Monaco Letter Hugh O'ShaughnessyThings are looking up in Monaco. His Most Serene Highness Albert II took the place of his equally serene 81-year-old father Rainier III as sovereign prince of this tiny territory on the latter's death on April 6th.
His 6,000 Monegasque subjects, not to mention the 24,000 foreigners who live here and the 10,000 foreigners who come in from France and Italy to work here every day, are looking forward to his solemn installation on November 19th.
Spirits are rising in this sliver of land on France's Côte d'Azur near the border with Italy - at less than two square kilometres a lot smaller than the Phoenix Park.
The new sovereign prince, still a bachelor at 47, no longer has the stammer he once had when talking French and no longer feels obliged not to be seen wearing spectacles in public. He has spoken out frankly about the son he had out of wedlock with an Air France stewardess from west Africa and has raised the expectation that there might be other similar progeny.
He has told the Monegasques how lucky they are and how they must show themselves worthy of the privileges they enjoy in one of Europe's smallest statelets which sprang to world attention when his father married the Irish-American Hollywood star Grace Kelly in 1956.
The place is bursting with prosperity. Enormous blocks of flats are rising so rapidly on the site of earlier, humbler buildings that before long there will surely be standing room only in the principality.
The days in the early 19th century when Monaco was an unimportant backwater whose people earned a precarious living from selling olives and which was briefly occupied by Britain are over. Immense glittering yachts are tied up in the harbour and the casino, first opened in 1857, sparkles in the summer sun.
Every scrap of land is priceless, demand for it fed by those who want for themselves and their businesses the tax-free status that Monaco offers.
Rainier did his best to ensure that those who - after much investigation by French and Monegasque police - were granted permission to reside here did so for at least six months of the year and did not use Monaco as a mere fiscal convenience.
It is said that some residents leave their lights on the whole year round so as to obtain an electricity bill that would attest to permanent presence in the principality.
Monaco and France live hugger-mugger with each other: some residents with a small property in the principality live across the frontier in a bigger house in France, keeping their telephone lines between their two properties connected through a party wall.
Decades ago new acreage was claimed from the Mediterranean on which a sports stadium and apartments have been built. Since then the railway line has been pushed underground into a handsome new station. This spills over into French territory, but the change has meant that a few precious hectares have been freed on ground level for the insatiable builders.
Car ownership is difficult and garages are sold for premium prices, so there are half a dozen bus lines, and a system of public lifts and underground walkways enables pedestrians who know where to find them to climb up the steep slope on which Monaco is built without too much loss of breath. "Some cities rely on underground railways. We've got the lifts," one resident remarked.
Only on the Rock, the old town of Monaco, does some sense of history reassert itself from under the glitz. It accommodates the princely palace, a small park, government offices and a late 19th-century cathedral which contains the bones of many of the Grimaldi dynasty.
The family traces its origin to 1297 when François la Malizia - Francis the Bloody-Minded - captured this place from the Genoese. Prince Rainier lies there beside his wife.
A stone's throw from the palace is the rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine where the Princess Grace Irish Library, one of the best treasuries of Irish culture outside Ireland and Britain, is housed. The late princess never forgot her family's roots in Co Mayo, and her own collection of books on Irish subjects was augmented after her death by the Princess Grace Foundation, watched over by the late prince.
Important Irish cultural figures from Prof Roy Foster from Oxford to Dr Bruce Stewart from Coleraine help to administer a varied programme which goes from formal lectures from scholars to events for Monegasque children.
Judith Gantley, the administrator, welcomed this reporter and offered him tea even though he arrived on the stroke of closing time.
The PGIL has also received support from Michael Smurfit, the industrialist and Irish honorary consul who lives and controls companies registered here, as has the second Irish cultural centre, the Monaco Ireland Arts Society, which exists to promote Irish theatre, music and poetry in Monaco.
The library has an enterprising publication programme. In 1992 when Dr George Sandulescu was its director, for instance, it republished Vertue Rewarded, or the Irish Princess, which is considered to be the first Irish novel.
Appearing in 1693 and set in Clonmel, it tells the story of a foreign prince who pursued the beautiful and chaste Marinda till he won her and "raised her Quality as high (in comparison of what she was before) as a Woman's Ambition could desire". Some saw Grace as a 20th-century Marinda. Others see Albert II in need of finding his own 21st-century Marinda.