OPINION:The "New York Times" has revived a portrait of Ireland of old: beautiful, tragic, feckless and not able to look after itself, writes ORNA MULCAHY
OH HECK, first the Sunday Timesdumping on the Irish with its magazine cover story of the bedraggled Celtic kitten and now the New York Timeshighlighting the miseries of the Emerald Isle. It spoiled my morning coffee yesterday to read Timothy Egan's view of Dingle, prominently displayed under the heading "The Orphans of Ireland". He describes the town, and by extension all Ireland, as a place bereft, with empty houses and crushed hopes, making throwaway references to saints and scholars, pints of Guinness and Boston being the next parish. The next Famine, readers might think, is just around the corner.
Egan, who won a National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl in 1930s America, reckons he knows a case of misery when he sees it, and he has a lovely turn of phrase describing the results of Dingle's property splurge: "just outside the wonderful brooding town where David Lean filmed Ryan's Daughter, the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of southern California development".
Give us a break here. Ryan's Daughterwas nearly 40 years ago; if you will go to a seaside resort out of season, it's likely to be grim. I can't imagine that Hyannis Port is any great shakes in March. In fact a colleague who just returned from there said it was dismal, and christened it Cape Empty.
Back to Dingle and Ireland. Egan refers to Ernest Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt (“First gradually, then suddenly”, which Egan paraphrases as “slowly, then all at once”) as he takes a hop and a skip through the cities where “idle cranes tower over roofless apartment buildings”. Though his snapshot is sensational, it has nuggets of truth and the truth hurts. In focusing on one area of the economy that the Government got so spectacularly wrong, he revives a portrait of Ireland of old: beautiful, tragic, feckless and not able to look after itself.
Nothing new there. The international media always had Ireland pegged as a charming, eccentric place. Throughout the 1980s, as an emigrant in London, I fumed at the depiction of Ireland in the British papers. We were either savage terrorists or drunken slobs, feckless cute hoor politicians or hard-up west Brits with bad teeth living in crumbling old houses, Molly Keane-style. Alternatively, we were down and out in Kilburn, emigrating in droves to Australia, or riding through the streets of Dublin bareback on piebald ponies.
The Daily Telegraphwas particularly harsh. It once used a large photograph of women picking over a mound of rubbish in Dublin's Summerhill with the caption "market shopping in Dublin" or some such nonsense. The journalist in that case was Irish, the story was more of the same: hard times in the city of Joyce and Synge. Articles in the Economistmagazine in those years were invariably accompanied by Victorian cartoons from Punch showing the incorrigible Oirish as big fat Neanderthals. There was justification for some of this. Ireland was a basket case in the 1980s, though change was coming.
Returning to Dublin in 1989, I offered the Observernewspaper back in London a story about emigrants coming home to a country with prospects. The features editor said she liked the story but it was too upbeat. It wouldn't go down well with readers in Northern Ireland, she said. Freelancing briefly for American publications, I often suggested stories about new people and new trends but what they really wanted was stuff about the Ireland of old: thatched cottages, people with red hair and freckles, and penniless peers with priceless portraits. That sort of thing. The burgeoning economy did not interest them.
Fast forward a decade and the phones were hopping. Journalists from the UK, America and beyond looked for soundbites about the economic miracle and in particular the property market. One French TV team found it utterly baffling that their own embassy sat in splendour amidst far lesser houses that changed hands for €12 million. Journalists flew in from all over the world to contemplate the miraculous changes sweeping the old sod. Briefly, Ireland's star shone, even if the New York Timessuggested some years back that the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin was the new Wild West.
We can expect a lot more of the same, going forward, as the politicians say, but let's just shrug and get on with it. Making mistakes is not a permanent position. Misery is not the permanent condition of the Irish. Just because property has knocked us backwards it doesn't mean that we have to stay there. Looked at another way, Egan's article is reassuring. Our country is much loved by Americans, as it is by the Germans and the English. Let them think of us still as lovable rogues, so long as they come to admire our outstandingly beautiful island. My very first thought on seeing the New York Timesstory online was how lovely Dingle looked. The paper's website gets tens of millions of hits a day. Let's hope that some of those visitors book their holiday here today.