The Celtophilia Stock Play

If Celtophilia were a gamble on the stock exchange, I’d be a rich man because I bought Ireland early: pre-Riverdance. I had the first album by The Pogues. I read the poetry: Paul Durcan, Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan. I even honeymooned there, which was not my travel agent’s pick. Ireland was at a depressing nadir in the mid-1980s. Twenty-five percent unemployment. Bright minds fleeing to the U.K. and beyond. A national debt so high the country was nearly bankrupt. Bad honeymoon karma, you might say.

But what a great trip we had in dark, smoky Dublin, where the food was bad and our hotel room was freezing, but where we could also slip into a pub and find musicians playing around a corner table covered in pint glasses. And where I remember watching a group of students idling away a rainy afternoon in Kehoe’s pub, playing some kind of guess-who-I-am game. One guy was holding his breath, cheeks puffed out. I was thinking Brendan Behan, but then he exhaled, red-faced from the effort, and said, “Ah, cripes. I’m an eggplant!”

Nobody paid any attention to us; Dublin just went on being Dublin. Its grooves and idiosyncrasies so entrenched, so unchangeably Irish, that we simply dropped in and were swallowed up. We loved it.

Of course, as you’ve probably heard, the miraculous Celtic Tiger – 10 years of economic growth from 1994 to 2004 – has shifted reality over there. Ireland, Dublin in particular, is now the economic envy of Europe. Lowest unemployment, highest economic growth, tourism and immigration booming. And in Kehoe’s (where I go faithfully every time I visit), people still gather to kibitz and unwind but the tone has changed. This past spring, in front of those familiar taps, sipping stout and reading the real estate listings – €2-million properties in the once sleepy suburb of Howth – I was again conscious of a nearby group: business guys. But this time, they were looking at me.

“Hello?” I said, surprised, at which point the ringleader leaned toward me and, in his Thomas Pink shirt with cufflinks shaped like dice (having himself quite a remarkable resemblance to Brendan Behan), gesturing to my newspaper, said, “You’re from an Irish family, that we can see. So you’re coming back then, are you?”