Rush Hour, Ireland

On the fridge in our home is a little magnet that shows a flock of sheep meandering down a country road. Underneath is a caption: “Rush hour, Ireland.” It reminds me of a story of a Spanish professor visiting the west of Ireland where the sense of time used to be the slowest of all. Interviewing an old gentleman he observed sitting for hours outside a pub, he asked him if the Irish had an equivalent for the Spanish word mañana. The old Irishman thought for a long while, and then answered, “No, we don’t have any word as urgent as that.”

That, of course, was then. Ireland more recently…