`The whole country's gone giddy with cash and casual sex," said the girl in the Westport bar, brushing her hand across my chest in a determined bid for a bit of the latter. "I like your jumper. Where did you get it?" From an old one-legged woman on the Aran Islands, I said, with 12 wains and an alcoholic husband to support.
"And you believed her - you tourist, you," she said, slipping her arm around my waist and bumping my friend Seamus out of the picture. "I suppose you've been going round the country breaking the hearts of us innocent, convent-educated Irish girls. You ones from over the water are the worst."
My buttocks clenched. Me English? Me, whose first words were in Irish, who has never knowingly been on the winning side in anything, who spent my teens digging turf, shearing sheep, picking potatoes and protesting against the visits of the Pope and Ronald Reagan. So I was English now was I, and a tourist, too? You used to be able to tell the tourists because they were the only ones in Aran jumpers. Now it's not so easy. The Irish are rich enough now to afford handknits themselves and bold enough to wear them.
I was a tourist in my own land - heck, I even had the sweater - to be charmed, bamboozled and gently fleeced. The changes slowly began to dawn in West Cork. One glorious morning we headed out to Cape Clear, escorted by a couple of dolphins, to the last island in the deep south where Irish is spoken.
On the surface nothing much had changed. But in the cafe by the pier you could get a cappuccino. Kids larked about on the rocks, but the adults in the pubs and the pottery shop were more silent. Their customers, the tourists, were English-speakers and with every transaction they were losing their language. Every word was a little betrayal.
On the way back, as the sun set, the boatman sang Galway Bay. It sounds corny, but a pride at his spontaneity welled up in me, feelings that were later bolstered by several scoops of Murphy's stout, a basket of shrimps and the best salmon sandwich I think I've ever had. Thank you, Sullivan's of Crookhaven.
I got up during the night for a call of nature and heard a corncrake calling out across Roaring Water Bay. You can only take so much metaphysical beauty with a thick head, and by breakfast time we were watching the telly, lulling our stomachs into a false sense of security for the fry to come. But RTE's Bibi Baskin was interviewing Pierce Brosnan about a film called The Nephew, which he had come home to make with his own money. "So Pierce," asks Bibi, "how Irish are you?" Brosnan was stunned. You could see that, beneath the cosmetic personality, under all those layers of plastic and pretence, he was hurt.
Suddenly the Irish have got choosy. The land of the welcomes is even getting panicky about a few refugees. It's amazing how smug a few good years and a couple of billion pounds in European Union grants can make you.
Unfortunately they've got choosy about all the wrong things. The next day, driving down over Macgillycuddy's Reeks, we caught our first sight of the golden McDonald's arches peeping over the latest batch of godawful roadside bungalows. (We can only pray to the gods of the bog to swallow them up as quickly as they did the TB-riddled thatched cottages.)
Killarney long ago lost its soul to tourism. But it still had something. Now they are tearing out its heart to build chain hotels for the coach tours. Our feet didn't touch the ground till we were safely on the ferry crossing the Shannon to Clare.
Music grows like rushes in Clare. At a pub the band played a couple of good local tunes to silence, then one of the band dropped his accordion and picked up a guitar. Flash bulbs popped as he battered poor old Molly Malone to death all over again. We may as well have been in the Dusseldorf branch of Durty Nelly's. Irish music has already survived two of the most insidious forces of the 20th century - imperialism and country and western. I'm not sure about tourism, though.
Next day we headed to Galway to see some friends who work in Research & Development for a couple of American multinationals. Galway once smelt of seaweed and turf fires, now it smells of money. It is the wagging tail of the Celtic Tiger. You could bottle the buzz.
You'd never think they could mess up a place as beautiful as this, but it is amazing what greed, political gombeenism and some speculative builders can do. The funky medieval centre is OK (you won't see those words together often) but the outskirts are now ringed with malls and concrete box, middle-class estates with names like The Pines and Marlborough Downs.
We went for a picnic on a little suburban beach, drank wine and danced about like mad things. The locals stopped just to watch us, thinking we were Germans (the traditional Irish picnic is a packet of crisps in the car with the wipers on, rain or not). As we skimmed stones at dusk, someone stole my wallet from the car. The police had a fair idea who was responsible. There was a traveller camp close by. "They'd steal the eyes out of your head when you weren't looking." And frankly I can't say I blame them.
And two nights later we found ourselves in Rosbeg, looking back inland at the vast, spectacular emptiness of Donegal. Unfortunately, I remember it when it wasn't quite this empty. Donegal is my home and the Tiger and the tourists have passed it by. Even in a year you forget just how beautiful it is.
As dawn broke over the dunes the next morning we stumbled back to the tent. I have vague recollections of spending the previous nine hours in the Dawros Bay House, an old shambling place my father used to take me to as a child, where the legendary Ted Ponsonby played like a man who had sold his soul to the devil for five more fingers.
The afternoon after the night before we drove through the land of my memory - Portnoo, Leitir, Gweebarra Bay, Lough Barra - and back over the mountains towards Glendowan. To me, these are the most heart-breakingly beautiful places on earth, and Seamus was sick in all of them. The sun shone (as it does once or twice a millennium in Donegal) and I don't know if it was the drink, but I started to blub. Seamus even stirred from his stupor and offered to drive.
We stopped at my cousin's farm at the foot of Slieve Snaght, watched over by red deer and falcons. "We'll climb that tomorrow," I said. "Whatever you say, Fiachra," said Seamus, "Just get me to a doctor first."
We bumped over the top of Glenveagh and down towards my family's home-place. I must have been on autopilot when we stopped at the Stone of Loneliness by Lough Gartan. St Columba lay there the night before he went into exile, and emigrants used to do the same to cure their homesickness before they'd take the boat. As for me, I never want to be cured.
That blonde girl in that bar in Westport? Well, she made her excuses when I told her I was sleeping with Seamus... in a tent. I think it was the tent that did it.