Across the country, a new sophistication meets timeless beauty and (almost) all the eyes are smiling. Kevin Doyle finds his roots—and much else

Apart from some vague fragments of family myth regarding my forebears (a hero bishop who was tarred and feathered by the English; a giant who ate three chickens at every meal), the door to my family's past in Ireland was shut long ago. Whatever ties we had there have been forgotten: There was nary a shamrock in my home when I was growing up, and no one ever went misty-eyed talking about the auld sod. Why would they? After all, they left because things were bad. Because mothers and their children were dropping dead on the side of the road, their mouths stained green from the grass they chewed to fill their famine-starved bellies. There's not a lot of romance in that.

So I'd never thought much about Ireland. If anything, I had a hereditary predisposition to not think about it. But for the last several years, the miracle of the Celtic Tiger is a subject that's been hard to avoid, and I've had more than one conversation with more than one Irish acquaintance, usually after more than one drink, that went very much like this:

"So, you've never been to Dublin or Galway?"

"No."

"Never seen Clare or Cork?"

"Nope."

"If you go now you won't feckin' believe how much they've changed. I tell you, you won't even feckin' recognize them."

"But I've never been."

"Well, then you really won't recognize them."

So I decided it was time I found out what all the commotion was about. To return, in a way, to places I'd never been and to see what had become of the land my ancestors left without looking back.

The New Ireland has two faces, I'd been told, and you can see them clearly on two streets in Dublin. Gritty Moore Street, an outdoor market since the 1920s, is the face of the new, multiethnic Ireland. Chinese restaurants and African hair salons line the sidewalk, while Turks, Pakistanis, and Poles pick through crates of apples, potatoes, Chinese pears, and red chilies. Irish fishwives, once legion, are dwindling here, but the hearty few who remain hawk shimmering mackerel, ruby snapper, and alabaster sole, cigarettes dangling precariously from their lips.

Across the River Liffey, Dublin's axis, on Grafton Street, is the modern, moneyed side of the new Ireland: a cobblestoned pedestrian thoroughfare lined with designer boutiques and anchored by the hallowed Brown Thomas department store, where Lindsay Lohan look-alikes brave the fifty-degree chill in fur-trimmed tube tops, miniskirts, and flip-flops, while freshly minted professionals in business suits scurry along, mobile phones plastered to their ears.

But no one had told me about the face of Ireland I'd stumble upon during a July afternoon stroll along the north shore of the Liffey. Following the percussive beat of a thumping bass coming from behind the city's Civic Offices at Wood Quay, I rounded the corner of the modern concrete municipal building and found myself wading into a sea of hulking transvestites in spangles and fishnet stockings, their high heels plunging into the damp earth. Above it all bobbed cotton-candy wigs of platinum blond, fuchsia, and flame, like so many fluorescent buoys on a sequined tide. On a stage in the center of an amphitheater, a willowy blond with an impressive Adam's apple shouted to a cheering crowd of several hundred. "We're here today to celebrate who we are and how far we have come!" The audience roared.