Am here for a couple of weeks, and it’s fascinating/terrifying/challenging/exciting to consider the prospect of moving back, after my time in Italy is up. Thirteen years away from your home town is a long, long time. I have, of course, been aware of the changes in the city, through my visits to the folks and the handful of close friends I always see when I’m here. But when I allow myself to see the city as a potential home, it becomes as alien to me as Warsaw or Montreal. The economic infrastructure, the mechanics of living, have changed so much that I have to start from scratch. I heard that there’s a government pamphlet for people like me. It’s odd that I might actually read it.
It doesn’t feel like coming back, the old myths don’t seem to be tugging obviously at my psyche. I don’t have a whiff of nostalgia or sentimentality about the place. After all, it is the city where I was beaten up by a gang a couple of years ago, on leaving the George (and not for the first time). London has not been so unhospitable, in 12 years living right in its centre. I have no illusions: Dublin is a savage, unsafe place.
But it’s a fascinating time to be here, and decisions are being made about the future direction of this mushrooming society that are enormously important, and I want to be around and put in my tuppenceworth. The level of engagement in political discourse here is far higher than in London, everyone has something to say, and says it with passion – and I love that. I love the time, still, that people take in Ireland to transform daily social interactions into humorous or pleasant exchanges. I love the eye-contact with Irish people – it’s not the cold indifference or the sexualised come-on of London, it’s fuller, warmer, and there’s an eroticism not too far away, with both men and women.
On a political level, I am fascinated with the likes of John Waters and Kevin Myers, both of whose writings of course I knew 13 years ago. Both seem to have shifted to the right, which is fair enough, but both of them write in a preposterously prickly style, as if they are being oppressed by a liberal dictatorship. This I really don’t understand. What confuses me/interests me is that if you filter out the venom that seems, sometimes, to be steaming from their words, some interesting points are being made – for example Kevin Myers yesterday in the Irish Times (sub required) on whether we really want a society with a substantial Muslim population, that would support Shariah law being introduced. It’s a vital question that goes to the heart of democracy, but he asks it like a wounded cat in a corner hissing and spitting, railing hysterically against a “new, sinisterly frivolous liberal hierarchy.” You wouldn’t want to go near and debate with him unless you were wearing industrial-strength protective clothing, or you’d get scratched.
How has this happened? I’d love to know when and how this souring of the crucial social/political debate began, because it matters. For sensible decisions to be made, both sides of the argument have to be put cogently and reasonably.
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