The pleasures & treasures of Ireland

Al Fresco

The days of Dublin as a provincial backwater, a city that drove the likes of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon to realise their creative genius in Paris and London, are long since gone; this is now the booming cosmopolitan capital of a country so prosperous and polyglot that, according to one conjecture, more Chinese is spoken in its streets than Gaelic.

When Francis Bacon, possibly the greatest Western figurative painter of the late 20th century died in 1992, he had already decided to leave his incredibly messy studio in London "" itself a work of art "" as a living memorial to the city of his birth.

It can now be seen, behind plate glass, in the municipal gallery together with a database of its precise contents.

Ditto the great Anglo-Irish art collector Hugh Lane, who in the end left his treasures of Impressionist and modern art, much to the annoyance of the British and French, to Ireland.

Lane was a nephew of Lady Gregory, collaborator and founder, along with William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge of the famous Abbey Theatre, and that may have been a reason.

But the Irish temperament is wedded to ideas of romance and revolution; it is entirely fitting that its famous sons and daughters should feature so prominently in the Irish renewal.

You walk into smoky Dublin pubs like O'Donoghue's and O'Reillys, and there they all are, in fading black and white snapshots, from Seamus Heaney and Edna O'Brien to Pierce Brosnan, stuck behind the bar.

Satiric, poetic and talkative, the Irish are best encountered in their pubs. It isn't long before someone will pull out a flute or a guitar and it is usually very long before they go home.

"So what did you do last night ?" I asked a friend one morning. "We kept the waiters from a good night's sleep," she replied sadly.

With a population of 3.9 million, say, a quarter of that of Delhi, and an area of 27,000 sq. km, the Republic of Ireland (excluding, of course, the six Protestant-dominated counties of northern Ireland) is now one of the richest places in Europe.

The dark days of the potato famines of the 1840s"" that left one million dead "" and the waves of migration that continued until well into the early 1980s are now lost to the mists of history.

Driving out to the Atlantic coastline through places like Sligo and Galway and Connemara, the lyricism of the countryside goes hand in hand with memories of hardship and suffering.

Not so long ago this was a comparatively undeveloped part of Europe, shadowed by religious orthodoxy and terrorist violence.

But just this year, an Irish friend proudly told me, as we winded our way through sparkling villages, bustling with Thai and tandoori takeaways, and prosperous farms and bungalows smothered in roses, more independent houses were built in Ireland than in all of England, which has 50 times a bigger population. How did the Irish get there that fast ?

One interesting answer is investment in education. Per capita public expenditure in education is among the highest in the Western world, more than 13 per cent as compared to an average of 10 per cent in the European Union and 9 per cent in America.

Ireland has a million students in fulltime education and 65 per cent of students will go on to get a university degree. The emphasis isn't on numbers but on quality.

More and more overseas students come here in search of higher education, in medicine and hotel management, from China, the Middle East and, increasingly, from India.

This has propelled the country as a knowledge-based and technology-driven economy, replacing low-wage industries like textiles with value-added manufacturing services such as infotech. Ireland is now one of the largest software producers in the world.

It has also shown a remarkable resolve in thrashing out the northern Ireland problem since the Good Friday agreement of 1997.

Terrorists are mostly in jail and many former militants absorbed into the political mainstream. Rump insurgents such as Continuity IRA or Real IRA remain underground but terrorist violence has dropped to containable levels.

And another thing: for the first time in 150 years the Irish migration has been reversed. The overseas Irish are coming home to stay.