We’re Keeping You Afloat

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

We’re Keeping You Afloat

March 26, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

THE lake at the back of Jimmy White’s house is hallmarked silver. In deep winter it is often brownly angry and swollen, and it gobbles up 20 or 30 acres of the low greenlands around the shores. Eastertide, though, has the softest touch of all the seasons, gentle as a girl fairy’s forefinger. The lake has given back the greenlands to the earth and is just lying on its back in the sun.

It’s a lovely day. A pair of swans come flying in from the east as I watch. All that white grace in the air ends, as always, in an awkward landing, concentric silvery ringlets arcing away as the swans find their elegance and grace again on the surface in just a moment or two. And the ringlets catch the lazy sun.

Eastertide has that gentle pastoral and spiritual thing about it. Resurrection time.

Our clocks will change soon. We will gain another golden evening hour as well as the natural lengthening of the daylight hours.

I’m sitting in the garden again for the first time this year. A stray bumble bee passes by, one of the Seven Sleepers of Winter already awake and about — the bee, the bat, the butterfly, the cuckoo and the swallow, the corncrake and the weatherbleat — and all the rest will follow.

Let me therefore gently insert my old tongue in my cheek and say my only complaint this Eastertide is that I am virtually alone apart from the Dutch Nation. All my friends and all my neighbors are gone away to the one destination.

The boarding kennels are packed with dogs, the Shannon Airport carpark is overflowing, there is not a suitcase left in the parish this Easter but ours! And why?

I’ll tell you why. America — God bless it and all its states — was always our land of opportunity. But never more so than now.

Whatever the hell you are doing to your economy may be tough on all of you (God love ye again), but dammit, it’s like opening up El Dorado for us.

The euro which we use, and which used be worth much less than a dollar a few years ago, is today worth the guts of two dollars! And improving every day.

That is why my friends and neighbors are heading off in their hundreds every week for the kind of shopping sprees our ancestors never even dreamed about. And they come back with tales of such great bargains in America that Next Door starts slavering at the mouth and heads off the following Friday.

It’s an incredible development. People from townlands once denuded by the coffin ships are now flying back and forth at least every month, deploying their euros in the big stores of New York and Boston and Chicago. Unbelievable!

Go to Mass of a Sunday and there are women there in Yankee coats and dresses, men in leather jackets they bought for buttons because of their extra spending power, sunlight through the chapel windows glittering on diamond bracelets and earrings and brooches. It would blind your eyes.

About the only items which my neighbors are not bringing across with them are heavy yokes like bulldozers!

Now I’m no economist as ye well know, but it would seem to me that the Celtic Tiger (which never died here, not really) must now be a major factor in helping to keep the stores in your big cities at least ticking over.

Your consumer confidence index might be low just at present, but by God our consumer confidence in your “value” over there is sky-high.

It is ironic, I suppose, that it is our millions of euros that are now making times better for the retailers and hoteliers of the New World. It is the modern equivalent of the American letter containing the $20 from the emigrant son or daughter in New York that was crucial for the west of Irelanders in the last century.

I met a man or relatively modest means last night who has been in America with his wife three times already this year, including once with his kids down to Disney World. Fifteen years ago that man would be hard put to it to finance a week in Kilkee. Just like all the rest of us.

But tell me, in the name of heaven what are ye doing over there with your economy? Every time we turn on the news bulletins (primarily to check the dollar exchange rate) there is another huge big bank gone burst or nearly so, another crazy slippage day on the stock market, another day of dollar slippage, another day of dollar dilution.

That’s great for my friends and neighbors this Eastertide, but dammit it must be rough and tough to live through.

We have a kind of modest slowdown here, primarily in the construction sector, but the Celtic Tiger, though older and quieter, is still walking abroad and no banks have folded. I know this sub-prime lending thing and the consequent credit squeeze between banks has been a fundamental factor, but is there something even worse coming down your tracks?

Your former guru Greenspan of the lugubrious spaniel face was on our screens saying the current financial crisis was the worst since World War II. It’s a somewhat frightening and fascinating scenario that is unfolding, nowadays even more fascinating from here than the ongoing Obama-Clinton battle.

Don’t worry too much about it. The Irish invaders will keep the tills tinkling until the boat steadies itself sometime after Easter. And I will continue, like now, to feel quite alone and lonely.

And a bit hurt too — because, of course, our Irish Voice editor Debbie pays me in dollars!

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