The article below was published a few years after the release of Once and the peak in


immigration to Ireland that followed it. This excerpt discusses and celebrates the way in which Ireland is changing as new peoples and cultures join it.


Have you ever experienced the cultural blending which the author discusses? Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?


By: Dan Barry Published: May 18, 2008 For full article: http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/travel/18ireland.html?pagewanted=1


Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland…


You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.


There you have it: delightful, post-­‐millennial Ireland…


My mother grew up on a farm near [Kinvara], and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-­‐like subdivisions.


The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-­‐processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities— from maracuja to mandioca— in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.


And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.


You will see the Irish at the Quadrilha, some of them wearing the soccer jerseys of Brazil’s national team, just as you will see Brazilians two months later at the Gort Show, an annual agricultural fair, where inside the community center, locals compete for best mince pie and handsomest heads of garden cabbage, while in the fields outside, judges in bowler hats ponder before selecting the best-­‐ colored colt, filly or gelding. The new Gort is reflected in the flags of Ireland and Brazil that sometimes hang in shop windows, the green in both nearly blending.


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Travel.nytimes.com


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