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The View From The Far Shore

How do the people of rural France view the booming Ireland of today? Are they in awe of the little nation, the Celtic Tiger? Have they watched the progress of the small island in wonder? They have not. Not in this part.

I have lived here now for eighteen months. I know of course that here in this area, the southwest, just an hour from the Spanish border, life is much different than say, life in Paris would be. Nevertheless I must admit that it is still something of a serious shock to me that quite a lot of the French who live in this far-flung place imagine Ireland to be the same country it was back in the nineteen fifties or sixties. This was a bit of a blow to my ego. They do not appear to grasp the fact that I came here from a thriving, modern place; a place of which I am very proud indeed, an island where people of other nationalities are queuing up to get in. In my early days here, whenever I referred to Dublin as the soirée capital of Europe, I received bemused and puzzled looks in return.

I began to get a feeling that people were being kind; humouring me almost, the woman from the little green island up north, lucky me to have arrived in what they consider to be the gastronomic heart of their great country. The thinking here is that the Church still runs Ireland and terrorises the people and that as a result everyone is very religious. Although hardly anyone in France appears to bother much with Catholicism, my being Irish and not going to the cathedral here simply amazed them. Especially at Christmas and Easter.

I was asked if I found this place very similar to Ireland, it being one of the quietest, most remote and under populated parts of France, where nothing ever happens. The fact that no one here has ever visited Ireland and as a result hasn't a clue about life there, isn't of any importance. They just had their opinions and that was that. In vain I tried to explain that I had moved from a Dublin where life had become so frenzied, murders so common, the place awash with drugs and a traffic problem so appalling that people talked of little else. I tried to impress on them that my life here bore absolutely no resemblance to the one I left. They just refused to take it in. Surely the emerald isle was a land of fairies, one person even said. Laid back and quiet, old fashioned and peaceful.

Again and again I asked if they hadn't seen on TV and read in the papers about little Ireland being world leaders in all sorts of things? What about our wonderful food, our smoked salmon, our cheeses, I asked. That got a polite laugh, not only because of the amount of cheese France produces, but because they truly consider themselves to be not only European leaders, but World leaders when it comes to food and wine.

What about our young Irish population, one of the best educated in the world, I queried. Irish women making waves in industry and the professions. Forty five percent of French doctors are women, I was told. Also there are no waiting lists for hospitals and you can have blood tests by just going into the laboratory. It opens at six thirty am. No waiting. And results may be collected that same evening. I can testify to this being correct - in Ireland I have had to take half days off work to queue for blood tests.

Well, music then, I asked, trying to be more light hearted. Don't you know one of our home grown rock bands is the biggest on the plant? Adding that I had even worked for their outfit at one time, thinking they might be impressed. But oh dear, in this wild part of this very large country, Bono and the boys impressed the locals, as Billy Connolly would say, 'not a jot'.

Friends send me copies of the Irish Times now and again and even when I brandish it with all its tales of corruption, preposterous prices for Irish property, gang warfare, shootouts and police chases, my neighbours and new friends in the village still persist in thinking most of Ireland is still a quiet land, full of people knitting Aran sweaters, making really good butter, smoking salmon, riding horses and being happy fishermen. Recently I got a glimpse of why this might be.

There was an excellent programme on French TV about the Connemara pony. If I were French, this programme would have made me jump out of my chair, hotfoot it up to Toulouse and grab the next flight to Ireland, with a one way ticket. Two French women made the programme and it was superb. Simply full of sunshine, silver sparkling waves of the Atlantic and happy chubby children rushing in to stables to tack up splendidly clean ponies. And of course it featured a tall, thin, quiet, dark haired man, the one the show was really all about. The Connemara pony specialist. He had stepped right out of that old advert for Kerrygold butter. We saw a glorious hour of golden light, those famous forty shades of green fields, little stone walls, shimmering magical lakes, smiling people and gorgeous ponies. No one in this programme was rain lashed and dripping, water tricking down the back of their neck. No one came home exhausted, drenched to the skin, hair like a bird's nest and a face like a boiled lobster. Ah, so many joyful memories of my very happy days spent with the Connemara ponies in the west.

This film was an Ireland of dreams, a delight to see. A person told me how very difficult his working life was here. He travels from our village up to Toulouse and back each day to work. This involves a pleasant, one hour drive through beautiful countryside, with no traffic problems until you actually get to the city, where there is a terrific underground system to whiz you around in double quick time. To go to work using a superb road system, coupled with Toulouse having a metro seemed like a perfect picnic to me. Add to this the fact that the winters here are short; in a year we get over 300 days of sunshine and blue skies, and the patience of an Irish person begins to wear a bit thin.

I began to recount the following, which could be a day in the life of any average Dubliner. I worked for a time with an Information Technology giant, a frantic and wonderful outfit, in the very trendy Pembroke Street area of Dublin City. There was no parking for the normal worker bees, only for the three or four top bananas. I had a morning wake up time of 6.10, getting home after 7.00 each evening. The travelling involved queuing for a feeder bus to the nearest Dart station, hoping it wouldn't be full by the time it reached my stop. Then standing on a freezing railway station, followed by a stop-start journey from the north county Dublin to the centre of the city. The passengers, all paying for the privilege, swinging from the roof, hanging on to each other, almost unable to breathe by the time we got to the city. And oh joy, the same happiness to look forward to each evening. The home bound journey was made even more Bangladeshili because the train for the north county commenced it's journey in Bray in County Wicklow, while squillions of us waited to cram aboard at the three major Dublin city centre stations.

The travelling public practically in each other's pockets, crushed, pressed together and flattened against the windows and doors for up to forty-five minutes. This was made particularly grisly on those very wet, dark winter evenings, when large overcoats and dripping umbrellas ensured the windows were totally steamed up. All of us had soaking wet feet and me always wishing I were taller than 5 foot. Small women know all about those freaky male travellers who always seem to find us and get right up beside us in packed carriages.

Remember, at this point I hadn't even got around to telling my new French friend about the day's work which we all put in, hours and hours of sheer slog, hardly being able to draw breath, thanking Allah for Bendini and Shaw sandwiches, when he stopped me. With a look of pure horror and disbelief, he asked me could I possibly be serious, surely I was making it up? And then he made the statement that people simply couldn't cope with that kind of life. I tried to say wait, wait, I have only described getting there, hang on for the workload, pal, but he was too stunned.

At last. Game, set and match to the Irish woman. Here, most people work a thirty-five hour week. Shops and business still close between twelve and two. Some people who ski actually work around their ski-ing times. Everyone understands. C'est la vie. This is La France. There is a firm divide between work and personal life. They cannot understand how someone could ask you to suddenly stay late at the office. What could be so important, indeed more important than your family, your plans for the evening?

I must stress that I live in a fairly remote area, with very few big cities, but an area in which all the services work efficiently and I have never met so many polite people in my life.

Then there are the wonderful English ex pats. Of course we have the mighty Amazon.com. But I do miss being able to buy books in English. I miss bookshops and browsing in them. But we have a lady who has collected so many books from the others that she has what amounts to an actual library. The shelves are full of Mary Wesley, Rosamund Pilcher, Joanna Trollope, E F Benson, Dick Francis, and of course, you know who. I reached celebrity status when someone found out I had actually met Maeve and, feeling my star rising by the minute, I couldn't resist remarking casually that I even had some recent correspondence from her. If the French are not up to speed with our literary giants, at the least the English ladies are. Dinner invites now flooding in.

With the best will in the world of trying to get to know the French, and I really have made two good friends here, (not much after a year and half?) meeting the ladies has been a truly wonderful addition to my life in this place. They are typical English ladies abroad; they paint, they write, they love animals, they know where the best tearooms are. Think of those ladies in the movie 'Tea with MussoliniÓ. You've got it.

One of these formidable ladies told me in her wonderfully clipped voice about a recent phone call she received from a Frenchman, and offered advice as to how I should handle it should anything similar happen to me. Her phone rang and a voice said Sereek. What? she asked. Sereek, Sereek, said the voice again. Well, what the hell would you make of that? she asked me. It turned out to be a chap called Eric (c'est Eric) telling her he was ready to start working for her. She continued the advice. When they begin talking at you at speed, you have to simply say a loud "Hello". The English word usually stops 'em mid sentence - makes 'em slow down, you know. I thanked her and privately thought I would still prefer to bone up on the language.

Marvellous ex pats as I may think of them, but the French, with their general stance on all things English, have a totally different attitude to the ladies who live among them. I, on the other hand, seem generally to have been accepted fairly quickly. Since my early days, the moment I said I was Irish, the expression changed. As time has gone by I learnt that they feel the Irish and the French are alike, but the English they find to be rather cold, distant people, not willing to integrate. Of course this is a terrible generalisation. Eventually I came to a conclusion. Maybe the English who came to live here are not rugby people. Let me explain.

What I didn't know before I came to this area, was that Rugby, with a capital R, is the thing. It's up there with food and drink, right at the top of the most important things in life. Gradually, and this is important, as I met more men, having been swamped by the Mesdames to begin with, I began to see the light. Even though I haven't met one man in this area yet who has attended a match in Ireland, they all profess to know Lansdowne Road intimately. I have heard the words 'it is my dream to go there' more than once. When the local paper advertises a match in Ireland, the ad simply says Lansdowne Road. Not Dublin. Not Ireland. With Aer Lingus direct from Toulouse now, the people of the smallest department in France will soon join their countrymen in the hallowed ground.

To illustrate how important and all consuming the thoughts of the great game are, I was lying on a trolley having treatment on my knee after a fall when the Kinetherapist suddenly asked me if it was really true that the train stopped just at the gates of Lansdowne Road? I weakly said yes. He shook his head in wonder and said weren't the Irish just great, putting Rugby first. I winced, as he appeared to wind my leg up behind my head and then, as the pain lessened, I happily agreed, saying Ireland was a great country, just like France is.

by

Jane Shortall
20th February 2005

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