My own aesthetic preferences aside, it is interesting to theorise about why this happened. When you talk to people about it the conversation always turns to corruption and the "brown paper bags" full of euros which apparently changed hands. But there is more to it than this, a relative lack of will to resist development - so prevalent in England - and a sympathy with the property owner. Perhaps, too, a French-style perception of development as the palliative for backwardness, also absent in England. However, whereas in France what goes on in the countryside is largely the restoration of buildings, in Ireland the old crofts weren't worth renovating - my father-in-law's in Longford among them. Sometimes the old ruin merely remains as a garden feature. Finally, there is a cultural memory of a well-populated Ireland. After all, despite a 30 per cent increase in population in the last quarter century and an increased immigrant population (to 15 per cent of the total population), the whole island still only has three quarters of the eight million people it had in the 1841 census. Just as some Scottish intellectuals resent the emptiness of the Highlands and see not the conveniently emptied quasi-wilderness which I see, but the the injustice of the Clearances, there may be an element of thought that bungalows are restoring the old Ireland, especially in the West. But the consequence is that Northern Ireland is much better preserved than the Republic.

We swung round the country, from Derry to Sligo to Limerick and Killarney. Then out to Dingle and back across to the more familiar theatres, universities and dinner parties of Dublin. All the way round I semi-consciously recorded the level of Bogside Syndrome because, though I believe De Valera's asceticism, religiosity and frugality are gone forever, his nationalism and the identity of an oppressed nation are still very much there. There is little acknowledgement, for example, of the consequences of having a republic of four million people sitting next to a larger country which contains sixteen million who regard themselves as at least partly Irish. So, whereas it is absurd that there is an international border between Donegal and Derry (though not much of one: apart from the bungalows you only notice that the speed limits are in kilometres) it is also absurd that the Republic does not acknowledge how uniquely connected it is, historically and demographically, to its larger neighbour. If the Gaelic Athletic Association represents the successful wing of the old fundamentalist nationalism - though it now co-exists with English sports rather than trying to ban them - the language is the costly failure: you hear far more Polish and German in Ireland than you do Gaelic. There are now Gaelic-medium schools, known to some of the more civic, less ethnic, nationalists as "inbred schools" because for some they have a certain appeal of racial purity, like Afrikaans-medium schools in South Africa. From one point of view this is keeping an ancient culture alive; from another it is an opting out of cosmopolitanism, from the same 19th century origins, as the Nazi and Zionist opt-outs.

To begin to understand Ireland you have to try to understand the Irish Free Variable. For any significant X, Ireland is both X and not X. It is both friendly and unfriendly. (Why no Union Jacks with the German and American flags outside the hotels in the Republic?) It is both British and not-British, cosmopolitan and not cosmopolitan, prosperous and not prosperous. No wonder it produced Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw.