The German ambassador, under fire for his remarks about the Irish, has a point, writes Hugo Hamilton, who has a foot in both camps.
I can remember my German mother once trying to make a point to the Irish people about litter. Outside a sweetshop in Glasthule, she could no longer bear to watch an entire family throwing their ice-pop wrappers on to the street in front of her.
Without a word, she politely decided to pick up after them and put their litter into the nearby bin.
I wanted to disappear into the bin myself at that moment. Even as a child, I must have known that her post-war German attitude of pulling together was lost on the Irish. The people here were not ready for a message about bad attitudes towards public space and they responded with a mixture of hostility and derision to criticism from outside.
Fifty years later, the litter in Dublin has not improved, the Irish people are no better at accepting criticism, and the German ambassador, Christian Pauls, seems to have fallen into the same trap as my mother with his blunt remarks on this country. The Irish people still feel they should be unconditionally loved, particularly by German investors.
The German writer, Heinrich Böll, came to Ireland at the height of the German economic miracle 50 years ago and found a people untouched by consumerism. His small travel book, Irisches Tagebuch(Irish Journal), described a nation of tea-drinkers and whiskey-drinkers and priests with safety pins, a place that boasted a low suicide rate, a people who were "happier than they knew it themselves". The book drew thousands of Germans to Ireland, searching for things that were destroyed by the Nazi catastrophe and also by the new German consumer culture.
It was Böll's songline for the German people, leading them to a sanctuary where they could reconnect with the landscape, to a people who felt that "when God made time, he made plenty of it". When the book was published in English, it was seen here as offensive. One reviewer demanded an apology from the German ambassador and Conor Cruise O'Brien called it a "ghastly little book" because it appeared to romanticise peasant culture.
The irony now is that the encoded warnings about material values contained in that book seem to have come full circle. The Irish have stepped into the shoes of the Germans. They talk money, they have become punctual, and the songs and stories we used to make up for ourselves are now being replaced by the imagination of Gucci and Debenhams. As sociologist Tom Inglis has been saying, we have gone from a culture of "self-denial to one of self-indulgence". For the fiftieth anniversary of Böll's small, iconic travel book, my German publisher asked me to retrace his journey, to see what was left of this country. The title of my book, Die Redselige Insel(The Island of Talking) refers to the Irish people's tradition of inventing themselves in the art of talking. It was also a country of talking about nothing, the country of talking up a great silence about its own problems.
In the book, I observe how Ireland has changed, how the priests have been replaced by bouncers in black suits outside nightclubs, how the confessional has been replaced by Liveline. How it took less than half a century for a simple Achill fisherman to become the owner of the biggest fishing vessel in the world, raking up everything edible on the coast of Africa. And also, about the inventive way in which the Irish have dealt with the smoking ban, how the smoker now seizes the opportunity to leave behind a great philosophical exit line before making his way outside for a smoke.
MANY GERMANS WOULDstill like to believe the cliches about Ireland as place full of contradictions, where the speed limit on the road to the Glasnevin cemetery differs from the speed limit coming back. One of the biggest bestsellers in Germany recently was a novel about a flock of Irish sheep investigating the murder of their shepherd. The Germans still admire our skilful ways of getting around reality and say it's painless doing business with the Irish because we make paying out money feel like fun.
But there is also a creeping realisation in Germany that the Irish are not doing themselves any favours. Not only has Ireland become too expensive, we seem to be throwing away the very things that make us attractive. Just as the Germans have lived with the cult of the perpetrator, the Irish have cultivated the myth of a people who had things done to them, by foreign rule, by the weather, by waves of emigration. Now it seems we have begun doing some unforgivable things to ourselves.
We are not only the great optimists of Europe, spending to make up for centuries of poverty, but we have also become the great opportunists. We cannot be expected to remain poor, to live in damp cottages with purple nylon sheets for aesthetic reasons. We cannot be expected to preserve the fields of Athenry, free from one-off mansions with lit-up driveways.
While we have been exporting the Irish pub to every corner of Germany, the German tourist arriving in Galway finds it bizarre, perhaps even disloyal, that the finest Irish pub, Taylor's Bar, has been turned into a lap-dancing club. The Irish planning laws are like a trip to the underworld. A German architect restoring derelict cottages in Achill had to fight the Co Mayo planning authorities to be allowed to retain some ancient stone ruins on the land.
Heinrich Böll wrote that the road in the 1950s belonged to the cow, but Ireland has become one of the most car-dependent countries in the world, with little respect for continuity or heritage. In the debate over the Hill of Tara, a local councillor recently argued that the absence of the new road was breaking up families.
Above all, the German part of me finds that the Irish part of me still has a bad attitude towards public space. In a time of prosperity, it's every man for himself in a high culture of private ownership. The public baths in Dún Laoghaire, where I grew up, have been closed for 25 years. Perhaps it is the Polish mothers and the Chinese mothers now living here who will eventually restore our attitudes towards civic amenities.
It seems ungrateful to badmouth a country that has had a rough time in the past. I'm not saying that the Irish have lost everything: there are still great singers, we have a great trademark culture of our own, we have Croke Park and the hurling final every September, and we have a unique way of creating a feeling of home, something the Germans have always found magical here.
But we have also taken on some of the empty features of the modern world. The retired Achill schoolteacher, Tommy Johnson, spoke to me about the Irish word "comhar", referring to a custom of helping poor neighbours which is no longer in existence. There are more homeless people in Ireland now than ever before.
The larger point which the German ambassador tried to make is that each European country seems to be repeating many of the same mistakes, without learning from each other. As Sean O'Huiginn, the former Irish ambassador to Germany, put it at a recent conference in Limerick University, we are now in danger of taking on the same "hollow heart of consumerism" that Heinrich Böll warned the German people about 50 years ago.