I was recently back in Ireland, where I spent the spring semester of my junior year of university in 1995, for a five-day visit and stroll down memory lane.  This was my eight trip back to the Emerald Isle after that first stint, so clearly I have a particular affinity for the place, both as it is and as it was. I spent the majority of this trip with three friends from my University College Dublin days, exploring new places and revisiting old favorites.  We reminisced about nights out at Fibber Magees on Parnell Street or sessions at the UCD student bar or sitting around our cold commons rooms sipping hot tea in a vain attempt to stay warm.  We also talked about all of the changes that Ireland has undergone in those intervening 24 years.  In many ways, it still has the same feel, the same friendliness, and the familiar soul that I grew to love in my six months in the country.  But in numerous other ways it’s a profoundly different place.  And this odd paradox is in equal parts disorienting and encouraging.

When I first lived there, Ireland was an ethnically-homogenous and economically-depressed country.  There were no black people, brown people, or Asian people when I lived there.  Hell, there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t Irish and Catholic aside from the odd American tourist (who, more often than not, claimed to be both).  But Dublin has now grown into a properly international, cosmopolitan city.  With immigrants and tourists of all ilk and even jobs for locals and migrants alike. My friends all started university under the assumption that they would have to go abroad to find gainful employment and seek their fame and fortune, not realizing that an economic overhaul of the island (by virtue of generous EU subsidies that renewed infrastructure and boosted competitiveness and a favorable corporate income tax rate) was already underway.

Molly Malone’s fair city has undergone an impressive makeover in a relatively short period of time.  Rapid Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, including on all public transportation.  Crumbling buildings have been replaced with sleek new structures.  Cranes and construction projects can be seen dotted throughout the city from a good vantage in Phoenix Park—itself an admirable example of maintaining ample green spaces in close proximity to city centers. The airport has two modern terminals now, the roads are fantastic, and sharply-dressed people of all races populate the packed restaurants, bars, and clubs.  I met numerous Brazilians this trip and ended up speaking a fair bit of Portuguese.  All of this would have seemed unthinkable just 20 years ago.  A far cry from our previous nights out that featured bottles from the off-license drunk at home or on the way to the pub, clad in damp, wooly jumpers and baggy trousers.  Our destination was usually a dank, moldy pub that reeked of stale cigarette smoke.  Mind you, I loved all of this at the time and still remember it very fondly, but Dublin wasn’t always the most aesthetically-pleasing city.  That is clearly no longer the case and if I seem like an underpaid Irish Ministry of Tourism PR rep, then you’ll forgive me.

My friend Stephen and I had many hours in the car together during our Great Northern Irish Roadtrip, and we discussed the nature of these changes and what they meant for Irish society.  I pointed out that the country was much more expensive that it was in our university days.  No longer could we buy a pint of Guinness for two punts (Irish pounds).  He countered that it was a necessary product of growing wages and income.  I recalled a particular trip to Dublin in 1999 when I first saw Asian immigrants working in a local fast food chain in 1999 (the iconic Abrekebabra); it was a bit of shock to the system to see non-white people in Ireland.  But it was a positive sign that, for the first time in its history, Ireland was experiencing more immigration than emigration.  It was a sign of growth, of a healthy, robust economy that could not only keep its college graduates with offers of potential employment but also support the entry of others.  As a byproduct, it meant that Ireland was also no longer racially, culturally, or religiously homogenous, which came with its own challenges (a challenge with which many of Scandinavian countries are also struggling).  Initially, I think that part of the reason that I felt such a connection to Ireland when I first went there was the sense of belonging: a white, Catholic country where everyone looked like me and went to the same church on Sundays like me.  The familiarity was comforting and comfortable.  I had never felt such a connection to a place and a people.  But the Ireland of the 20thcentury, also the Ireland of the previous several centuries, was now gone.  And it’s not a bad thing.  It’s a sign of evolution, of necessary change, and of progress.  I appreciated Ireland in 1995 for its monoculture and definitive identity; but I like to think that I have evolved alongside Dublin to be able to appreciate it for its current diversity and embrace of global culture.

There are those within Ireland and many more outside who would bemoan these tectonic societal shifts.  They decry the loss of identity and the sense of unease that it creates. Ireland is much less Catholic now, as a series of scandals and marching secularism have diminished the Church’s once-unchallenged influence.  Gay marriage and abortion are now both legal via popular referendum.  There’s the perception among some elements of society that something precious and unifying has been lost.  That they were better off before.  These were the forces behind the Brexit vote in 2016.  And perhaps also Trump’s election in the US mere months later. It’s the reactionary desire to go back to an imagined, idyllic past that was somehow better and purer. Unfortunately for these people, you can’t turn back the clock and you can’t put the toothpaste of cultural evolution and change back in the tube.  Even if you were able to, why would you want to?

These sentiments, understandable in the main but harmful when you get down to specifics, are reflective of the tendency among the reactionary crowd to glorify recent history at the expense of the present.  In wanting to return to a more perfect past, this contingent often remembers only the good and glosses over the bad.  We remember the US, England, or even Ireland as a nation of principally white people with a common culture and identity that bonded us all together.  And we forget that Catholics were persecuted in England and Ireland.  And that the Irish and Italian were scorned in the US.  And that’s the just the white-on-white discrimination, to say nothing of the more serious forms of repression and subjugation of other ethnic minorities.  Throughout our histories, immigration has been blamed for many of society’s maladies, from disease to rapid population growth to crime.  Replace the formerly marginalized Irish and Italians with Pakistanis in England, Polish or Romanians in Ireland, or Latinos in the US, and you begin to recognize many of the same refrains.  These people aren’t like us.  They don’t look like us.  They don’t understand our way of life.  They may not speak the language (maybe they hold no currency).  They’re changing our society and not for the better.  Change is uncomfortable, I get it.  But it’s also inevitable.  Unless you want stagnation.  You can go back to the Ireland of the 20thcentury. But you don’t get your better standard of living, your super-fast WiFi, your multi-national corporations providing employment, your beautiful Brazilians, or your tasty new gastropubs populated by stylish internationals.

When I look back on the Ireland I first encountered 24 years ago, it is assuredly through rose-colored glasses.  I might briefly lament the fact that everyone no longer looks like me, goes to church like me (or as I once did), and drinks Guinness like me.[1]  But then I think of all the wonderful things that change has brought this country.  It brought economic growth.  Which brought migration.  Which led to cultural diversity.  And a different sense of what it meant to be Irish.  It brought rightful pride.  And not the dangerous nationalism we see in numerous corners of the world today.  It brought a sense of a progressive nation, emerging from a troubled past with its pride and traditions intact, open to embracing new people, new societal norms, and new ways of thinking.  England and America, it seems to me, the two great traditional destinations of Irish emigrants, could learn a valuable lesson or two from this tiny giant of an island.

[1]Though most of the immigrants I encountered did acquire a taste for the black gold, to their enormous credit and a testament to the enduring power of Ireland’s greatest export.