Lifting the Green Curtain

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The summer sky still breaks over the land in splinters of green, gold or luminous waves of grey, staining the hills blue and purple and vermilion, heaping the valleys with shimmering veils of mist. In that weird, wet Atlantic light—or so they say—the swarthy chieftains and pale queens who once ruled the five kingdoms of Celtic Ireland still clatter across country. As the island's endless sleight-of-sky creates and dissolves horizons, the landscape seems dreamily unreal. The reality of Ireland is special: it lies on a border region where tragedy and laughter, jollity and gloom, hell and the happy isles converge—and as such it may reflect human existence more truly than what usually passes for realism.

The Irish have always cultivated the art of living, and they still have time and space for the slow perusal of race horses, the thoughtful consumption of stout, and weighty disputation in rich, foamy periods that make English English seem like verbal porridge. Ireland's traditional shanachies, its Gaelic storytellers, still spin their grave tales in the western counties, and of late have also favored Radio Eireann with their art.

Tinkers' carts still creak along country roads; city air is as pure as Connemara spring water. Off the Aran Islands, fishermen still go out in currachs, their ancient coracles, and never learn to swim because they know death takes longer if they do. Ireland has in abundance the qualities that often seem to be dis appearing elsewhere: kindliness, an unruly individualism, lack of snobbery, ease, style and, above all, sly humor. Though the Irish have lived much of their lives with bloodshed and privation, their tales of the bad times are recounted with as little rancor as if they were retelling the saga of Lugh of the Long Arm and the time he slew Balor of the Evil Eye with his slingshot.

But while the Irish cling to their past, there are signs today that the nation is also at last facing up to its future. For the first time in this century, most Irishmen are ready to believe that it can be a bright one.

Huzzas & Silence. The signs are everywhere: in the new factories and office buildings, in the Irish-assembled cars (Fords, Austins, Volkswagens) fighting for street space in Dublin, in the new TV antennas crowding the rooftops, in the waning of national self-pity. The signs are provided by the new hotels and carriage-trade castles, by the well-dressed people shopping in supermarkets, by the death of many glorious cliches, by the whole panorama of Ireland's land and leaders (see color pages).

The nation's new mood is that of Sean Lemass, who four years ago succeeded Eamon de Valera as Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Though Lemass has been De Valera's protégé and heir apparent for three decades, the two men could not be more dissimilar. "Dev," the aloof, magnetic revolutionary with a martyr's face and mystic's mind, was the sort of leader whom the Irish have adored in every age. Sean Lemass, a reticent, pragmatic planner called "The Quiet Man," is by temperament and ancestry more Gallic than Gaelic, and represents a wholly new species of leadership for Ireland.