centuries of oppression by (as I call them) Catholo-fascists in (as I call them) dogma collars, is finally beginning to accommodate itself to its own sexual yearnings. Unhappily, some parts of eastern Europe have yet to throw off the clerical jackboot and, as a result, the citizens of those countries find even the most innocent of carnal allusions frightening and disorienting.
Eager for a break from professional pondering, I recently allowed myself a trip to the cinema. The film, The Iron Man, was the usual American pabulum, but the audience was alive with beauty and variety. Aware that nobody as beautiful as the Polish girls in front of me - alabaster skin and the eyes of nesting squirrels - could possibly be interested in such mindless garbage, I leaned forward to offer them one of the bottles of lager from my carrier bag. They declined politely, but turned positively hostile when, after resting my (admittedly slightly woozy) head on the blonde girl's shoulder, I began reciting little snatches of my most admired love poetry.
The verses, drawn from works such as The Rutting Ferret and The Moist Mitten, would not be regarded as particularly explicit if delivered in the average Dublin drawing room, but in the land that gave us Karol Wojtyla it seems such references still stir atavistic fears.
An hour or so later, as I sat in the Garda station waiting for my partner to come and bail me out, I contemplated the terrible irony of my situation. The American journalist Tom Brokaw coined the phrase "greatest generation" to describe his compatriots who fought in the second World War. They travelled to Europe, died or acquitted themselves bravely, then returned to (my views, not Brokaw's) help construct a quasi-fascist, military-industrial death machine of obscene proportions.
This nation chose not to fight in the Great Patriotic War but, three decades later, some of its citizens did engage in another battle against another monstrous evil. We who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s - singers, journalists, playwrights, actors and poets - finally launched that brave, belated assault on the tyranny of the Catholic Church and its curtain-twitching collaborators.
Who enabled this new, mildly cosmopolitan nation that permits entry to brave Zulus, noble Magyars and poetic Romany folk? Declan Kearney, founder of Derry's Nailbomb Theatre Company. Críostóir MacSpideog, the documentary film-maker, who changed urban minds with his classic Bog Wedding. Spuds McDingle, the Limerick-born rock guitarist who, had he not fallen fatally from a hotel window, would surely have gone on to play with the Rolling Stones. And, yes, one humble, bearded poet with an affection for old whiskey and the smell of wet badgers.
It is, surely, not too outrageous for us to identify ourselves as Ireland's own Greatest Generation. Yet we have no monument. There are no parades given in our honour. The young and rich, anaesthetised by Americana, speed by and pay us little heed.
There was good news about the economy this week. Before long, our ungrateful beneficiaries may be joining us in unhappy poverty.
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Ross O'Carroll-Kelly is resting