Conor O'Clery's Notebook:

A return to Moscow

On a visit to Moscow last week I went to a concert in the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire on Great Nikitskaya Street, not far from the Kremlin. Based on Verdi’s "Otello" it had opera singers performing the solos in Italian, and actors reading the prose lines in Russian. I almost didn’t make it in time because of a traffic jam in the roadway outside, where Mercedes and Lexus cars were jostling for parking spaces.

What a difference this was from the last time I came to an event in the Conservatoire, in February 1990, as the Soviet Union was opening up to the world. That evening hundreds of excited Muscovites slipped and stumbled in the darkness over icy footpaths to crowd inside and hear Mstislav Rostropovich give his first performance after returning from exile. Every seat and aisle was crammed.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife Raisa appeared in a box beside the stage, accompanied by Rostropovich’s wife, the celebrated Bolshoi opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. The atmosphere was electric. The great musician’s performance of Dvorak’s cello concerto was one of the most memorable moments in the struggle of freedom over totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

There is less of that freedom in Russia now, and less of the chaos that accompanied it. I wonder what Rostropovich, who died two years ago, would make of Moscow today. The once mighty Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been consigned to history but in its place the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin has adopted some Soviet characteristics, such as a virtual monopoly of power.

During my visit, the main evening television news program, Vremya, in true Soviet style, featured as its lead item one evening a long and obsequious interview with President Dmitry Medvedev. I was also struck by the absence of any foreign language publications, such as the International Herald Tribune, in city newspaper kiosks. It seems to be policy to make few concessions to English.

However, compared to the impoverished metropolis I knew 20 years ago when I was Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times, the city is booming. Moscow is full of delightful cafes (blini with red caviar for the masses), good restaurants, well-stocked supermarkets and high-end stores. And people in shops and restaurants are polite to customers. Only someone who experienced daily the institutional rudeness of Soviet Russia knows what a real revolution this is.

An Irish crop yields its bounty, but it's 'Gitmo' for the deer

I feel like a real Irish peasant now that I have dug up my first crop of potatoes. The choice of the Kerr’s Pink brand has paid off. They flourish well in our garden which is on a slope at 1,000 feet in the hills above Dublin. Boiled and then fried in oil they are absolutely delicious.

We have also had a good crop of squash, lettuce, parsley, bean and peas.

The strawberries were a disappointment, small and not very sweet or plentiful. I think we are too high up and there hasn’t been enough sunshine. Besides, a pair of jays feasted on them every day.

The same birds I suspect ate our whole crop of gooseberries, so next year we are going to have to invest in nets. We carved the garden this spring out of a field choked with thorn bushes and ferns and enclosed it with a nine-foot fence. It is our very own Gitmo, but designed to keep terrorist out rather than in — the terrorists being the deer that wander down from the forest at dusk looking for an evening meal.

Everything in nature has its uses we find. The zillions of small stones we raked out of the soil have proved useful in securing and surfacing the paths which would otherwise get muddy in rain.

With tomatoes, cucumbers and corn cobs from the greenhouse we are enjoying complete meals from our own resources, and doing our bit for the planet. It is all part of a great movement in Ireland of back to the land.

It used to be house prices that dominated dinner table conversations. With the deflation of the property bubble, its now more about fruit and vegetables and how best to survive as the country slides into bankruptcy and the government screws the taxpayers.

How will the garden grow?

DUBLIN — My dispatch on how the Irish are renewing their relationship with the potato and other home-grown vegetables had a personal resonance.

For months my wife Zhanna and I have been battling to reclaim an impenetrable patch of thorn trees and ferns behind our home in the Dublin mountains and make it into a garden. It involved cutting down 75 trees and then hiring a excavator to dig the stumps out of the ground.

Just as big a problem was the removal of the fern roots, which spread out deep underground like a mass of telephone cables. Every fork-full of earth brought up a tangle of the tubular roots, which eventually made a pile ten feet high. They dried out after a couple of days and we were able to get rid of them in a rather smoky bonfire.

Luckily the area was free of stones, indicating that it had been used for cultivation sometime in the distant past. If you ever wonder why Ireland has so many dry-stone walls, it is because farmers had to do something to dispose of the stones that litter much of the high ground.

Our next step was the erection of a high fence to keep out the sika deer that wander down from the forest and strip bare most unprotected bushes and flowers, though they dislike daffodils so we have daffodils everywhere around the house.

Finally, last weekend, we began planting in our new garden, starting with three rows of potatoes. It was tough work getting to this point but we loved it.

After a dry week the earth was rather dusty and for the first time in Ireland we found ourselves hoping it would rain. And it did, the next day. Soon we will be praying that it will stop.

Snow is general over Ireland

Snow is general over Ireland.

Most people in this country know the famous last line of James Joyce’s celebrated short story "The Dead," written a century ago: “Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

We have come to regard such a thing as a feature of the distant past, especially in these days of global warming. But as I write, snow is indeed general over Ireland, and the country is struggling to cope.

Dublin is among the worst affected places as the snow is blowing from the east across the Irish Sea. This evening rush hour traffic on the M50 motorway around the city has come to a near standstill. Commuters are being advised to find accommodation in the city center rather then add to the chaos. I had to abandon my Prius in blizzard conditions a mile from my home in the Dublin hills.

The extreme weather has been produced by a rare meteorological occurrence — a low-pressure system south of Ireland feeding moisture into frigid air coming all the way from Siberia. Most of the time we just get warm air from the Atlantic. The last occasion we had a ‘big snow’ in Ireland was January 1982, when the government appointed a cabinet member to coordinate emergency services — he was mockingly referred to afterwards as the ‘Minister for Snow.’

The heavy fall is transforming the Irish countryside, making real the imaginary pictures we put on our Christmas cards:

It is beautiful but treacherous: for the first time in a quarter of a century farmers worry that their livestock will die of exposure or suffocate in snow drifts. Many schools have shut and teenagers who have never seen snow lie in the Dublin streets have out with improvised sleighs (mainly strips of plastic).

I once skied on Broadway during a New York blizzard just so I could say I did. So tomorrow I intend to unwrap the cross-country skis that have been lying in my garage since my New York days, and go skiing down the road — so I can boast about it to my grandkids another quarter of a century from now.

And the snow continues to fall, as Joyce put it “on the living and the dead."

A dour Ireland cheers on Obama, for a moment

It is a really depressing time here in Ireland as the Celtic Tiger writhes in its death throes, but for one hour people cheered up, and cheered on the new president of the United States as he took his oath of office.

The ceremony was broadcast live on Irish national television, RTE. Because it was taking place at around 5 pm Irish time, office managers in Dublin allowed their staff to go home before the rush hour to watch it on television.

In fact there was no rush hour. Those who couldn't leave early crowded into bars and hotel lounges watching the event on television. About 200 people were invited into the circular atrium of the U.S. embassy in Dublin to enjoy the privilege of watching the event on American soil, amng them university lecturers, media personalities, senior Irish army officers and business executives.

As the guests gathered to sip white wine and nibble hors d’oeuvres there was much talk of how important the post-Bush presidency would be to a world that has become weary of the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Dr. Tom Clonan, international security analyst for The Irish Times, summed it up for me, saying simply, “We all have a stake in Obama’s success.”

This sentiment was reflected in the enthusiastic reception for President Obama’s inauguration speech, which was relayed from a computer screen onto the concrete atrium wall, and especially in the spontaneous applause when the new president told viewers around the world, “We are willing to lead once more.”

Afterwards embassy staff played a karaoke version of Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys’ ‘There’s no one as Irish as Barak O’Bama’ on the screen, with a leprechaun bouncing along the words at the bottom. But nobody sang along. It wasn’t that sort of party and the mood left by the speech was more somber than merry.

The long-serving Bush-appointed U.S. ambassador, Tom Foley, was not there. He had gone to make way for his successor, leaving a rather puzzled nation with his thoughts on the Irish preference for white rather than black pepper. In a farewell message to Ireland, he wrote about how woanderful a time he had, but that he had one complaint. “The pepper in Ireland doesn’t smell right and someone really should do something about it. I suggest you pick a Tuesday later this year and have everyone switch from whatever you are using in your peper mills to regular black pepper corns. It may help with tourism.”

The only people who could not take time off to watch the inauguration were Ireland’s politicians; they were engaged in furious debate two miles away in the Irish parliament over the government’s decision to nationalize one of Ireland three big banks, Anglo Irish, leading to a collapse in the share price of the other two, AIB and Bank of Ireland, and fears for Ireland’s credibility in world markets.

The Taoiseach (prime minister) Brian Cowen did take time out however to issue a statement about President Obama’s inauguration, saying, "As we face the great challenges that confront us, his leadership will be central to global economic recovery and to the advancement of peace and justice. On behalf of the people of Ireland, I offer President Obama our warmest congratulations, best wishes and support." Cowen often appears in a rumpled suit and one result of the Obama presidency is that the new American president might encourage Irish politicians by example to dress more elegantly.

That at least is the hope of leading Dublin tailor Louis Copeland. By setting a high standard in sartorial elegance, he told The Irish Times, President Obama will be the best thing for the menswear trade in Ireland since John F Kennedy.

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