Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [12]
It saw the leprechauns. It saw the Washer. It saw me . . . or at least I think it did, as someone who could see the Old Folk and was therefore of interest. It didn’t need us, though, for tonight. It had had enough. It gazed yellowly at us for a moment more, then padded leisurely away across Temple Bar Square into the shadows behind the Irish Film Centre—the lighter-colored stripes, livid green like a thunderstorm sunset, fading into grimy city shadow as it went, the darker stripes gone the color of that shadow already, vanishing into it as the lighter ones faded. Only the shape of the slowly lashing tail remained for a moment under the stuttering light of the streetlamp at the corner of the S quare . . . then slipped into the dark and was gone.
A horrified, frozen silence followed.
“F me,” said the leprechaun at last, when he could speak again. “It’s the Celtic Tiger . . .”
THE OLD PEOPLE MET AGAIN late that night in the Long Hall, after chucking-out time had officially been called and the mortals pushed (or in select cases, thrown) out into the street. The Old Folk, for their own part, pay no attention to licensing laws, having little to fear from them. There’s no point staging Garda raids on pubs open past “time” when between the first bang on the door and the forced entry, everybody inside literally vanishes.
Many of the Old Ones were afraid to say the name of what we’d seen. The idiom had become popular in the early nineties, adopted as inward investment boomed and the economy became the fastest-growing in Europe. It had become a favorite phrase and image for Irish people everywhere, a matter of pride, turning up in countless advertisements. But no one had foreseen the side effects, perhaps not even the Old People. They were seeing them now.
“We should hunt down whoever coined the F ing name and make their last hours unpleasant,” said one of the Washers.
“Too late for that now,” the Eldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name, and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while.And now that it’s more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real. It’s started killing us to take our strength from us, and it’ll keep killing us and getting bigger and stronger . . . until it’s big enough to breed.”
A sort of collective shudder went through the room. I shuddered, too, though it was as much from the strangeness of the moment as anything else. There are no female leprechauns, but nonetheless there are always enough younger ones to replace the old who die. Power in Ireland does not run to mortal’s rules, either in reproduction or in other ways. If the Folk said the Tiger could make more of itself, it could.And when the food supply ran out in the city, the Tiger’s brood would head into the countryside and continue the killing until there were none of the Old Folk left . . . and none of Old Ireland. What remained would be a wealthy country, the fastest-growing economy in Europe, then as now: but spiritually it would be a dead place, something vital gone from it forever.
“I think we all know who we need now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “We need the one who speaks to the Island in tongues