WITH a busy pub a few yards off Grafton Street, Liam Dolan's doing better for himself: than he probably would have ever done in his native Ballinasloe. His place, the Claddagh is easy to find. It beside St Dunstan's Basilica and anyway there are always the painted shamrocks on the pavement outside to help you.
And it is usually packed it's particularly full after the Friday night ceili when the air is thick with calls for the draft Beamish.
And downstairs in Liam's restaurant the Japanese tourists who visit in their droves go mad over the fresh seafood. They come over in their tens of thousands each year to worship at what has become the revered Japanese shrines of Anne of Green Gables among the creeks and sand dunes of the north shore.
Red haired orphan
The loveable, red haired, pig tailed orphan was the heroine of the eponymous novel written here at the beginning of the century by Lucy Maud Montgomery and took Japanese teenagers by storm when it was translated in 1954.
Some indeed, bring their men over and hundreds get married each year according to the rites of the reformed church. A local pastor, a prosperous gentleman performs the ceremonies at the pretty wooden house amid the hills and the sand dunes at the seaside hamlet of French River, where Maud herself married her fiance, a Presbyterian minister.
Spud Isle, aka Prince Edward Island, is the smallest province of Canada. In the 18th century when it was a British colony, the first governor, a Donegal man called Walter Patterson, wanted it renamed New Ireland. The Whitehall said that name was taken but did he fancy New Guernsey or New Anglesey instead?
He did not and it was eventually decided to humour the royal family by calling the place after the king's son and the capital, Charlottetown, after the queen. PEI, as the place is universally known, is Canada's smallest but most thickly populated province, whose red soil, produces the finest potatoes.
It is a tiny place of 160,000 people, 280km from end to end and you can drive from Waterford in the West through Kinkora and Dromore to Belfast in the south east before breakfast. (On the way you'll pass through a place called O'Leary where the natives speak French.)
Prosperous Irish
Now the local Irish are starting to advertise their new found confidence and prosperity. The University of PEI in Charlottetown has been persuaded to buy one of those expensive facsimiles of the Book of Kells for its library and George O'Connor and his friends in the Benevolent Irish Society (BIS) are planning a monument by the waterfront to the Irish immigrants.
Thousands, many from north Co Monaghan, arrived here well before the Famine. On one day alone, it is said, two boats docked and 850 tired souls tumbled out on to the quay, stepping into a new life in what was then one of Britain's North American colonies. (During the Famine only one big vessel put into Charlottetown most of the coffin ships went on to bigger places.)
For many there was not much of a change. PEI was as much in the hands of absentee landlords as anywhere in Ireland and the landscape was and remains one of gentle meadows set beside quiet water courses.
"Sometimes when I wake up I think I'm back somewhere in the midlands," says Liam.
The BIS, which helped arrange a memorable visit of Monaghan County Council members last year, has plans for a spectacular Celtic cross surrounded by a stone from each of the 32 counties and the money to fund the project is slowly coming in.
Religious tensions
A century ago there were religious tensions between the Protestant, mainly Scots, majority and the slightly smaller Catholic, mainly Irish, community. In the village of Belfast blood was spilled and a life taken. And a state of undeclared war persisted until recently.
At his gas station near Wellington, Ed McNeill (71), a Catholic, recalls that even in his childhood the two communities kept apart under the influence of ministers of all religious persuasions. "If you married a Protestant girl, you might as well have gone back across the Atlantic. And no Protestants lived where we lived in Richmond."
Today there are as many Protestants as Catholics in Richmond. Ed puts the better relations down to a weakening of the power of the clergy. "We started inviting each other into our churches and things began getting a lot better."
Prof Brendan O'Grady, a scholar at the University of PEI, puts the relaxation of relations' down to the reforms after the Second Vatican Council.
Is there a lesson in civics here on Spud Isle for those Irish Catholics who want to put the clock back to before Vatican II?