Celtic tiger an endangered species?

Coming from a country that has grown grown grown since colonization, it is hard to come to terms with one that has done mostly the opposite.

Ireland's population trend since the 1800s has been a ski jump. During the big famine in the 1840s, some two million Irish died or emigrated. And the trend continued, the country losing citizens like lemmings until the sixties, when it flattened and turned. Most of what we value as tourists is a result of that depopulation and stagnation - quaint, old-fashioned villages, unchanged rural landscapes, narrow cobbled roads winding  through a land forgot. More a museum than a modern western country, a product of neglect rather than conservation.

The last twenty years were a different story. A combination of accession to the EU, deregulation, immigration and growth policies saw Ireland trumpeted as the celtic tiger. Investment and economic activity reached fever pitch. There was an anything goes feeling and pretty well anything did. This Ireland had cranes dot the Dublin skyline, big black beemers and audis cruise the motorways and clog the villages and new country estates spring up like mushrooms. Everyone was making money, everyone was happy.

And now, it seems, the party is over. Caught in the global financial crisis, with high, unstable levels of private and public debt, a contracting economy, a credit squeeze and widespread corruption, Ireland is reeling. The national newspapers are dominated by the crisis - corporate closures, job losses, corrupt development deals, public sector debt, EU mandates. The local papers call for buy local campaigns, community solidarity. And the government is framing the biggest reduction in public spending ever, slashing services across health, education and welfare, freezing public sector wages until 2014.

And yet it has a surreal feel to it. Grafton Street in Dublin, a walking street for shopping south of the Liffey, is pumping, shoppers jostling along, bags full (although it did seem quiet in Louis Vuitton). The Irish Times  give equal space to the crisis and Lady Gaga's Dublin gig.

It seems to me the Irish are completely surprised by their own luck - whether it's good or bad. How could this happen, they seem to ask, whatever happens. Perhaps we are captive in some way to our national past, to centuries of invasion, stagnation, oppression. If that's so, the celtic tiger may indeed be an endangered species, a blip on Ireland's more sluggish evolutionary path. Or maybe, the national will is different now and that, together with the cajoling, deep-pocketed big brother, the EU, will see Ireland through. Either way, the long-suffering Irish will be there, blinking, drinking, bemused.





ok sorry, not a tourist blog at all really! here are some photos!