Latvia is emerging from the chrysalis of one of its coldest winters on record. The Baltic sea at the popular resort of Jurmala was frozen solid this year, giving the impression, at least, that one could walk all the way to Sweden.
Now, the wonderful art nouveau buildings in Riga's city centre have cast off their dusting of snow and ice and the countryside will soon show itself in full technicolour after months in monochrome.
The Latvian capital, roughly the size of Dublin, is the metropolis of the Baltics with broad avenues converging on a quaint medieval centre. It has seen many of its people emigrate as EU membership has provided a visa-free entry to a Western style of living. Latvia's population is just 2.3 million and perhaps up to 40,000 have come to live and work in Ireland in recent years.
The Irish have been going to Latvia for much longer. In the ante-room to the office of the president in Riga castle, the portraits of two men from the Co Limerick hang on the walls. Both of them ruled the place for the Tsars of Russia.
Peter Lacy was a brilliant soldier who was rewarded for his exploits against the Swedes and Turks with the governorship and the title of count. George Browne, also a soldier, governed the region for 30 years and at 94 was found dead in his office, having written to St Petersburg for the umpteenth time asking to be granted permission to retire.
Both have suffered the strange fate, common to many Irishmen of note, of reincarnation as public houses. At home in Ireland this bizarre metempsychosis has already claimed Daniel O'Connell, Oliver St John Gogarty, Henry Grattan and quite a few others. Lacy has become somewhat posher as De Lacy in downtown Riga, while George Browne has returned to earth as a mahogany-countered bar and restaurant close to the quaint town hall square in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. In Tsarist times Livonia, governed from Riga, included a chunk of southern Estonia.
But it was in Riga and environs that both men spent the last part of their lives. Lacy had played a major role in the city's capture from the Swedes in the early 18th century and Browne, who was related to Lacy by marriage, left an enduring mark on the city's architecture in the form of a Catholic church in a city where the Latvians are Lutheran and the Russians Orthodox.
Russian speakers, even today, are a majority in Riga, though many of them are not ethnic Russians. Some are Ukrainian, others of Belarussian origin, and the city's once thriving Jewish population was Russian-speaking too. Among the latter, Mikhail Eisenstein contributed many of the more remarkable art nouveau buildings while his son, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, became of the the great directors of early cinema. His Battleship Potemkin remains a classic and is available to this day on DVD at most video stores.
Founded by Germans in the 13th century, Riga was occupied by Sweden, Russia and Nazi Germany - and then by the Soviet Union before emerging as capital of independent Latvia for the second time in 1991. In short Riga, like Dublin, was a strange metropolis whose population was long dominated by people from outside. In the latter part of the 19th century Latvians, or Letts as they were then known, made up only a quarter of the city's inhabitants, being greatly outnumbered by Germans and somewhat fewer in number than the Russians.
In 1930, when the Kilkenny-born essayist Hubert Butler visited the city and its seaside suburbs, many of the great mansions at Jurmala were owned by German and Russian noble families. There were Irish and Scottish connections too, with towns on the Baltic coast named by timber merchants as Edinburga and Dubbelin. In Butler's time, when Latvia was enjoying its first period of independence, there was even a Soviet commissar in residence by the strand.
Fifty years later, when Riga strand was visited by my colleague Conor O'Clery, the commissars had become a majority. Today some of the mansions have fallen into the hands of "New Russians", the wealthy class that capitalised on the end of Communist rule in Moscow, mainly through their own links with, and networking within, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There are some large houses where the Latvian flag flies from garden flagpoles, but these are in a small minority.
In Soviet times, after the mass exodus of the German population at Hitler's request, there was an influx of Russians sent there as factory workers on Stalin's orders. They were happy to come to Riga, for the Baltics enjoyed a much higher standard of living than anywhere in Russia, though somewhat lower than that in the West. Nevertheless, the nickname "Soviet West", enjoyed by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had a certain validity.
There is a new Irish community in Riga now, involved in the ubiquitous "Irish" bars and more importantly in banking. Lacy, who fought as a boy soldier at the siege of Limerick, and Browne who left in the Penal Times when Catholics could not hope to gain advancement, are just vague memories, if remembered at all by the young Irish of the town.
The two men were buried in the crypt of the country church founded by the Jesuits close to the Lithuanian border. When I visited the place recently the holy water fonts inside the building were frozen through. A travel documentary, presented by me, on the city and its two distinguished Irishmen is to be shown on RTÉ television later this year. There is a twist at the end that I shall not reveal at this stage.