As 2006 marked my return to living in Ireland, the state of the country itself should provide me with enough material for a review such as this. However, I have yet to get to the stage where I can write objectively about what I find here. I doubt I ever will, of course, for objectivity is something I have never really been able to achieve, nor, sometimes, have I been interested in attempting it. Objectivity is an illusion, after all. A belief.

The act of writing itself, curiously, is one that seemingly serves the purpose of communicating, of making connections, but can have the opposite effect, that of alienating oneself from that which one is describing. While living abroad, writing my epistle from the disconcerted, I was safe in the knowledge that I could write about my neighbours and my newsagents and my bank and the pubs and the scene and the people I met there without social repercussions. I never encountered anyone who had read what I had written that week. Now that I’m living and working right in the heart of Dublin, I feel pressured to be more discreet, less invasive. Telling other people’s stories can be theft of sorts, and I’ve been thieving away for more years than I care to remember – but secretly, a sort of cat burglar of the soul. I’d like to ’fess up and come clean, guv, make an honest writer of myself. And no better place than this city, where everyone has a story to tell. But the competition here is intense; it’s a literary rat race. Everyone has an opinion.
Commenting on cultures and peoples is fraught with danger, in particular if its your own culture and people, for fear of being accused of stereotyping or generalising. For example, I’ve been particularly wary of falling into that trap in my attempts to comment on the differences between the sexes, and sometimes I find myself over-qualifying to compensate, resulting perhaps in a neutered, anodyne discourse. It’s not fear of offending people – it’s a conscious effort to name the differences and at the same time not veer off into extremism or antagonism, acknowledging we men and women have far more in common with each other than not. But the differences need to be acknowledged.
When it comes to commentary on peoples or cultures, I’ve felt freer in offering my opinions, especially of the English. We Irish love to criticise them, because we can see their shadow far easier than they can; it’s the price that is paid for being a colonial power. But it’s less easy to pick the beam out of our own eye, for until relatively recently we saw ourselves as poor and powerless victims. And self-criticism is never easy. But I’d like to, some day, be able to find words to properly describe the people, city and culture that spawned me.
In my efforts to describe my own life in London, as a 30-something gay Irish man struggling to connect, I revealed everything there was to know about my values and cultural expectations and hopes and fears, by implication. You can take the bootboy out of Dublin, but you can’t take Dublin out of the bootboy. It was a curious process of abstraction – like a photographic negative, I dipped myself in the astringent ether of London, and watched myself develop (or fade away, or perhaps a bit of both). My experience was painful and formative and enlightening. In my attempts to describe what my life was like there, I was also, consciously, acknowledging that it was part of my own inner world too – for all the times I spoke of the “cruel-cool” gay scene in London, I was also acknowledging my own coldness and capacity to disconnect.
Recently in a column, looking back on my time there, I referred to the “psychic vacuum of reserved English tolerance and distant politeness”. I was taken to task by a fellow blogger and friend, an Englishman of great heart and humour, who thought I was being cheeky to suggest such a thing, and insulting to the English people. Can an Irishman be so bold as to offer a critique of the city he lives in? Of course. Of the country he lives in? Of course. But the reason why England felt like a psychic vacuum to me, is that in Ireland, we engage with each other in a more full-on way, an intense, often passionate, sometimes invasive, aggressive, and intrusive way. The image that comes to mind is of a fish, used to living in dense dark peaty near-stagnant guinnessy pond, finding itself in clear, cold, distilled London; the experience is primarily one of missing the familiar emotional viscosity, or even pressure, like a case of the psychic bends. The pain that resulted was not that the London way of life is objectively bad; but as a counterpoint to Irish life, it’s less close, and it did feel like a vacuum. To me. But, now that I’m back in the inky soup, having acclimatized myself to the rarified atmosphere, I can’t see anything clearly. Yet.
This year for me, is about discovering Ireland. It feels like it’s for the first time; and in that of course I know I’m not alone. There are many thousands moving here, every year, just like me, trying to negotiate the depths of Irish life, its intensity and undercurrents, its frustrations and comedies. This is a time of flux. Let’s hope we have some idea where we are heading.