I'm happy to report that people in Galway still have the wildest-looking hair. Outside Neachtain's pub, Pat Bracken the puppeteer is doing his usual show, and a dreamy dark-eyed girl tapdances to a jazz CD. As always, Shop Street is alive with buskers, but instead of The Bucks of Oranmore or The Lisheen Jig, these days you're as likely to hear a Romanian folk tune. In the alcove of every second shop sits a child of maybe six or seven, nimbly working a squeezebox, their eyes downcast, their face expressionless.

The local musos aren't impressed with the competition. 'They're there seven days a week', one complains. 'They're gypsies - never go to school.' On the corner, a young Romanian holds up The Big Issue, the magazine that allows its indigent sellers to keep half their takings. My friend hands over three Euros, but the woman clings to the magazine, protesting that she wants to 'sell' it again. More Irish than the Irish, my friend mutters, as he tries to claim his purchase.

The Saturday market is in full swing, ruddy-faced farmers in thick gansies with boxes of turnips, parsnips and spuds alongside hippies offering fresh goats' cheese and wholemeal bread. Around the corner, from the window of Kenny's famous bookshop, a strange assembly of faces observes the passing parade: writers John McGahern and Evelyn Conlon, and redhaired poet Louis de Paor, with his redhaired wife Shirley and their five redhaired kids, looking like those old John Hinde postcards of ringleted kids gathering turf. There's poet and playwright Vincent Woods, who still visits Australia regularly, looking more hirsute than he is today. There's me, a photo taken in 1989, clutching my just-published first book, The Snowy, and in the centre, a somewhat forbidding Germaine Greer - we're all participants at the Irish-Australian History Conference happening up the road at University College Galway.

Greer told a packed theatre that her keynote speech, 'Ned Kelly and the Irish inheritance' was not her area of expertise, and by the end, two and a half hours later, many of the academics present snidely agreed. Her presentation was rambling, as if she was developing it on the spot, but I am prepared to forgive the lack of rigour because it was thrilling to hear a woman of her stature and intellect hoeing into Irish-Australian history with such passion and curiosity.

We've spent far too much time JUDGING Ned, she told us, instead of trying to understand him. She marvelled at how 'blindly courageous' he was, but confessed she only realised Ned was 'such a great hero' when she recently read the Jerilderie letter, in which, a year before he was hanged, Ned pours out the story of his actions, his grievances and his beliefs. As Greer noted, 'a good vaunt.' Peter Carey bowdlerised the style of it for his overrated book, creating a supposed Irish-Australian lingo for Kelly that I found irritating and unbelievable.

Like the eminent historian Manning Clark, Greer's thesis was that Kelly's actions stemmed from the bigger picture of the Irish of his class and time being systematically oppressed, both at home and in Australia, and that he had no choice but to live outside the system, since the system so patently betrayed his kind. To the charges that Kelly was a mere horse thief, Greer mused that he had the old anarchist values that you could own what you deserve - he stole horses the owners didn't even know they had. As for whether he told lies, she retorted, 'there's no point in a man being true to his word if no-one believes him.'

In a week when the Northern Irish police force had been shown to have abetted Loyalist paramilitaries in the assassination of Catholics, this comment resonated loudly with the audience. Germaine understood the Irish mistrust of what the British archly describe as justice.We'd seen it all before - like the lies by those in positions of authority which led to the wrongful imprisonment of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, for bombings they did not commit.

Afterwards, I met friends at Nimmo's wine bar, down by Spanish Arch. It was the day after midsummer, and though it had been raining and cold all week, at about six o'clock the sun broke through, as if to taunt us with how beautiful summer could be. The grey stone bridges shone, the window boxes danced with red and yellow and purple flowers, and through the deep-set windows, we watched the Corrib rush past to the gleaming pale blue expanse of Galway Bay.

But as the wine flowed, the stories grew darker. One close friend recounted how her relative, a happy, well-adjusted twenty-year-old, had drowned in that same river one night months before, in unknown circumstances. There had always been suicides in those turbulent waters, but no-one could remember so many as of late - half a dozen young, popular students, with no history of depression, no obvious symptoms of alienation. Then a boy was found on the banks dazed and disorientated, complaining of a terrible thirst and about to throw himself in to sate it - a death averted. So what was happening? Girls took their drinks with them even to the toilet, my friend said, to avoid having them 'spiked', with the risk of susequent abduction and assault. Now it was rumoured something even more sinister was afoot - someone, out of sheer malevolence, was targeting boys.

Staring out at the dozens of magical white swans in the endless evening light, it was hard to imagine such evil. But those two Irelands have always coexisted. I can think of nowhere as generous and as cruel, as inspirational and as repressive, as joyous and as tragic.

Sometimes I think it's worse to make a quick trip home, as I've just done. It mangles the emotions to be saying hello and goodbye in a fortnight, sometimes in the space of one meeting. Coming back, I sat beside a Dubliner who'd been on a flying visit to see his sick mother, which had left him drained and addled. Or as he more colourfully explained, 'For a month after you get back, you don't know whether you need a shit or a haircut.