Surely the national slogan of the 4.5 million Irish who still remain on this hugely agricultural island must be something similar to, "What! Me Worry?" Beset by enough problems to make any populace moan and groan, the Irish have a seemingly bottomless zest for the pleasures of life.

"Worry is the interest you pay for tomorrow's troubles," Caitlin Chairbre, a fiesty mother of six and a pub owner in Drogheda, told me one evening. "In Ireland we live from day to day, still believing strongly that everything in good time will be righted by God, or fate, or whatever.

"Aye, it is our faith that's always made us different, made us strong in spite of all the troubles and peoples who's sought to rule us."

She handed me another dark and foamy pint of Guinness ale that someone in the packed pub had bought for me and continued, "'Drink and be merry today, for tomorrow may not come!'--That's what the average working man here will tell you." Then, with a twinkle in her hazel eyes, she added, "Which makes owning a pub all the much better, you understand."

Caitlin (Irish for Cathleen) so well epitomized the warmth I was to find everywhere in Ireland, be it in the Catholic south or in the Protestant north. Somehow she had heard of my walking north from Dublin, and she had sent her son, Fiacre, out on the road between Dublin and Drogheda to search for me. When he'd found me, he'd left his car beside the roadway and walked beside me the last two miles into the ancient town on the banks of the Boyne River.

Then for the next two days I was treated to several sumptuous Irish dinners of locally caught salmon, potatoes, oxen tongue, home-grown peas and tomatoes, freshly-baked bread, gooseberry and custurd desserts, and gallons upon gallons of hot tea with milk and sugar. In between the meals and the evening songfests in the pub, we were to take trips to the nearby Irish Sea castles in the surrounding grassy hills.

It was like everything I'd ever seen in picture books and movies: tightly-curved country lanes, tall and endless hedges, straw-thatched farmhouses, and lush pastures dotted with what must be the world's most contented-looking dairy cows and sheep.

Even though the car we were packed into--her wildly red-haired daughter Roisin's tiny black Citroen Charleston--was no bigger than a bathtub, the lanes we sped along were barely wide enough for other autos to pass. It certainly made for a lot of wide-eyed gasps on my part, as we darted into each blind curve. The Irish drive as hard and furiously as they drink their stout.

But then one must remember that in Ireland life is to be lived, and that worrying is for those who've gone and died before they had the chance to make ammends. Best to share good times with good company and part with the words: "Zo N-eiri an bozair leaz." May the road rise with you.

Steven