Ireland

The coming of peace, if it sticks, gives Northern Ireland a chance to cash in on development opportunities the European Union has opened in the Irish Republic. There has been heavy investment in Dublin and the southern coast, from U.S. and Japanese firms attracted by a well-educated, low-paid, work force inside the giant European market.A quarter-century of communal strife has largely denied such investment to the six counties of Northern Ireland, but also to the border counties of the Republic.

The Irish Republic is a very small country and a very Catholic one in terms of the hold of church teaching on civil and public matters. It is perhaps the last truly Catholic country left.This picture is reinforced by the importance to Ireland of the sad public case of the bishop of Galway, who resigned upon acknowledging his paternity of a teen-aged boy in Connecticut and his use of church funds to pay child support. This revelation has become a national preoccupation in Ireland.Great institutions survive lapses of even highly placed individuals who cannot live up to their standards of virtue.

Everyone and every place is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, but to experience the authentic Ireland all year-round, you need to visit Dublin. The Irish capital, home to James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and U2's Bono, began more than 1,000 years ago as a Viking village. Today, it is a diverse city in the heart of a metropolitan area of more than 1 million people. Here are five places not to miss on a visit to the Emerald Isle's largest city: 1 Dublin Castle : Here on a ridge at the junction of the River Liffey and its tributary Poddle, Dublin was born.

After covering the start of the present troubles of Northern Ireland in some depth years ago, I came to the conclusion that Northern Ireland would become part of the Irish Republic after:1. Drastic population change to a Catholic majority in the province.2. A strengthening of European institutions, with Ireland and Britain jointly losing sovereignty.3. Improvement of the Irish economy and welfare system to equal Britain's.4. A great secularization within the Irish Republic, the last truly Catholic country left.

Rosemary Mahoney knew a lot about Ireland and the Irish. She's from a Boston Irish-American family, and when she was 17 she lived in the country for a year and learned to speak Gaelic.But when she went back to Ireland in 1991 to live there for another year and write a book, Ms. Mahoney found out how much she had to learn. She wasn't quite prepared for the complexities of the Irish people, and the relationships between men and women often seemed unfathomable."I think the men are very afraid of women in Ireland, and women have a lot of power in the home," says Ms. Mahoney, a Roland Park resident whose book "Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age" has just been published by Houghton Mifflin.

Ireland's new government is committed to job creation in ways that are new to the Irish tradition, and to nonsectarian civil measures that are alien to that tradition. Ireland is changing, and the Nov. 25 election reflected and hastened that change. So stalemated was the outcome that the politicians needed from then till mid-January to forge a coalition, which sounds more like Israeli or Italian than Irish politics.The unpopular Albert Reynolds remains prime minister. But his Fianna Fail party, which normally rules alone or with very junior partners, is sharing power with the Labor Party, which claims a whopping third of the cabinet seats.

Tucked away in some distant memory is a photo of an Irish coastline where palm trees grow! Does this ring a bell with you?You'll find palms in the southwest, notably in the Ring of Kerry area, the most famous scenic drive in Ireland. The loop through wild country and charming villages encircles the Iveragh Peninsula. The drive usually starts and ends in Kenmare, south of Killarney.The climate that allows cabbage palms to grow is produced by the Gulf Stream, which holds its warmth all the way across the Atlantic and even moderates the climate in parts of Scotland and Norway.

WASHINGTON - Americans recently made a best-seller of a book insouciantly titled "How the Irish Saved Civilization." Last week the Irish were at it again. By their resounding "no" in a referendum on the Nice Treaty, Irish voters advanced the cause of saving European democracy from its stealthiest post-1945 threat - the relentlessly growing European superstate known by an anodyne name, the European Union. The "no" side's slogan: "You will lose power, money and freedom." True, true and true.

PICTURE this: It's a freezing cold morning and the four of us brothers are encased in the collapsed mattress, which reeks of excrement and urine and is the home of millions of fleas and lice that feast nightly on our bodies.Church bells ring out as they do every day, giving Mass times. You struggle to light a fire with wet scraps of wood and sodden peat. Your soaked shirttail is beginning to stiffen with the cold and your ears, nose and toes and fingertips tell you it's freezing in here.That would be a sample winter morning in our house, except for getting the monthly food docket.

THE tangled narratives of the relationship between Ireland and Britain -- and among the people of Ireland, north and south -- are littered with broken promises, betrayals and easy solutions.The shattered hopes are so embedded in the glaciers of unforgiving history that one reads with trepidation Wednesday's declaration of a "framework of peace" by the governments in London and Dublin.But this is the very brightest possibility to have emerged in the quarter-century's violence that has claimed 3,000 lives -- Protestants and Roman Catholics, gunmen, soldiers, civilians, children.