E is for...Eireann

Ok, I'm slightly changing the rules here, because Eireann is an Irish word, not an English one. But then again, who said that the words had to be in English.

Eireann means Ireland, and it's the country where I was born and I've lived here all my life. I love it. Not in a republican, nationalistic sense, but in a more familial way. Yes it has bad points. Yes it's tiny. Yes it rains most of the time. Yes we have hit the international headlines this past year for all the wrong reasons. But it's home.

I like the landscape, I like the people and I like the way we have an ability to laugh at ourselves. I even, God help me, like the rain. But what I'm proudest of, is the fact that despite being a poor nation for most of our existence, and despite having a small population, we have produced a lot of great literature. From Joyce and Wilde to Yeats and Shaw. A lot of our current female writers, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Cathy Kelly sell copies of their books worldwide.

Dublin City, where I live, is a UNESCO City of Literature. And amid all the recessionary doom and gloom, the unemployment, our national debt, I think that is something to be proud of.