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Immigrants to Ireland began to form second and third branches of the Irish soul. It was and is not uncommon for Souths and Norths in any land to diverge on the issue of charm v. hustle. But in Ireland the normal geographical split was widened by the nature of the settlers. In Ulster, these tended to be tough Presbyterian Scotsmen, with little taste for England but less for the Pope. Their role in an island without history was to keep the 17th century's religious acrimony and long-faced industry alive and to form a kind of museum for the Protestant ethic. The Scots seldom assimilate anywhere without a struggle, and Belfast is a lot closer to Glasgow than it is to Dublin, especially on a Sunday. It may help to fix the type if you realize that Woodrow Wilson and Field Marshal Montgomery were both descendants of Ulster. Picture these men locked in a small country with a bunch of unreconstructed Gaels and marvel that the place is as quiet as it is.
In the South, settlers were more likely to be Church of Englanders, casual, snotty, talented. Out of them was spun the raffish-gentleman type: Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde. They too stayed as aloof from the Gaelic Irish as space permitted, and the freedom they fought for was their own, not their servants'. Yet compromise came easier to them. To this day, they have no trouble feeling superior even in a minority setup. Such religious passions as they had, in any case, cooled a long time ago. Southera Protestants have shown no manifest sympathy with their hot-under-the-clerical-collar colleagues up North —who according to Pete Hamill, the American-Ulster-man writer, have no trouble feeling like a minority even when they're not.
The history the Anglo-Irish missed includes the whole Industrial Revolution. The wit of Wilde and Bernard Shaw jumps us back over the smokestacks to the English Restoration, when Dublin and London were more like country towns and a man had time to work on his wit. Now the English have stopped exporting clever fellows across the Irish Sea. Yet their dandyish wit lingers in the air, and when it flicks against the grotesque imagery of the Gaels, it sets off one of those wild word-fires, fastidiously phrased, that can sometimes blaze up in pubs and books alike, becoming a fire-storm in the works of Joyce. God knows the Irish will even deny that they're witty, to make a point, and declare that English influence was the ruination of them. But the mixture of humors has given them a literature which—if you phrase the question right—they will admit is not altogether bad.
Every visitor wants the Irish to stay the way they are. But the younger Irish have known for some time that this depends on remaining outside history; that the culture which has been mummified so long, and looks so fresh, may well crumble at the first blast of fresh air. There are parts of it they would not half mind losing, the strengths and weaknesses being so inextricably entwined.