What is life like in Ireland?

Answer 1

How is it different in the US than in Ireland? It's bigger, everything is a LOT cheaper to buy and to do, and there is more stuff to do. On the other hand, it's less pretty, you have to buy into car and debt culture to survive, there are a lot of very ignorant but well meaning people, and cultural differences create a very factional society.

1) Everything is cheaper in the US. It may be hard to imagine but it is simply cheaper to live in the US then anywhere else.

2) Becoming an American citizen is more a function of getting a credit card, a car loan, and a house loan than passing some test or other. You join the culture here by accumulating debt.

3) The US consists of half a dozen "cultures" depending on which area you visit. It's one federal government, but the northeast, Great Lakes, plains, south, tex/mex, and northwest cultures are very different - people look, dress, act, and think differently (see 'the Nine Nations Of North America" for a simplistic version) And these cultures have different racial mixes as well as cultural mixes. Really, the USA is an empire at home as well as abroad.

4) it's very big. It takes a long time to get anywhere. Everything is spread out. You spend a lot of time driving. Statistics are misleading: almost all public transportation in the USA is in one city: NYC, and even there, it is a vast minority of people, while the rest of the country operates by car. It's not just a matter of preference. It's a really big place. Parts of the west have very low population density, comparable to polar regions in other countries.

5) the 'friendship' concept in Ireland is very intimate and meaningful. In the USA, especially among the educated, friendships are often related to either business or recreational activities, and people are more likely to 'trade up' in friends than hold them. It is easy to feel alone in the USA.

6) People own their houses. Apartments are only for 'the young and the poor'. It's a status symbol. And American's don't respect raising children in apartments. Nice people will say otherwise, but in practice it's a cultural fact. THus houses are everywhere.

7) People will generally be friendly to you if you are from Ireland. Most major cities have Irish communities. Even Seattle.

8) During the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and certainly post-war, Europeans in general rebelled against nobility, but Americans against the government, since we didn't have a nobility. So the majority of us don't trust the government. Most europeans, even English speakers do not understand this. Likewise, in Europe as well as in Canada and Australia, women rebelled against the church, where in the USA, women rebelled against MEN. Therefore male-female relationships in the USA are frequently (not always but frequently, and especially among the educated) more like partnerships than intimate relationships between men and women. This is slowly changing among women currently under thirty. But if you watch people and wonder what's different, that's what it is.

9) While western europeans are catching up, Americans are FAT, largely because of our car culture, but walking is impractical. Office work is sedentary. And food is very inexpensive. And portions are big. There are a million ways to eat here and it will surprise you how true the statement is, that Americans are 'the people that eat all the time'.

10) Americans invite people to their houses. Americans do not invite people to gather at pubs and restaurants that often unless they are young and dating.

11) America is NY on one end, and San Francisco on the other, and everything else is Cleveland. In other words, the ring of dirty apartments, chain link fences, unkempt yards around Paris, or Vienna, or any other city is present in the USA, although many cities have cleaned up significantly over the past twenty years.

12) There is a LOT of stuff to do. It's unbelievable. Life is a lot more commercial, which means more money moves, and money only creates prosperity when it's moving, and it MOVES in the US, so there are a lot of options for entertainment. This means that while relationships are less intimate they are easier to maintain with casual activities.

13) outside of a few places, most architecture is often hideous. Driving from the north to south ends of Los Angeles is to see literally HOURS of indisinquishable reclaimed desert covered in revolting strip malls, telephone poles, and shoddy buildings that are all to similar to those in Mexico city.

14) There is still real wilderness here and it's really beautiful in many places that are NOT covered with shoddy buildings. The rockies, the northwest, the upper great lakes and Alaska in particular are beautiful. Houston and it's strip clubs, and Texas deserts, are horrible. In fact, if you want to feel particularly alienated, visit Texas. It's a whole different world.

15) there has been a constant movement of wealth to the west coast. A movement of people out of the rural areas into the cities. The southwest has been nearly reclaimed by Mexico. The great lakes region (the manufacturing sector) is impoverished, aging and losing population rapidly, and homes can be bought for less than a third of elsewhere in the country. San francisco and seattle are the growth areas due to money and technology, Los Angeles for the entertainment arts. New york for finance and advertising.

16) Germany (and much of Europe) focused on creating educated average people. Americans focused on creating educated exceptional people. For example, it would be very inappropriate to 'determine' the future of children, so Americans assume everyone can be president or go to Harvard - and that isn't always good. And what that means is that the average Irishman, Brit, and northern European is much more aware, well read, educated than the average American. While the exceptional Americans are indeed, pretty exceptional.

17) Americans are not afraid of failure. The culture rewards risk takers. It does not punish failures. "if you haven't gone bankrupt in business you haven't tried hard enough". To europeans it's odd.

18) America is an empire, not a nation. America is an empire of different nationalities all competing with each other similar to how Europe was organized as tribes across state boundaries before nationalism gave states their ethnic identities. And America is becoming increasingly 'tribal'. So people's behavior (the silly friendliness that europeans tease Americans for) is due to the fact of a highly mobile, highly fractured set of tribal cultures that must interact with each other across lots of class and culture boundaries, when they are all commercially motivated.

19) American society is highly divided, and increasingly so. While the country is center-right (which means that it leans conservatively), the young, immigrants, and single women in particular, and single mothers, minorities, and increasingly affluent urbanites, tend to be left leaning. The coastal areas are more left leaning and the center areas more conservative.

20) Crime is different in the USA. 'Knicking it', or small property crime is oddly common in most European countries on a scale that American's cannot comprehend. In some cities you can still be ticketed for 'jaywalking'. Some visitors say "I don't feel that this country is free, I feel that consumer goods in this country are almost free." Most American violence comes from dense urban areas, and in those areas, and in the criminal industry (and it's an industry here, where drugs are the primary cause - again policing this country is very hard compared to policing a dense urban environment). And the country is more culturally militial than all but perhaps Germany.

21) Americans are VERY ACTION ORIENTED, and very experimental. They will act on very little information, and far less certainty, with less perception of risk.

22) If you drink and drive or drink in public it can be very costly. Dublin (or Sheffield or York) drinking behavior is not as easy to get away with as it used to be.

23) Insurance regulations and our 'irresponsible courts' mean that it's very hard to do a lot of things without feeling like all risk and excitement has been removed from it, and that you're being treated like a child. For example, if Irish castles were in the USA, you'd only be able to look at them from a distance, because of an owner's fear of lawsuits.

That's a start.

Answer 2

This year's global economic recession has hit Ireland very hard. Many people are in financial difficulty. Other than that, it's a lovely country, with lots of pubs.

Answer 3

They tried to live like everyone else. They had hard times and good but all of it came and improved in the end.(: