Wetsuit Wonderland

The past is a foreign country and in many ways modern Ireland may as well be on another planet when I compare it to the place I grew up in. Change is inevitable but a part of me still pines for that place, the smells, the tastes and the thrills of that distant Ireland. I could mention numerous examples of what has changed in my home town, from the industrial size Tesco through to the fine marina through to the legoland estates which have made rural roads look like faceless city suburbs. My home town looks a lot better and smells of new money, it is just a pity that certain things could not have been planned a bit better.
When I was a kid the highlight of the summer was doing the swimming and water safety lessons at the local beach in Cappagh. Rain or shine we braved the cold water in our regulation Speedos. Sure it was cold but we just went into the water and got on with it. As we got in to our teens we had to spend longer and longer in the water doing safety routines. I was an extremely thin boy so this was very difficult for me and I actually ended up being fished out of the water on a few occasions suffering from hypothermia.
Nowadays I rarely see a kid in the water here without a wetsuit. Wetsuits are much cheaper than they were twenty years ago and parents don't want their kids getting cold. My initial reaction on seeing this is that they are losers, the kids are too soft, they don't need wetsuits and how can they prepare for the real circumstance of, say, diving into a river to save somebody if they are being protected by wetsuits? On the other hand I think back to my own experience of never passing the advanced safety lessons because I could not survive long enough in the water without succumbing to hypothermia.
The wetsuit dilemma sums up my attitude to Ireland now. The country is doing its own thing and my opinions are irrelevant. I am sometimes jealous of the success it has in my absence, I am often proud of its achievements but ultimately I am a bystander, a foreigner, an outsider looking in. Ultimately you can only change the place where you live not the place where you dream.