This entertaining and lively memoir describes the characters, landscapes and formative events during Ireland's remarkable late twentieth century renaissance. Starting with a nostalgic reflection on his upbringing in a historically rich corner of Dublin near the Phoenix Park, Brendan Cardiff recalls a highly eventful and eclectic career in Ireland and on the continent. With a self-deprecating sense of humour, Cardiff offers exuberant but insightful reflections and evocative portraits of people and places, formative institutions - UCD, IPA, IDA - and iconic figures of the country's enviable transformation like T.J. Barrington and Michael Killeen. An underlying and unifying theme of this memoir is the author's deep commitment to the European cultural ideal and to transnational partnership. His career unfolds as a guide in Rome of dolce vita days and in the wintertime Tyrol. In the early European Commission, he helped launch pioneering initiatives, especially after the arrival of the dynamic Jacques Delors. He describes in harrowing terms his work as a development assistant in a tropical paradise inexorably ravaged by the vain but cunning psychopath, Idi Amin.
He later worked at expanding the Community's highly popular programmes for student mobility, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, linking minds across former minefields. The book also includes an insightful summary of what works and what doesn't in international aid and development. "Roots & Routes" concludes with a captivating travelogue with numerous colour photographs of some of the exotic places Brendan has explored in a professional and personal capacity, including Ethiopia, Namibia, Kashmir, Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Borneo, East Africa, the Brazil Rain Forest and Yemen.