From yesterday's Boston Globe, "The ire of the Irish":

Twenty years ago, when Ronald Reagan visited his ancestral village in County Tipperary, most Irish people – uncharacteristically – bit their tongues.

Reagan’s support for right-wing dictators and guerrillas in Central America and for the apartheid government in South Africa, not to mention his determination to put more missiles in Europe, made him wildly unpopular in the land of his forebears. Still, the Irish welcomed him to Ballyporeen, and cheered him when he took a sip from a pint of Guinness at a pub renamed in his honor – even though, truth be told, some Tipperarymen privately grumbled that a Secret Service agent took the first sip and that Reagan merely used the pint as a photo prop.

But things change, even in a country where it used to be said there was no future, just the past happening over and over again. The Ronald Reagan Pub in Ballyporeen is for sale. And next Friday, when George W. Bush touches down at Shannon Airport for a United States-European Union summit, many Irish people are expected to give him their equivalent of a Bronx cheer instead of the traditionalcead mile failte, or a hundred thousand welcomes. There were about 10,000 demonstrators when Reagan visited Ireland; Irish police say they are preparing for at least 10 times that number next week.

Determined to keep an expected crush of protesters away from Bush, the Irish police are mounting the biggest security operation in the country’s history – which, on an island that endured a fierce 30-year Irish Republican Army insurgency, says something.