My Favourite Place in the World to Wander: Ireland

I love travelling, and have travelled in well over 30 countries, and in every continent but Africa.

However, my favourite country to travel in, hands down, is Ireland.

It is beautiful and green. It is full of history, mythic, magic and mysticism. It has a poetic pagan past, those wonderful Druids, and an equally poetic early Christian history. It is tragic. It has wonderful place names, full of poetry in themselves. It has nurtured wonderful poets like Yeats and Heaney.

However, it is the people who make a place, and I love the Irish. I love their accents, their use of English, their gentleness, their good humour, and their helpfulness.

I think whenever I need a break, I will escape to Ireland if I can.

However, I would not like to live there permanently. It is too homogenous a society. What on earth would I do among all those O’Leary’s and McLoughlins? I still think England is the best place for a citizen of the world,  with a reasonably diverse population, and a fairly open-minded, tolerant and accepting indigenous population.