In Europe

it. Declan works for a contractor. ‘Everything is expensive, and you don't earn much around here,’ he says. ‘But you can always go hunting, and the river is full of trout. And now it's time to dig peat and bring it in, we all have our own little section of peat bog, it's been in the family for centuries.’
    They take me along to the pub. Jackie goes into one of the side rooms for her weekly folk-dance lesson: step up, step back, turn, and turn. Meanwhile I sit by the fire and hear the local gossip: about Crazy Mary who sells lottery tickets and always lets her family win; about the local judge who drives all the single ladies mad; about the Dutchman, Willem, who never stops building and whose head, if you sawed it open, would reveal one huge do-it-yourself catalogue with all the Dutch and Irish prices listed side by side, down to the final decimal point. A song is sung, then another, outside the rain rattles, the judge tosses another chunk of turf on the fire.
    Dublin is the capital of all these soggy heaths. Keeping up appearances is a concept completely foreign to Dubliners. They gave up the fight long ago, everyone trundles down the street here in equal disarray. According to Brussels’ statistics, Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union, but I do not notice a bit of it. Quilted vests are the pinnacle of fashion here, the women push rusty prams. Even in the Czech Republic, the roads and houses look better cared for than they do here.
    Concentrations of wealth do exist, of course, and they are doubtlessly on the increase. Successive Irish governments have made massive investments in education and training, a third of all Europe's computers are built in Ireland, and for the first time in modern memory there are Irish emigrants coming home in huge numbers. A sheen of luxury has settled over Dublin's shabby city centre, ‘simple’ restaurants charging ridiculous prices are popping up all over, and so a new product is gradually being created: a nostalgic, dirty, drunken and poetic Dublin for the new rich and the weekend tourist. But is this really Dublin? The television shows reports of a fire in a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of town, a complete shambles, two children killed. The camera zooms in on aburned roof, a few cheap pieces of furniture and curtains, toys, a wet street, skinny ladies. No matter what the statistics and the folders say, my eyes see a nation of farmers still marked by the poverty of generations.
    Life here has always required poetic, dreamy, romantic and nostalgic spectacles, in order to put up with this life and give it meaning. Without such spectacles Dublin is little more than a great nineteenth-century working neighbourhood, a sea of squat brick blocks of flats with here and there the grey columns of a large historical building. At almost all these buildings, a hero once died.
    Listen to the Irish Proclamation of the Republic, read aloud by poet Patrick Pearse outside the General Post Office on Easter Monday, 1916: ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen: in the name of God and of the dead generations …’ The wings of the angels in the statuary along the street are still riddled with bullet holes, but that particular revolution did not succeed. Pearse and fifteen others died in front of British firing squads. The popular fury this provoked resulted at last in modern-day Ireland.
    The Troubles, as the British call any problem in Ireland, are the aftermath of a centuries-old colonial conflict that is not yet over. From the sixteenth century, Protestant England was lord and master over poor, Catholic Ireland, and in 1800, after the ratification of the Act of Union, the country was even formally annexed by the United Kingdom. Ireland itself was sorely neglected. Only the north of the country kept up with the times. Protestant colonists from Scotland built estates – where the native Irish worked in virtual serfdom – and heavy industry grew rapidly. By 1900, Belfast resembled a second Manchester.
    After the 1916 Easter Uprising, a bloody war broke out between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Army, and a compromise was reached only in 1921: the largely Catholic south was to become independent, while little Northern Ireland would remain a part of Great Britain. In the north, the Protestants were in complete control.
    ‘The dead generations …’ I take a tour of 200-year-old Kilmainham Prison, the Bastille of Ireland and now a favourite