A Connecticut Yankee in a failing Ireland

Author David Monagan moved his family here ten years ago, buoyed by a romanticism that has since dimmed a little says Colette Sheridan.

“WHAT the hell are we doing here?” journalist and author, David Monagan, has been asking his family since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. The ex-pat American, who has just published Ireland Unhinged: Encounters with a Wildly Changing Country, moved to Cork 10 years ago with his wife, Jamie, and three children, then aged 12, 10 and six.

The couple, who have Irish ancestors, had romantic notions about Ireland, fuelled by the literature of James Joyce, WB Yeats and JP Donleavy, and Monagan had studied English at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1970s.