What sort of a country is it, where you can ring up an operator for a phone number and get a harmonica tune instead? Hitchhike a lift with a hearse driver one day, and a stunt driver the next? (He starts his Volvo with a spoon and as you fly over curves and bridges, he's showing you his portfolio of cars completely enveloped in flames.) Or find in the window of a chemist's shop a display of green punk hair dye next to a giant box of slug killer? Where else but in Ireland can you be drinking Guinness at a music festival one minute, and hiking up some heathery mountain the next, on your way to see a secret Druid sanctuary with a fellow who explains that he is a reincarnation of Saint Columcille?

“Ireland is as cozy as a teapot. Its simple, friendly natives are quaint and humorous. Irish people love Americans and are eager to please them. I used to protest at these stereotypes, usually uttered by enthusiastic tourist just returned from a two-week ramble through Erin's green isle.

Humph! Facades! Cliches! I’d grumble and snicker, thinking that if you had lived there—in a cold damp Connemara cottage, or worked in a pastry factory in Dirty Dublin, or fallen in love with one of the beguiling natives—you wouldn't say such things. But that was my folly. After years of living in and with Ireland, her people and her music, I see the whole country as a construct of facades, illusions and mirrors of illusion. Truth is as caprious as the weather. Just about anything you can think to say about Ireland is true at one time or another. The Irish psyche is more tangled than the knotwork in the Book of Kells. You will never unravel it. And that is why Ireland drives those who love it mad with frustration, seduces with charm and humour, deludes with beauty, inspires peculiar reckless passion, heals as it wounds and works magic on the psyche. It is a place given to outlandish experiences. [For more stories on Ireland, see IRELAND.]