Interesting facts about Ireland

This was my first visit to the Emerald Isle. It’s always good to see a country first-hand, because you pick up information that you might not have learned otherwise.  I found that I had mistakenly confused much of the country with the UK. The people here speak English natively, they use the same power adapters and they drive on the left side of the street. Those facts plus the proximity and historical ties might make you confuse the two countries, but spend some time here and you’ll immediately see why that’s a silly mistake.  Here are a selection of interesting facts I learned.

• Ireland's top-level-domain suffix is ".ie" (as in "Internet Explorer"). So it was funny to see URLs plastered that way, such as the great coffee shop I visited in central dublin: http://www.insomnia.ie
• There are no snakes in Ireland.
• Today’s population is about 4M, considerably less than the 7–8M estimated in the 1830’s.  A tough combination of the terrible Potato Famine of the 1840s plus massive emigration culled the population to a low of 2M in the 1930s. [I haven’t confirmed these numbers—these are the rough stats that I remember from a casual conversation with one of our Irish employees over lunch]
• Ireland is not a member of NATO.
• They eat a lot of potatoes! I was only here two nights, but somehow they turned up at every meal.

Dublin was wonderful, and I can’t wait to come back again.