This time, when I landed, the first thing I did was rent a car, a tiny violet-colored vehicle called a Micra. It was the smallest car I had ever been inside. I admired her austerity-measures economy and the fact that when I got lost, as frequently happened, I could turn her 180 degrees in about a four-foot radius, like turning yourself on a spinny ride at the fair. As I drove, I kept noticing recent-looking houses and subdivisions, many of which had empty parking lots. Completely empty — the places were uninhabited. This was the outer fringes of the notorious “ghost estates,” tens of thousands of structures, half-built and abandoned, or finished but never occupied and swiftly falling apart, which colonized the island in beige clusters during the Irish housing madness.

They actually impinge on the appearance of the countryside, there are so many. You’ll find them especially near the entrances into cities, where they would (I suppose the thinking went) be most status-confirming, or else out along the edges of smaller roads, where their developers had idly hoped to plant new townlets (a few estates were born with their own ghost pub and ghost post office). In the op-ed pages, citizens offered modest proposals for what to do with these structures. Give them free to returning immigrants and bring the exiles home. Give them to the poor. Or else — and probably most practicable — bulldoze them back into green grass, remove them as eyesores and safety hazards.

I pulled off the road at various times and walked around in a few of the ghost estates. They are melancholy and menacing-feeling places — the weeds have started advancing, cracks and holes are opening in the pavement. There’s often mold. Boarded-up windows. In places the authorities have had a hard time keeping people from stealing building materials from the sites, and in a way, who can blame them. Stealing from whom, after all? Half the developers responsible for these aborted projects left the country after the crash. You would hear stories (the Irish can sometimes relish as topics the hubris and comeuppance of their own) about onetime wheeling-dealing rural builders, having lived high on tax games and borrowed wealth, “and now they say he’s living in New Zealand, swinging a hammer like he did before they gave him all that cash!” It had been a dream, like something in a Celtic Revival play: faeries built thousands and thousands of houses in the night. In the morning everybody was poor again.

It was hard to see why the government would allow the ruination of so much open land, which is one of Ireland’s principal commodities, namely the “unspoiled” landscape. People go to Ireland for all sorts of reasons, but they mainly go there because it’s pretty, because it’s “not all built up.”

From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn’t green — the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It’s that the greenness doesn’t mean what it seems. It doesn’t encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s, there were more people living there than today. What you see in the open spaces the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them through the ports by the millions. It’s perhaps not so strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development. Perhaps in a way, the houses were meant for returning immigrants even before they became ghost estates. They were built for the diaspora.

In the Aran Islands, in different places including on some of the farms overlooking the ocean, there are curious stone huts, invariably described in guidebooks as “beehive-shaped.” They are made out of flat rocks, piled atop one another and expertly joined (“corbelled,” is the term). Anthropologists aren’t in complete agreement about what they are — and neither have been the generations of pub-stool antiquarians who’ll lay a theory on you free — but many think that early Christian monks built them. What the monks were doing on three barren slabs of limestone in the freezing sea, why they couldn’t pray somewhere near Galway, is unclear. The islands seem to have been an ancient pilgrimage site. Perhaps the huts were shelters for pilgrims. Or maybe people just used them for smoking fish. Or are they tombs? They are as mysterious as they are humble.

John Millington Synge writes of walking to see these beehive huts (clochans in Gaelic) in “The Aran Islands,” his classic account of living here for several months in the 1890s, when he gathered the material for his greatest plays. No other writer is more closely associated with this place and its people than Synge, although in many ways he makes an unlikely representative. He was Anglo-Irish, Protestant in his upbringing, fairly well to do, scientifically minded — there could have been, at the time, few Irish people possessing less in common with the peasantry he wound up making his subject and taking for his inspiration. Even in his famed descriptions, you can sense a remoteness. It was the artist in him, the very thing that made him a great writer. He never loved his own people too much to be able to see what was grotesque and silly and consequently most human in them. On his walk to the beehive huts, he’s following an old blind man named Mourteen, a local storyteller who gave him all sorts of material. The man knows the islands so well that Synge cuts his feet trying to keep up, despite the fact that his guide can’t see — “so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy,” is Synge’s phrase. The old man at one point indulges “a freak of earthly humour” and starts talking sex, saying what he would do if he could bring a girl into the hut with him. They pass a house where a schoolteacher lives alone. “Ah, master,” the old man says, “wouldn’t it be fine to be in there and to be kissing her?” It’s just the kind of scene that Synge’s detractors hated him for. The heroism of his characters comes purely from their helpless urge to be themselves, against all better judgment.