Bars and stripes

It was some week. The sight of Gerry Adams and David Ervine joining in a Mexican wave at a Clinton event in the North was one indication of the speed of change in Ireland these days; but the fact they were doing it in an ice hockey stadium in Belfast was enough to make you fasten your seat-belt.

Ice hockey is a risky choice for the latest symbol of the peace process. There are some obvious skating parallels, sure, but the sport is also famous for episodes in which the competitors beat the hell out of each other with sticks. Still, I wouldn't wish to stand in the way of progress, especially if it's on skates.

Down here, it was a no less tumultuous week. It began with the Irish delegation returning from the Nice summit and claiming victory in the negotiations for the new expanded EU; and yet by Tuesday afternoon, one had to wonder which union of states we belonged to. Listening to Bertie Ahern remind Bill Clinton about the extent of US investment here, you felt like wrapping the stars and stripes around you and singing God Save America.

That event in Guinness's brewery was strange too, coming as it did five weeks after the US presidential elections, still then without a result. Some of the journalists at Tuesday's event hadn't seen each other since the US embassy's election night party, when we (in the sense of "everybody except me") drank free beer and watched the cliffhanger unfold on the giant screens.

Yet there we were five weeks on and, incredibly, there was more free beer! "When will this nightmare end?" we were asking. We were also remarking how odd it was that there was still no president-elect. It had been fun for a while but there was a need now for closure, we all agreed, and not just of the free bar. By Wednesday, happily, normality had finally been restored on both fronts.

Of course the week also marked the closure, for Ireland anyway, of "the Clinton years". It's unbelievable, but I've checked, and there really were eight of these years - I began working in this newspaper in the first of them. I just don't know where they've gone now.

Chelsea Clinton must wonder too. She was 12 when it all started, and where most teenagers have to worry mainly about acne, she spent her entire adolescence as the daughter of the most controversial parents in White House history. Yet there she was in Guinness's on Tuesday, a glamorous young woman (who, when she smiles, has more teeth than the Treaty of Nice), confident and poised. They could both have turned out so badly, but she and Ireland appear to be the two outstanding successes of the Clinton administration.

There were reminders during the week's events of how far Ireland has come, particularly in the presidential visit to Dundalk. I know Dundalk personally. I spent a year at college there way back in 1979/80. Dundalk was a depressed place then. There was little US investment, and no Corr sisters anywhere, as far as I could see.

It was a wet but happy place on Tuesday night, however; when according to the reports, the stars and stripes hung from every shop window and people in fancy dress included "a drenched Uncle Sam and a damp-looking cowboy". Residents saw the visit as a formal end to the bad old days during which, as a local person reminded our reporter, the town was known as "El Paso", especially in the North.

There was a geographical contradiction in this because the Republic as a whole used to be referred to in the North as "Mexico", partly on account of it being south of the border, and partly because of its poverty in the eyes of the gringos who lived north of the Forkhill customs post.

El Paso, as everybody knows, is in Texas. There was no Rio Grande that desperate migrants crossed in a tyre; but there were people seeking economic opportunity on the other side. It was found there in the form of beer or diesel, or sometimes pigs, and brought back in the dead of night, often by damp-looking cowboys.

That was then, but these days the smuggling trade is the only really depressed part of the Border economy. Apart from the rain, the sole disappointment in Dundalk on Tuesday was that the Corrs weren't around for Clinton either. Referring to the saxophone-playing president, a member of the crowd said: "It would have been fun watching him jam with Andrea." Fun is hardly the word for it.

But Dundalk is clearly doing well for itself. With the strength of sterling and the weakness of the Euro, the flow of cross-border shopping traffic has been reversed with a vengeance. Northern bargain hunters come south to El Paso in droves. They drive home with full tanks of petrol and car-boots full of bargains, and a grateful Dundalk sends them on their way with a Mexican wave.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie