FINDING A beer or a nightclub to drink it in will not be a problem for Irish football fans in the Estonian capital of Tallinn over the next few days but finding Sunday Mass might be.
While Christianity is the biggest religion in Estonia, just 16 per cent of the population of 1.3 million believe in any class of a god and it has more atheists than anywhere outside of China, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll.
Religion may not be held in high regard by many Estonians, but parenthood certainly seems to be and the country is one of the best places in the world to have a baby because one parent of a new-born (the parents get to choose which) is entitled to 100 per cent of their salary for 18 months after a child is born.
The most northerly of the three former Soviet Baltic republics, Estonia has been a member of the EU for just over seven years and has the highest GDP of any of the former Soviet republics.
It declared its independence from the USSR in 1991, although that was not the first time it had broken from its giant neighbour to the east. The heavily forested country was part of the Russian empire for centuries before it broke free in 1918. First time out, independence did not last long.
Sandwiched between Hitler’s Germany and Stalinist Russia, the country had little chance to assert itself. Soviet troops invaded in 1940 but the occupation did not last long and they were pushed out by the Nazis a year later. Three years on and the Red Army was back, and this time it stayed for 50 years.
While the Estonians are a Finnic people, and the official language, Estonian, is closely related to Finnish, the Russian influence is hard to avoid and ethnic Russians account for up to a third of the population.
Its head of state is president Toomas Hendrik Ilves who plays a mainly ceremonial role. The levers of power are controlled by a centre-right coalition led by prime minister Andrus Ansip, who won a majority in elections last March after first becoming prime minister in April 2005.
While over 1,000 Estonians are set to come to the second leg of the play-off in Dublin on Tuesday, including at least three senior government officials, football is not the most popular sport in the country – that position is held by basketball.
The country is also pretty good at wife-carrying and the Estonian method is widely considered to be the most efficient method of carrying a wife competitively. All winners at what is one of the oddest international competitions in recent years have used it.
In case you’re interested, the method sees a “wife” hang upside-down with her legs around the “husband’s” shoulders, holding onto his waist as he races around a course.
While they are looking for a church the devout will need to wrap up, as the average temperature in November is just 2 degrees, although last night it was zero.
