麻豆官网首页入口

Terry Wogan reaches the halfway mark in the odyssey around his homeland. He has travelled the southern half of the Republic, from Dublin round to Limerick, where he grew up. Now it's the turn of the north, much of which is quite literally a different country. After sharing memories of his buttoned-up childhood holidays in Galway and witnessing a seismic shift in Catholic prudery when 180 Irish ladies throw off all their clothes and take a 'Dip in the Nip' for charity, Terry heads for the border.

As he crosses into Northern Ireland he recalls the watchtowers and armed security. Now all that gives the border away is a subtle change in the texture of the road surface. More than a decade after the Peace Agreement, Terry finds reasons to be cheerful here, with football replacing fighting in the notorious Creggan housing estate, a Peace Bridge hoping to bring Protestants and Catholics together in Derry and a London Docklands-style transformation of the famous shipyards in Belfast where the Titanic was built.

Back in Dublin, Terry remembers the intermission act in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest - the now global Riverdance phenomenon. 1994 also marked the beginning of the Celtic Tiger, an unprecedented economic boom which the Irish thought would never end. Instead, the world-wide economic collapse has dealt Ireland a body blow.