Irvine Welsh tells of how Ireland went multi-ethnic overnight.

Irvine Welsh: Well, Ireland’s kind of… It’s such a weird transformation. I’ve been… Because I’ve got relatives and family from there. I’ve been going there since I was a kid. But it’s like, it’s kind of… Just, in the last 10 years, 15 years, it just come out with, just like, [under new] recession, basically, and it’s just changed. it’s just changed so much. It’s become like, it’s become an importer of people. It’s become a multi-ethnic society and this has happened just in almost in a blink of an eye. When I go away from my street and come back about 2 weeks later, the whole place practically was different. You can see it happen before your eyes, almost. It’s quite a transformation. So, it’s been a great thing for people in Ireland because they’re just… You have to have been put up [IB] over the years. You deserve a bit of wealth and affluence. But, on the other hand, something like that does change a country and sometimes not always for the better.

There’s a kind of gold rush mentality, but, again the current recession we’re moving into now, it’s difficult to see how that can play out. But, again, Ireland is in a much stronger position than the USA or the UK to ride out the recession because unlike us in Britain or yourselves in America, it’s now spend all this kind of capital reserve. So, it’s like it has a lot of money reserved. So, the big capital projects like the Dublin Metro, the [IB] and stuff, these are all going ahead, whereas these are usually the first things that crumble when you have a recession.

Recorded on: September 8, 2008