Forget the bailout, it’s great to be Irish

With all the recent doom and gloom over the economic downturn, its easy to forget what a great nation we are.

By Conor Hogan

Whether you are texting at the Wall of China, eating chicken across from the Taj Mahal, throwing pieces of paper into the volcanoes of Guatemala or watching an arctic fox fight a walrus in the Northeast Greenland National Park, there is one noise you are bound to hear - an Irish accent. You can go on holiday to escape Ireland, but you can never escape the Irish.

Irish people are some of the biggest holidayers in the world, and we don't like to spend our time local. While two-thirds of Spaniards holiday in Spain, and over half of French and Italians holiday in their own country, a mere 14 per cent of us spend our time off in the Emerald Isle. The only countries in Europe that holiday less in their own country are Luxembourgers and Maltesers, and let's face it, their countries are flipping tiny.

By holidaying abroad, we are continuing the Irish tradition of travelling (one of the distinguishing characteristics about being Irish is that you probably aren't in Ireland right now). Throughout history (in the words of that great 20th century philosopher Billy Ocean) when the going has got tough, we've got going. While there are only four million of us in the Republic of Ireland, there is an estimated 100 million people of Irish descent in the world.

In the United States there are 36,278,332 who identify themselves as Irish, while there are 4,354,155 in Canada, 1,803,741 in Australia (of which 72,050 were born in Ireland), a million in Argentina, 600,000 in Mexico and, luckily for the FAI, 14 million in the UK.

Wherever we've gone, we've made an impact. Irish people like Tomá¡s O'Daly developed the sugar industry in Puerto Rico. In the US, Irish Americans dominate the police and fire services, and half of all American presidents have had Irish ancestry (and we also built the White House). In Mexico, meanwhile, Zorro himself, William Lamport, was an Irishman - born in 1615 in county Wexford.

Achievements

While we influenced the world by going there, we also influenced it by staying where we are - through the arts. In painting and music we've done all right, but it is the written word where we've had a disproportionate influence. In poetry, Seamus Heaney's verses about bogs and frogs have earned him international fame and the Nobel Prize, while Samuel Beckett's minimalist plays are as popular in France as Jerry Lewis.

Then there's Flann O'Brien, Oscar Wide, W.B Yeats and James Joyce - a man whose book Ulysses is, after the Bible, the most widely pretended-to-be-read book in history.

We are a nation of scientists too - Robert Boyle, Robert Mallet and John Joly are the fathers of modern chemistry, seismology and radiotherapy respectively, while George Johnstone Stoney discovered the electron in 1874 and Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.

Despite the bad weather, the current economic downtown, and one of the worst governments in the history of the state, the Irish remain positive. In fact, a recent Eurostat survey ranked Irish people as the happiest in the Europe, with 79 per cent saying they felt happy all or most of the time.

If history has taught us anything, it's that Ireland will bounce back from adversity. There are already signs that we will - merchandise exports have risen by 4 per cent this year, while food exports have risen by an incredible 23 per cent.

Emigration may be on the up but being Irish doesn't depend on the Island you live on, and those who left in the past often made something of themselves. For those of us that stay, we've been in far worse situations before and have fended off famine, war and destitution. We'll be okay.