A year or so ago, I ran into a undergraduate friend who had recently spent a summer studying at Trinity College in Dublin.
“I cried the whole way home,” she said, and then told me that she had decided she was moving back permanently. The terrifying part is that I understood exactly what she meant. After I finished a semester abroad in Cork, in the southwest of Ireland, I felt lonely and homesick. I couldn’t really explain my feelings to friends, who saw my four months abroad as an anomaly, or at most an incredible vacation. I exchanged emails and instant messages with my American study abroad friends about our homesickness for the hilly, colorful city that had been home for a few months. I I savored what I could, with Irish American pubs, Irish music, endless reruns of Father Ted. It was a kind of Jerusalem syndrome, but instead of religious mania, I missed the green fields and dark city lanes of Ireland. My heart hurt.
I’ve ever been alone in this. Ireland is full of Americans who, like me, are looking for themselves in the country that their ancestors left behind. As Ireland returns to its pre-famine population, it is a country in flux. Immigrants are creating new identities as Irish-Poles and Filipino-Irish. Yet, everywhere, tourist shops sell family coats of arms, Irish trinkets, and refrigerator magnets with Irish family names printed on them. Ireland is a country that is profiting from its past at the same time that it debates its future.
Despite my cynicism about being an American in Ireland, I made the journey back in June. I will admit that I felt euphorically gleeful when I got on my Aer Lingus flight and was surrounded by Irish accents, and again when I went shopping for brown bread and Cadbury’s chocolate upon my arrival. I’ll always feel a magnetic pull toward this place, where I was an adult for the first time. It was good to be back.
