Irishman Jack O’Sullivan is among the overseas ambassadors for Vilnius as European Capital of Culture for 2009. He talks to CATHERINE REILLY about his enduring love for Lithuania’s capital city, and why visitors won’t be disappointed by its many cultural delights.
AFTER ONE hour’s chat with Jack O’Sullivan in central Dublin, you are tempted to hop on an airport bus, squeeze yourself onto a Vilnius-bound plane and sample the city that this likeable Irishman holds so closely to his heart.
O’Sullivan, who spent a year in the Lithuanian capital in the mid-1990s and who regularly returns, has an enduring fascination with the current European Capital of Culture – and his enthusiasm is infectious. So it’s little wonder that the organisers of the year-long events programme asked him to be among its symbolic ambassadors.
Originally from Cork, O’Sullivan first ventured to Lithuania in 1994 on a major environmental assignment. “I was living in Dublin and got a call from a friend who was running a company called International Development Ireland, and he said ‘We have a potential job in Lithuania’. I said, ‘Where is Lithuania?’” recalls O’Sullivan, who is an environmental consultant. The company was successful in landing the contract, and he was chosen to oversee the project.
“My assignment was to go to Lithuania, live there for a year and produce the first ever national environmental strategy for the country. The Ministry of Environmental Protection, where I was lodged, gave me five people to work with, we set up a nice team and within a year we had it done on time and within budget.”
The posting to Vilnius also had a major impact on O’Sullivan’s personal life, because he met his wife Dalia in the unexpectedly romantic setting of the environmental ministry. “She was working in the climate change division and I was working on the environmental strategy, and one day she said hello to me, and I said hello to her,” he remembers fondly.
“That year I learned a lot about Vilnius and fell in love with the city,” he continues. “I rented a small house, I was beside the river – five minutes walk from my work, four minutes from the Opera and Ballet Theatre, 10 minutes from the equivalent of the National Concert Hall –there were about three big concert halls. And I was about 12 minutes by bus from the forest.”
During his year in Vilnius, he amassed scores of friends and acquaintances, but also remembers a certain reservation among Lithuanians during initial encounters.
“They are a very kind of reserved people,” he says. “Once you get to know Lithuanian people, they are extremely friendly, but there is a reservation which I think among the older people in particular stemmed from the communist period, when you never knew who might be listening or who might carry a word you said to someone you didn’t want to hear it.”
With Dalia, he strolled the streets of Vilnius countless times. “We found that we rather liked each other,” says O’Sullivan, “And when I came back to Ireland, I thought ‘I miss her. I miss the chats and the walks.’ And so I went back to Lithuania again in 1996 for a visit and again in 1997.”
The pair later married and now live in Castlepollard, Co Westmeath. “The forests around there were so lovely and reminded me of Lithuania,” explains O’Sull-ivan.
Ireland and Lithuania draw obvious comparisons, being of similar geographical size, predominantly Catholic and having endured a shared experience of occupation and mass emigration.
O’Sullivan, who was awarded the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas for promoting links between Lithuania and Ireland, sees many similarities – and some differences – between the two countries.
As a professional environmentalist, O’Sullivan is particularly impressed by the Lithuanians’ relationship with the natural world, something he feels is lacking in Ireland.
“When you go out into the forest in Lithuania, loads of people are picking mushrooms in the autumn, berries in the spring and summer, nuts later on. In Ireland, in the forest, if you are picking berries, people would say ‘What are you doing with them things? I’d only eat them if I bought them in a shop.’
“And when everyone here was tearing up their garden to lay tarmac for parking cars, in Lithuania they were planting stuff. There’s a much greater concern for heritage and the environment.”
He recalls a visit to Lithuania in 2000, when the Carrickmines Castle controversy was beginning to erupt in Ireland (the M50 motorway was built through it), and seeing a castle being rebuilt in Vilnius.
“I spoke to one of the people involved in the project and he said ‘Yes, we’re rebuilding the castle, it’s going to look exactly like it did in the 16th century, but we’re going to make it quite modern inside, it will be like a conference centre, a place where we’ll be able to show people what it was like.’ And I said ‘You know we had a castle just like that in Dublin, Carrickmines, and they are building a road through it.’ And I’ll never forget his words to me – he said ‘Why doesn’t the government stop it?’ I said ‘It’s the government doing it!’ He took a step back and looked at me in utter disbelief.”
The country has also managed to stave off much of the consumerism that has so gripped Ireland in the past 10 years. “The consumer society hasn’t quite hit yet but the pressures are strong,” he says. “I don’t know the situation now but when I was there, every ministry was given an economic advisor by the United States, and this guy’s job was to push the ‘free market’ doctrine... the message was always the same: ‘Privatise your farms, your rivers, your electricity service and you’ll be great.’”
He continues: “Ireland also has an awful lot in common with Lithuania. Both our countries lost half their population in different times – Ireland through emigration and famine, Lithuania through the Soviet system, being sent to Siberia, Jews being killed in their thousands after being invaded by Germany in 1941.”
A wealth of poets and writers have also been produced by the two countries, although Lithuania has been much more successful in preserving its language. “Like Ireland, the quality of poetry, music and sculpture is just way out, it’s fantastic,” he says.
“Lithuania is not an easy country politically,” adds O’Sullivan. “I think that politics, like in Ireland, can be pretty rough. So like Ireland, all the governments are coalitions.”
But probably the biggest connection between Ireland and Lithuania is the fact that tens of thousands of Lithuanians have come to live and work here since the country’s EU accession in 2004. Ireland has simply been viewed as a place to earn good money, confirms O’Sullivan, who nevertheless feels that a significant number of Lithuanians will stay here, especially those married to Irish spouses.
O’Sullivan also agrees that the media coverage in relation to Lithuanians in Ireland has been almost entirely negative, a fact that concerns and saddens him.
“Stabbings, drunk driving, driving without insurance and so on – that’s the only thing people read about. I think one thing the [Lithuanian] embassy must do – it probably is doing quite well but it should do more – is to promote a good image.”
This year represents a unique time in which to visit Lithuania, as it celebrates the millennium of its first mention in the written word, and Vilnius holds the status of European Capital of Culture, which will see a host of musical, artistic, literary and theatrical events.
Užupis is a part of Vilnius that O’Sullivan has particularly good memories of, explaining that it’s an artists’ mecca which has, tongue-in-cheek, even declared itself an independent republic (with a national day on 1 April). It is well worth a visit, says O’Sullivan, who says that Vilnius will have something for pretty much everyone.
The rest of the country, too, has some beautiful attractions, not least the Curonian Split on the coastline, which O’Sullivan explains can be Mediterranean-like in the summer.
For the full programme of events in Vilnius as European Capital of Culture 2009, visit www.culturelive.lt
