The simplest way to understand how radically Irish identity has changed is to consider the country’s new prime minister, Leo Varadkar. He is thirty-eight and in many ways a typical politician of the European center-right. He is also part Indian—his father Ashok is originally from Mumbai. And he is gay... Now Varadkar leads an Ireland in which over 17 percent of the population was born Elsewhere. The ultraglobalized Irish economy sucks in migrants from all over the world, notably Poland, Romania, the Baltic states, and Nigeria.
Yet in 2015 Ireland became the first country to introduce same-sex marriage by referendum—62 percent voted in favor. It was in the run-up to that vote that Varadkar, already a senior government minister, came out as gay. The public reaction was overwhelmingly supportive.
This article does not mention another important fact about Ireland - its economy is one of the world's worst - only topped by Iceland and Greece. Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, goes on and on (quite accurately) about the disreputable Irish.
Don't tell anyone, but I am part Irish myself - on my father's side. His father was a likeable chap, by all accounts, but a terrible businessman. Dad took after his mother - a dour woman no one liked, but had a good way with money.
I was born in a house Dad's mother owned, in Ft. Madison, Iowa - where they had moved to get a job on the Santa Fe Railroad. When I was born, in 1936, at the height of the Depression, my parents could not afford anything else.
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