You have to think very carefully before asking anyone in Dublin what they do for a living these days. At a famous journalists' bar near the Liffey, I made the mistake of asking that question of a young man named David, who sat nursing a pint.
It's an innocent question at home, the classic Canadian icebreaker, but it's a conversational grenade in a country where the jobless rate is 14.8 per cent. "I don't have work at the moment," David said, his eyes on the floor. He had been looking for months. We talked about Canada, and how at the revolving restaurant in Niagara Falls he had lost his father on a trip to the bathroom.
Why not go back, I said, and join the throngs of his countrymen looking for work in Canada? He looked up for the first time. "I couldn't leave Ireland," he said. "I'd be too homesick."
It's the same story all over Dublin, where the pubs remain packed despite the economy - full of gallows humour and people complaining about the price of a pint and holding goodbye parties for their friends. It's the Irish disease, unchanged over centuries: They would give anything to stay, but they have to go. (One estimate says 50,000 Irish emigrated in the past year.)
At the Hairy Lemon in downtown Dublin, there was a farewell party for an unemployed information technology specialist who was leaving for Toronto. "I don't want to go, but I've got no choice," he said. He ordered another drink and asked, hopefully, "Is there much work in Toronto?"
We're supposed to believe that globalization has rendered the whole world one big identikit mall, and you can be as happy in Lima as in Oslo, as long as you've got access to Facebook and World of Warcraft. Go forth and assimilate is the mantra of the new century. Follow the money.
But that's not the case in Ireland, where the sense of belonging and the desire to be at home is palpable. The irony is that the post-university generation thought that it would be the one to stay in Ireland, to reap the economic rewards of the Celtic Tiger boom. That tiger, of course, is now an inert tabby being served a plate of crow from the International Monetary Fund kitchen.
There are the people who would rather fight than leave: Jobless Paddy is one of them. I'm not idly trafficking in ethnic stereotypes here. If you had been walking down Merrion Road in Dublin recently, you would have noticed a billboard depicting a young man standing in front of the CN Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the Sydney Opera House, under the words, "Save me from emigration." In one hand, he carried a weirdly shaped stick that would be recognizable to anyone who plays the demented Irish sport of hurling. Interested employers were asked to contact Jobless Paddy.
Jobless Paddy is in fact Feilim Mac An Iomaire, a 26-year-old from Galway who was sick of unemployment and terrified that he would have to leave home to find work. "The thing is, I absolutely adore this country," said Mr. Mac An Iomaire, a marketing graduate who had spent a year in Australia and had no intention of leaving Ireland again. "I'd seen lots of my friends go. The options seem to be to stay on your parents' couch or go abroad, and we were losing lots of good people. But I wasn't going to leave without a fight."
He had sent out hundreds of conventional CVs and got not a nibble in response. Despairing, and running out of unemployment benefits, he used his last 2,000 euros to buy the billboard. The aim was to show that Jobless Paddy, given a chance, had the kind of creativity and drive that Ireland might need to pull itself out of its slump.
The pitch - for God's sake, keep this brain at home - worked, and Mr. Mac An Iomaire received hundreds of e-mails from potential employers. He had five job interviews, and on Monday begins a new job in the marketing and public-relations department of the betting giant Paddy Power. "I know how lucky I am to get this job," he said. (You could say he's rolling the dice with his future, but unlike that other popular gambling venture, the Irish housing market, the gaming industry is unlikely to crumble in a smoking heap. At least not in the near future.)
On the day I left Ireland, the newspapers were a sea of gloom with one bit of cheer floating on top: Officials were considering the possibility of a second IMF bailout, but at the same time, on both sides of the border they were celebrating Rory McIlroy's victory at the U.S. Open. Last year, the world's hottest golfer talked about how he had no desire to move to the U.S. in search of a pot of gold. "I love my life in Ireland, back in Europe, and I don't want ever to give that up." Jobless Paddy would understand.