“There’s seven of us you see. We’re spread out all over the world. One in Paris. One in Spain… in America some in Ireland and I’m in the UK.”

One of the great things about flying is when you sit next to a passenger who wants to talk, AND, who is interesting to listen to. Someone who you wouldn’t normally meet, who comes from a different viewpoint, who can give you their personal insight into the world and how they see it.

So here I was, on a plane to Dublin, chatting to an older irish woman who’d been living near london for the past 30 years or so. Her outlook on the rest of the world was factual - Paris: “not enough vegetables, too many people”, Poland: “food was unmemorable”, London: “too many people, I’m selfish you see… I don’t want to be looking at other people, I want to be the only one, looking out at the world.”

Dubliners are, in the true irish way, very chatty, likeable characters. On asking the taxi driver “had it rained cos the fields were very brown when we were flying in?”, I got the cheeky, sparkle in the eyes, reply “well thats the soil you see, thats what’s brown.”

From reading the Irish newspaper you’re hit with the strong catholicism of the country. Stories about the pope make the headlines and accounts of priests double checking that the groom to be was a ‘good catholic’ and not ‘orange’ sit besides stories of gunfights and aer lingus shares. The irish also write pc instead of %.

In 1971 almost 1 million irish were living in the UK, while the population of Ireland itself made up 2 million. John Lennon’s father was irish and Jonny Rotten came from irish stock. In 1846, 280,000 irish immigrated to Liverpool to escape the potato famine, 106,000 of whom moved abroad. By 1851, 25% of Liverpool’s population was Irish.

“But now Ireland is developing at such a fast pace. All the young ‘uns used to move abroad you see… Ireland produces some great minds but they all used to go abroad. Now they’re staying at home and the whole nation is changing, mostly in good ways, but also in bad.”

“I heard something crazy about polish couples coming over to work in Ireland and leaving their children with their grandparents in Poland. The Irish government was talking about giving these couples child benefits, for their children back in Poland. Something crazy like that!”

And so there I was, sitting in a hotel bar, drinking a ginger cosmopolitan, as my gut screamed out for a guinness. And so it is, with every move towards the cosmopolitan comes a resistance to preserve traditional ways of life.