Country Article / Postcards

Growing Pains

Date: 03/06/2004

James Joyce once said that Dublin could be rebuilt, if ever need be, from descriptions in his "Ulysses." That was in 1922. Today, Joyce might not recognize parts of his city most often in the news these days for scandals related to its lap-dancing and strip clubs, which are continually harassed for illegally employing non-nationals. The clubs themselves are no longer scandalous...only their hiring habits.

Dublin is still charmingly gray and grimy...but less dilapidated and less quirky. The last undeveloped stretch along its Liffey is being built into a shopping mall to open next fall.

Dublin is also less Irish than ever in its history. For generations, the Irish fled their homeland in search of work and opportunity. Today, Ireland is a preferred destination among émigrés from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Our immigration officer, like every other such civil servant in this country, is so over-loaded we can't get an appointment with him to renew our residency cards.

This burst of immigration, thousands a month, is changing the face of Dublin. In the city's pubs today you're more likely to be served a pint by someone with a Hungarian or Vietnamese accent than an Irish brogue.

This Ireland--Dublin, with its traffic jams and taxi strikes...its $25 cheeseburgers (no kidding...I saw one on a menu on our last visit) and $600,000 starter homes...its unforgivably unchecked housing construction and development sprawl--is as far from us as is Los Angeles from Charlottesville, Virginia. We read about it in the papers...visit maybe once a year to see for ourselves...but otherwise hide out in the Ireland of old, in a drafty stone house built more than two centuries ago down a lane you'd have little reason to travel if you didn't live there, too.

Living and working in this country day after day (for more than five years), I sometimes forget its charms. Then, on a morning like this morning, I'm reminded.

This year, early spring in Ireland is unusually cold and even more uncommonly sunny. Early mornings this week, the fields and mountainsides outside our windows have been covered with white frost glinting in the bright sun. Look at the right moment, and you could mistake the view for an old snapshot--white cows and sheep unmoving in the cold fields, huddled alongside the low stone walls for protection against the wind. Not a car, not another house in sight. The same view, I imagine, the family who built the house 200 years ago enjoyed.

Kathleen Peddicord

Publisher, International Living

P.S. On a less sentimental note: I attended a house auction in Waterford last week. A 200-year-old five-bedroom house just outside town sold for 1.2 million euro ($1.5 million). These old Georgian structures are not only charming...they're also worth a pretty pence these days.