Ireland Now

Contents

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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-

Putting this book together has been a pleasure for me. For others, it involved a certain amount of effort—making contacts, reading drafts, opening their lives, and searching their thoughts. Readers will be able to recognize how indebted I am to many of those who appear on these pages. ...

Introduction

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pp. 2-15

A man in bright green warm-ups made his way slowly along the main street of a small town in the west of Ireland. He wore a baseball cap with an Irish saying on the front of it, and he carried a polished blackthorn stick. He paused, then entered a shop that sold souvenirs and gifts. ...

There Is No Map of Ireland

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pp. 16-35

The future caught up with Ireland just as people had become comfortable with the idea that Ireland was one spot—in a world of rapidly collapsing certainties—where things changed slowly. A person could experience time travel, going back across the years simply by crossing the Atlantic Ocean or the Irish Sea. ...

In the Teeth of the Tiger

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pp. 36-63

In the 1990s the U.S. investment firm Morgan Stanley coined the now famous term “Celtic Tiger,” dramatizing a remarkable fact: the expanding Irish economy had been outperforming the rapidly growing Asian Tigers for years. Ireland’s astonishing economic growth has continued through the end of the decade ...

Strangers at Home

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pp. 64-81

In Ireland today, individual biographies intersect with a national history that has taken a sharp turn, as people everywhere in the world grope toward a dimly seen future driven by globalism. People make plans, place bets, engage in acts of faith that somehow, eventually, the future will all make sense, ...

No Traditions Without Change: Listeners Make the Music

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pp. 82-111

There’s nothing better than brown cake with a boiled egg and tea for supper. Boiled eel and potatoes are a sure cure for too much drink the night before. These are things spoken out of the past, from seasoned memory, things that are true for all time. Anyone who would challenge such revelations has not lived long enough to understand ...

Passing on the Farms: From Family to Euro-Business

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pp. 112-161

The business of planting potatoes was a simple matter a century ago on Great Blasket Island or on any small farm in Ireland. When the time came, you did it and hoped for the best, with only survival hanging in the balance. No matter how complicated the story of the present-day Irish, the present has grown out of the soil; ...

Parish Life: The Job of Keeping the Faith in Changing Times

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pp. 162-199

Some time ago I was waiting at a traffic light in a city in the Midwest when a news item on the radio drew my attention. It was an interview with an Irish parish priest who had written a very detailed history on the circumstances leading up to the death of Michael Collins. I was fumbling around looking for something to write down ...

The New Irish

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pp. 200-241

At an Irish National School, Dublin schoolboys were preparing to pray. They were washing their hands, face, and feet, getting ready to face Mecca for one of their five daily prayers. In addition to the National School, in which religious instruction is Islamic rather than Catholic, the Dublin Islamic Center contains a library, ...

Global Ireland and Places Called Home

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pp. 242-274

Ireland’s televised match with Germany was about to get underway early in the 2002 World Cup. Minutes before the game began, the streets of Kilkenny were full of people. It was more or less a normal business day, except for the undercurrent of anticipation that grew stronger as game time approached: ...

Bibliography

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pp. 275-278