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IRELAND ECONOMIC CRISIS RECALLS HISTORY OF MISERY

The emerald coast of Dingle, Ireland

DINGLE, Ireland — Under a sky that looks like a late-winter coat of sheep fleece, the island of saints and scholars falls away in a sheer drop to the Atlantic. The next parish over, they say from this far western edge of Ireland, is Boston.

It is reassuring to an Irish-American on a first-time visit to find the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people and a music embraced more than ever by the young.

But it is also jarring to see this ancient landscape littered with empty monuments to the kind of excess that helped bring down the global economy. For a time, the Irish thought they would never fall off those cliffs into the sea; a nation of barely 4 million people could defy gravity.

If Barack Obama, the president with roots in County Offaly, were to skip across the Irish Sea this week he would find a big part of what afflicted much of the western world during a mad era.

Houses prices quadrupled in less than a decade. Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle.

The crash was sickening, and much like Ernest Hemingway’s description of going broke: slowly, then all at once. Throughout Ireland, more than one in eight homes now sits empty. The skyline is crowded with idle cranes towering over roofless apartments. Property prices have plummeted across Ireland. And as the government plans drastic service cuts, people worry that Ireland will follow Iceland into insolvency.

Just outside of this wonderfully brooding town, where David Lean filmed “Ryan’s Daughter,” the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California housing developments. These were houses intended as holiday getaways for the new Princes of Dublin and Galway. Now they’re orphans — abandoned, and not even a nationalized bank wants them back.

“The Celtic tiger that transformed a beer-soaked backwater into the envy of every small nation with a thirst for a makeover is dead,” The Sunday Times noted last week, in a story with the kind of sneer that only a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch from still-hated England could produce.

They quoted an Irishman, John O’Keeffe, who moved back home in the midst of the boom: “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.”

If the rush to riches was very un-Irish, this country is now back to something more familiar — a state of misery. It was that greatest of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, who described the indigenous character trait as an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained people through temporary periods of joy.

Hope is a thing of sporting miracles — the national rugby team last week winning a European title that had eluded Ireland for 61 years — and that new American president whose maternal ancestors came from a village with an oddly-prescient name for our times, Moneygall.

The Irish are looking to Obama, wrote Kate Holmquist, a columnist for the Irish Times, “as if he’s not just America’s but also our president.”

Ireland is not on the itinerary for Obama’s travels this week. When he does come here, I would recommend a visit to the west: for inspiration, and for a cautionary tale woven into the land.

Clinging to the bony shoulders of Dingle Peninsula are beehive huts, the stone igloos once inhabited by Celts 1,500 years ago. You huddle inside the small space of those homes and marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds.

You walk along Dingle Harbor past a forlorn rock tower, Hussey’s Folly they call it. It was a 19th century stimulus project, a jobs generator for starving people at the time of the Great Famine.

And then, in the green folds of a peninsula holding the greatest concentration of archaeological sites in Ireland, you see the latest and largest of artifacts — the empty houses built at the peak of the Celtic tiger period.

If they stand as long as the beehive huts or Hussey’s tower, the orphans of Ireland will prove to be instructive. The huts are a testament to perseverance. The tower is a monument of hope against despair. And the empty new homes tell a story of greed.

A traveler, 100 years down the road, may wonder what a traveler of today ponders in the presence of the older sites: what were they thinking?

See Related: ECONOMIC CRISIS

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