What Would Pat Buchanan Think Of Ireland Now?

Talk of blacks and Hispanics sends Pat Buchanan into a rabid frenzy. He cannot stand what they are doing to the fabric of America. They aren't "assimilating" and are changing what he feels the founding fathers meant America to be. I guess he'd better not trek to his native land for the Ireland his ancestors fled is almost no more ...

I n his 2007 book, Ireland Now: Tales of Change From the Global Island (Univ. of Notre Dame Press), William Flanagan described the disorientation experienced by an Irish-American tourist in western Ireland. Everywhere he stopped, Pakistanis or Indians were running the shops and hotels. There were people with Eastern European accents. Eventually, the befuddled tourist asks, “What’s become of Ireland?”

With The Deportees, his first collection of stories, Roddy Doyle sets out to answer this question in a raucous, if at times superficial, manner.

For two decades now, Doyle has been sending out fictional dispatches about the state of Ireland—or at least Dublin. He was thrust into prominence in 1986 with The Commitments, later made into a scruffy, well-received movie by the director Alan Parker.

One of the more memorable lines from the book had one character, “a working class Dublin musician performing in a soul band,” calling the Irish the “niggers of Europe.” In a short but useful foreword to The Deportees, Doyle says that given Ireland’s profound economic, ethnic and racial changes, he would not even think to use that line today. “The line,” Doyle admits, “would make no sense.”