Ireland

Ireland is often portrayed as a charming, laboratory time capsule of pre-industrial Europe; its people a beguiling race of quaint and gullible country folk, imbued with a delightful lack of logic and a good line in disingenuous blarney. Once, maybe, it was possible to believe in that image but not any more. Ireland has leapfrogged the 20th century to become a high-tech, on-line, plugged-in kind of place with a complex culture and a lack of industrial baggage that continues to attract people looking for something different.