this week is the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, I was in Ireland 24 years ago, at the age of 19. I’m always unsure on how to tell this story and it always ends up coming out of my mouth from a different entry point. I will start from the beginning.

I graduated high school when I was 17, partly because I have a late birthday and partly because I missed/skipped the 2nd grade in the midst of moving around to 13 different schools, all within Alberta and due to relationships my mother had with men. her father, my father, other peoples fathers. Even my last year of high school I only had the bare minimum of classes, since I already knew I was going to be a detective like my stepdad once I graduated so I just worked at my two jobs (McDonald’s and Pizza Hut) and played soccer and snowboarded. When high school was over, I did much of the same thing waiting for my 18th birthday so I could graduate from the rave scene to real bars that played imported house music on vinyl, I loved to dance. I worked at a grocery store, I moved into the city with a girl I worked with, I snowboarded at least twice a week when I wasn’t playing soccer or hanging out with the guys from one of my teams where they lived in university residence - I played on a boys team in our town for indoor soccer and a women’s team in the city for outdoor, i’d skateboard and hang out with my brother at Denny’s after picking him up from high school parties.

In September I decided to start the police foundations program at the college, so I moved back in with my parents and drove between 2 - 4 hours daily to get to classes. One of my electives was Political Science where I got to represent Sweden (a socialist country my Marxist -goth self at the time greatly admired) in a Model UN exercise that changed my life. I had never left Canada, aside from the 5 most northern border states and had always wanted to travel, the only travel jobs I knew of were friends who were getting West Jet flight attendant jobs and that was not for me. Could I be a cop that travels? In January I attended a presentation in the second semester and on the spot sign up for a Student Work Abroad Program and I chose Ireland since I didn’t want to learn another language and Australia looked way too hot, England too crowded ( i got sick from the air pollution in Toronto) and the US too close. By March I had gotten a credit card on the college campus, pulled all the cash off it and put it in my bank account to get the work visa then bought my plane ticket. By May I was in Dublin with $250 dollars (in travellers cheques) in my hand, getting a briefing with my new friend (Tally) from college also on the trip to Ireland, on the job and housing boards. This trip was before the internet and cell phones were super expensive. Tally and I stayed at a huge hostel in downtown Dublin near the bus station. Everyday we would take turns negotiating around 40 other (mostly Australian) women in the dorm for a spot at a sink while the other one would watch the backpacks, after that we would head down to the cafeteria for bread with fresh butter, eggs, tomatoes beans, bacon and milk from a dispenser before we would head to the job board at the SWAP/Travel Cuts office and then make the rounds passing out resumes or checking in at various government departments to register as foreign workers. The rest of the time we would hang out in the museums or parks because they were free and we were pretty nerdy, we’d have to bring our backpacks with us so we wouldn’t get robbed. Although tally did get robbed in the hostel while we were sleeping because she didn’t heed my advice to sleep with her money belt around her neck our under her head. despite the aesthetic of the Cranberries at the time, employers did not fancy our Goth look, especially in the service industry at 18 years old with funny accents. This was the year 2000 and Ireland had just become a full member of the European Union, tech companies were setting up shop, students were coming from abroad to study and workers were coming from southern and eastern Europe to work. The Irish were losing thier minds with xenophobia. Sometimes when people spat at us I didn’t know whether it was because we were foreign, looked homeless, were goth, because we were women or because they were just high or drunk (there was a lot of IV drug use in public). We had maple leaf flags on our backpacks but few people knew what that was and would pronounce it “Canadia”, one of the American states. We decided to move south to Sligo where there would be less competition, it was worse and the hostel was much more expensive at about 15 Irish pounds/night, no breakfast. the plan was to follow the highway around NW to Galway but after Tally got mugged at gunpoint in a park we started scrambling a bit and ended up in Limerick at a foreign student housing bunker working at a 3 star hotel cleaning 14 hotel rooms a day in a polyester mini skirt and blazer. I ran out of money at this point and spent most of my time listening to my walkman, reading and writing while waiting for the job to start and then to get paid. The hotel took my work permit and never did pay real wages because they deducted the lunches and uniforms from foreign workers salaries, they also only let us sit with the Spanish workers at the foreign table so I only had enough to cover rent. I got another night shift job at the 24 hour McDonlads downtown, near the Limerick Prison where people would slur-yell incomprehensible orders at me while I tried to supervise middle aged Irish colleagues to follow my pseudo-American ways, which they were expert at both ignoring and ridiculing simultaneously. I certainly learned a lot about Europe from that and I hadn’t even read Angela’s Ashes to find out that we were in one of the most notoriously anti-social towns in the country, also aptly named ‘stab city’ as was the McDonalds policy to pay for staff to take taxis home to avoid such an an encounter and ultimately upset productivity. These were the days when Mary Robinson was trying to pull this old traditional isolated country out of third world status and into a mini-Germany; progressive and globally focused. On days off Tally and I would explore castle ruins lounge around the library at the university and wait for hours for someone to forget to log off of a computer so we could use the internet and write home. I also had an idea that hostels like foreigners so we could work there - I emailed every single one on my little pocket hostel map and heard back from about 5.