Irish Rovers

By John Aloysius Farrell

My spouse returned recently from a week-long ski trip to Breckenridge and Vail where, she reports, the slopes were cluttered with Celts.

Beside her many virtues, my dear lass harbors – I am compelled to acknowledge – a rare few flaws. High among them is her susceptibility to Irish charm, commonly called blarney, and known as something else when you step in it in a pasture.

Why else would she have suffered me these many years?

And so, on the lift lines, she broke out that cute Dutch smile of hers and struck up conversations with a couple of red-nosed Gaels whom, she reports, attributed their presence in Colorado to the effects of global warming. There is just no good snow in the Alps anymore, these weary European sophisticates griped, as they wheezed on their cigarettes at 13,000 feet.

But climate change can’t explain why, on a golf trip to Arizona in November, I noticed the same phenomenon. (I don’t ski. She doesn’t golf. Touchy subject. Don’t ask again.) You could not walk to the first tee without wading through a herd of yammering Irish. They had left the storied fairways of Lahinch and Ballybunion behind, to pack the pubs of Scottsdale, where they clamored for pints of the noble Smithwick’s or (that godawful) Stella Artois.

Marge: Homer, you cannot miss Lisa’s big day. And you have to come sober!

Homer: American sober or Irish sober?

In a vain attempt to match the warmth and generosity with which the cousins have greeted me in Ireland over the years, I did my own “welcome-to-Americay” bit in Arizona, and quickly learned the other reason for this latest trans-Atlantic migration. It’s the bloody Euro, they told me: it’s soaring above the weak U.S.dollar. They were ordering tenderloin and lobster, cigars and single malts in Scottsdale, for what an American tourist would pay for a quarter-pounder and fries in Cork.

It’s been barely more than a decade since bands like Black 47 chronicled the lot of Irish immigrants (legal and not) slaving on construction crews or working as au pairs, changing nappies for yuppies in Boston and New York.

But then the Celtic Tiger roared. Sustained by the European Union, the Irish built the continent’s hottest economy. These days, our newspapers report, rich Irish investors are buying some of the choicest real estate in Manhattan. The overwhelmed “roads” of Ireland are jammed with black BMWs and silver Mercedes sedans.

There are some good things to be said about a gimpy dollar. Just as we have loaded up our homes with cheap electronic gizmos from Asia in the last 20 years, Europeans and Canadians and Asians may start buying more stuff stamped “Made in the USA,” and putting more Americans to work. Exports are a bright spot in the U.S. economy, and maybe a welcome cushion as the housing bubble bursts.

But, bottom line, a weak dollar means that wise guys around the globe are betting on other folks’ future, not ours.

The lesson I take from the new Irish rovers is one I heard on the campaign trail from Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. The next president, Biden says, is going to have “zero margin of error” in the conduct of American foreign affairs; he or she will absolutely need a deft hand and subtle understanding of the world.

We’ve lost, I agree, our margin of error. We’re not the supreme hot shots –economically, militarily, diplomatically, scientifically, politically – anymore.

In a small but telling way, the Irish visitors to Arizona and Colorado tell us so. Those days when I would bounce around Ireland and the rest of Europe with a backpack, living like a sultan on $10 a day, are gone. Ireland has soothed its sectarian divisions, improved its schools, joined the world and demonstrated that a vibrant high tech economy is more than compatible with a sturdy social safety net and an imaginative government.

For an Irish-American of my generation, it is a happy, yet different and disorienting experience to visit with the cousins these days. Where once we toured like princes, secure in our superiority and their admiration, we’re met by today’s Irish with all their famous wit and warmth – but also with a bit of sorrow at our self-imposed wounds and (ouch!) irrelevancy.

Roles have changed. They’re not the sly, pipe-smoking caddies anymore. They’re the world-roving golfers, and skiers.

And we are the quaint ones now.