Ireland is full of Irish people

I had been in Ireland for only a couple of days when I made a statement that sounds absolutely ridiculous when said out loud - Ireland is full of Irish people. Amazingly, after I had said it, other people agreed with me and a week later, a colleague who hadn't been there when I first blurted it out said the same thing. Ireland is indeed full of Irish people. Everyone is called Sean, Paddy, Gerry, Colm, Eamon, Siobhan & Aiofe (pronounced Eefer) and has surnames like O'Mahony, Noonan, O'Brien, Moran, Reidy & O'Toole. It's like stepping into a stereotype. The country is remarkably racially uniform. I am not sure what I expected it to be but I guess I was thinking of something more like the diversity of London. Makes our team look bizarre to say the least - a couple of Englishmen, an American living in The Netherlands, a Dutch guy, a Ugandan Londoner, a German, a South African and me.
I attended a teleconference in Cork in which I could not understand a word that was being said and then met a couple of people face-to-face and still couldn't understand a word that was being said. In Dublin, it was decidedly better but I still have difficulty especially when they get excited (which is often) and start talking really fast.
I attended a big meeting in which the CEO came for a short speech. When he opened his mouth, I thought, oooh, an Aussie and when he said 'well, that's just bullshit', I got homesick. Someone said that his accent is a lot easier to understand now than a year ago. All I can say is that he must have been as ocker as they come if his accent has moderated to its current state.
Dublin is a lovely city when it is not raining, which is to say about 1% of the time. Fortunately for me, I was there on 5 consecutively fine days, which is almost unheard of. I visited Trinity College, home of the Book of Kells, a set of the 4 gospels written around 800 AD. It is also home to the Long Room in the Old Library, a beautiful barrel-vaulted room filled with 200,000 books that runs the length of the building. It has a collection of marble busts of great thinkers through history and houses the oldest harp in Ireland, a 15th century oak and willow harp that is the model for the emblem of Ireland. It is attributed to Brian Boru (an Irish king) but he predates it by a couple of centuries. The Irish claim that their emblem is the only one in the world that is a musical instrument, hence their musicality. Even Guiness uses it in its emblem. Great for the singing, drunken Irish.
The rest of Dublin is quite boring tourist-wise. I'm sure the alcoholics of the world think that Temple Bar is a great location and shoppers like Grafton St & O'Connell St but even the National Gallery was a disappointment for me. They have a Vermeer there but it was on loan to Japan for an exhibition.
I took a tour down to visit Blarney Castle, Cork and Cobh. I asked a girl from the group to take a photo of me as I kissed the Blarney Stone but she didn't even get a blurry shot or a shot of the paving stones. She got no photo at all! Geez...Hopefully I have the gift of eloquence now, though. Had an Irish stew and a scone in Blarney (scones are a staple in Ireland more so than in the UK). Mmm...
Cobh (pronounced Cove and has also been called Queenstown in the past) has a very important place in Irish history. It was the last port that the Titanic stopped at before it sank, it is the port to which the Lusitania was heading when it was sunk by the Germans (3 mass graves are located at the Old Church Cemetery near Cobh and contain over 1000 bodies) and, most importantly, it was the port from which the Irish Emigrants left for the US at the time of the Great Famine and from which the Irish convicts were sent to Australia. A fungus is the reason there are so many Irish people in the US and Australia. Hundreds of thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands more emigrated due to a fungus that attacked the potato crops of 1845-1851, wiping out the staple of Irish diets.
All in all, Ireland is a lovely green country. It would be a nice place to live if it didn't rain as much as it does. As a tourist destination, it is not recommended unless you like a pint or two or twenty...
Cold count: 16