It’s why I came back home in a recession

Adjusting to economically gloomy Ireland has not been easy after years in New Zealand. But we laugh here more than anywhere else, says Noelle McCarthy

AN hour before midnight on Saturday, December 31, and I am in the middle of the dance floor in a pub on Sullivan’s Quay.

I’m at a New Year’s Eve party and the theme is ‘white trash’. The DJ is playing Blue Monday and the dance floor is heaving with boys in trucker caps and girls with leopardskin dresses and stick-on tattoos. I have come as a ‘slapper’ and I am doing my best to approximate redneck dancing. Up on the wall there’s a poster. Under some pints of ‘black stuff’ the legend reads ‘Settle in Cork.’ I’m trying, but it’s been a tough six months.

I came home last summer after ten years away. I lived in Auckland, New Zealand. I came back for the craic. I missed it. I couldn’t have picked a worse time. There’s not much to laugh about in Ireland, but I have never laughed anywhere the way I laugh here.

This place is inherently funny. It’s the people, it’s the language, it’s the theatre of the absurd. It was an easy decision to come back, because I had no idea what I was getting into, and had no idea what I was giving up. After years in Auckland, I had a lovely life, friends and a good career. But when Ireland was mooted, I just said ‘yes’ and found the Ireland of 2011 was nothing like the one I’d left.

I’d missed the Tiger years, but I got word of the fabled excess. Helicopters chartered for 21st and 30th birthdays, every second taxi driver with a house in Spain. Hearing about this carry-on from the safety of sensible Auckland, it sounded as though most people had lost the run of themselves, and a few had gone insane. Which they had. But now the party is over. The Ireland I came home to is entrenched in the long dark night of the soul.

Which was fine, because last summer I was too. I have never in my life experienced the discomfort I felt in those first weeks back. I left a New Zealand winter, but was frozen to the bone in Ireland — in July. The lack of sunlight was appalling, but it’s the shock of being upended that freaks you out. Moving from the bottom of the world back up to the top is something you experience physically and it takes the body a while to adjust. The sensation is deeply disorienting. It was months before I could sleep without waking up at 3am and feeling momentarily upside down. And I was upside down in every way. I stayed in New Zealand long enough that it became my home. I knew the weather there, the seasons, the quality of the light. Ireland, though the home of my childhood, has none of the same familiarity.

Everything is strange, from the jingles on the radio to the way the water comes out of the taps. (I am not being facetious. Irish water pressure is savage. I soak my clothes every time I fill up a glass. It is unendurable. Can something not be done?)

It helped that I was miserable, because everybody else was miserable too. I thought I was ready for the recession. The ghost estates, the derelict buildings, the landmarks of my childhood boarded up and closed down. I knew what I was coming home to, I thought. Nothing prepares you for life in a country physically oppressed by gloom. NAMA, hypocrisy, dole queues, the cost of a visa for Australia, the price of fags and drink. These are the topics of conversation when people are depressed. Oh, and X Factor, the theatre of which seems to provide the only shining moments in our lives. I knew leaving Auckland that I was picking a strange time to come back. I wasn’t prepared to be considered crazy though. ‘You lived in New Zealand? You had a job there? Why the f*ck did you come back here?’ It’s still a common reaction.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes ask myself that too. I don’t know why I’ve come back here, except that I felt like coming home. I stayed away for many years, and, hand on heart, I never gave this place a second thought. If anything, I disliked being Irish a lot of the time I was abroad. I always wanted to blend in and the accent means you always stand out. I have been ‘professionally’ Irish now for quite a few years, but it’s a whole new proposition being Irish at home. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I think staying put here will help. Facing into the new year as a freelance journalist in a depressed economy is a tough proposition, and yet I am hopeful.

I am here with my family and my friends. For the first time in a long time, I am among people who talk like me, and who get the joke. I’m here for the craic — it may be bad timing, but it’s the best reason I’ve got.