OPINION:Ah, come on, Brendan Landers, Ireland's not that bad (and I'm from Canada . . . ), writes FRANCES O'ROURKE
MY FIRST months as a Canadian immigrant to Ireland were hard. Huddled in a Rathgar bedsit, bathing in a plastic tub in front of a two-bar electric fire – the shared third-floor bathroom was too grotty, too cold – it was the coldest, dampest winter a teenager reared in centrally-heated comfort in Canada could remember.
The year was 1968, and I was off to see the world. The plan had been to head for then swinging London, but I was sidetracked to Dublin. Just six months, my friend – she’d studied Seán O’Casey – said. She left, I stayed, married, had three daughters and am still enjoying a career in journalism.
I’m happy here. I liked Ireland then – the friendliness, the wit, the craic, the pubs, the folk groups in their Aran ganseys, the landscape – and I like it now.
I was lucky, it’s true, to have found a good job in journalism at a time when so many Irish people had to emigrate. Lucky to have found another job when the newspaper group I’d worked for for 22 years collapsed. Lucky to have seen the Ireland of 1968 so transformed that when I tell my daughters about it, it’s like describing another country. (Downtrodden women, Wimpy bars, Irel coffee, queues outside the Savoy for German school sex education film Helga.) Lucky to have seen the Troubles that kicked off four days after I arrived end, finally, in peace.
Lucky to see a country where an immigrant like myself was a curiosity adjust with some difficulty to the novelty of mass immigration because of its prosperity. Many immigrants who, like myself, don’t want to, hope never to, leave.
About the only thing that hasn’t changed in those 40 years is Irish people’s collective desire to maximise their misery.
Prosperity didn’t dent it: we had more money but apparently the worst health service in the western world, the highest prices, the worst traffic jams, the most overcrowded schools and, of course, the most corrupt politicians, businessmen etc, etc.
We’d become selfish, materialistic, lost our values, lost our souls, traded them in for well-heated homes, foreign holidays and properties, for a bit of bling.
Canada is a great country, it’s true, but not perfect, as Brendan Landers must know. It certainly has had its share of political scandals in the past few years (just before Christmas, its leader prorogued parliament because several opposition parties had the temerity to get together to try to vote it out of office).
There’s a shocking number of homeless on the streets of Toronto and Montreal, even in -30 degree weather, who weren’t there in the 1960s. (Partly a legacy of that 1960s policy of closing down mental hospitals, I’m told). It’s got a wonderful free health service, but you won’t be able to find a GP to register with if you’re new to the nation’s capital Ottawa, and yes, you’ll likely wait over a year for a hip replacement. Not to mention weird, barely-reported-abroad murders (a lad beheaded as he travelled on a bus last summer).
Ireland is far from perfect too, but it’s not the Ireland of 1968: no one was lying when they told the diaspora that this was a better (thanks to Europe), more open society with, up to last year, more opportunities.
The credit crunch is global. What is happening is terrifying – everywhere, not just here – and yes, we need better and more honest leadership all around. We also need to hold our nerve, to do what we can to stop the drama turning into a terminal crisis.
And cheer up – we now have a chance to rediscover our Celtic spirituality. And to indulge our taste for misery to the max.
Frances O’Rourke is deputy property editor of
The Irish Times