A short time back, I was granted my first Irish passport. This came about because the often-mythical granny from Cork - sure, don't all Irish-Americans have at least one in their closet? - was in my case a flesh-and-blood reality, writes Steve Coronella
Back in 1992, thanks mainly to the efforts of my wife, Madge Reardon's birth and marriage certificates were traced back to a small parish church in Minane Bridge, 15 miles south of Cork city. My grandmother left for Boston soon after her wedding day and the church had suffered a major fire since then, so finding these crucial documents was no sure thing. In the end, we had to settle for facsimiles authorised by the local priest, and those papers formed the bureaucratic underpinning of my successful application for an Irish passport in 2004.
As a result, I am now, by extension, a naturalised citizen of Europe and I can travel with ease through the 25 countries of the European Union.
So how does it feel to be coming home, as it were, to the lands of my forebears (Ireland and Sicily, to be specific)? And, perhaps more to the point, is there a tug in my soul between my native country and my adopted home?
First of all, I should say that my voluntary decision to up sticks for Ireland - which is, after all, an English-speaking country (of sorts) with strong historical links to Boston - doesn't rank with the life-wrenching choices which other immigrants have had to make over the years to escape either poverty or persecution. And to further soften any sense of culture shock I might feel, air travel from Ireland to the US is now frequent and affordable, telephoning has become much cheaper, and US imports - from TV shows to books to sporting influences - are thick on the ground here. (In comparison, I have a good friend who left Boston for Texas 15 years ago and he still hasn't recovered from the shock.) But this European dimension to my new identity has set me thinking in a different direction altogether.
For starters, it just ain't hip to be a Euro-weenie these days. Effete, government-dependent blowhards incapable of making a collective decision to save their lives - that's us (sorry, them). Forget the preceding centuries of exemplary civilisation; when it comes to Europe these days (old Europe, anyway), you're talking nothing but a bunch of opportunistic moaners and malcontents. And those are some of the countries the US is still friendly with.
Getting away from any ideological antagonisms between Uncle Sam and his Old World counterparts, it's clear that Europe is going to need me - and countless other new recruits - in the coming years. Young, free-thinking native Europeans are so busy re-positioning themselves at the centre of the universe that they're forgetting to, well, re-produce themselves.
Birth rates in Germany, France, and Italy have fallen below self-sustaining levels. If a steady flow of immigrants doesn't pour in (and soon), these societies will find themselves in an unsupportable position: too few workers trying to fund too many pensioners.
In the US, it is often said that our grandkids will end up paying for any fiscal imprudence we care to indulge in today. In Europe, there won't be any grandkids to carry the can.
But such elementary assessments aren't very fashionable here. It's the big ideas that count, and the biggest of them all at the moment is that the US (or more precisely, Bush's America) is bad news for Europe and the world at large.
For instance, a recent Transatlantic Trends survey, conducted in nine EU countries, showed that 72 per cent of Europeans disapprove of President Bush's handling of international affairs, and 59 per cent think US leadership is undesirable. (This news item appeared recently in this paper under the headline "Europeans unmoved by Bush charm drive", which reveals an interesting bias in itself.)
So what's a boy with a foot on either side of the pond supposed to do? I'm a simpering weenie if I see sense in the government models at work in France, Germany and Scandinavia. Yet if I defend the US against long-distance clichéd criticism - as I have done by dashing off an occasional letter to these pages - I run the risk of portraying myself as a capitalist stooge warmonger.
For the moment, anyway, I'll blame my grandparents for my identity crisis. If only they'd stayed put, in Cork and Sicily, life would be a lot simpler.