IRELAND is a country of lonely souls who dream of escaping to foreign climes on cheap flights. Google, the internet search engine, has revealed its end-of-year report, offering a fascinating insight into the Irish psyche.

Google Trends, which measures searches by country and city via the company’s all-pervasive search engine, has found Ireland is the global leader on queries about travel and second only to Britain for “holiday” searches. Cars and football seem to be our other chief pre-occupations.

The World Cup, Liverpool FC and Manchester United were among the most popular searches with Irish hits ranking in the top three in each category.

The findings are in keeping with a monthly “zeitgeist” list published online by Google, identifying the most popular subjects or topics searched and viewed in Ireland.

Ryanair, the low-fares airline, was the most popular website queried in April, July, August and September. Budget Travel, Aer Lingus, Dublin Airport and Carzone, a motoring website, were other favourite searches.

“Online travel and banking are high up on the list, as are reality television shows like Big Brother,” said Google Ireland.

But Irish internet users are also among the world’s loneliest, ranking first in country searches for “lonely” with Dublin topping the city list. Fr Harry Bohan of the Ceifin Centre in Co Clare, a social-change initiative, said the finding was a sign of the times.

“Even though we are living in the best of times, with that comes new problems, including loneliness,” he said. “People are trying to replace this with holidays or cars. We are going through a period of extraordinary change and turning to the internet to solve our problems.”

Ireland’s continued economic growth, maturing SSIAs and the World Cup in Germany last June were among the contributing factors to an increased interest in travel, football and more inventive ways to spend money.

“The issue now is we have the money but the critical element is that we make the right choices with what to do with that money,” said Austin Hughes, chief economist of IIB Bank.

Further trends for 2006 show Ireland to be a nation concerned with health and wellbeing, leading the rest of the world in searches for gyms.

However, Damien Mulley, an Irish blogger, said many popular topics were not reflected in the findings. He cited last February’s Dublin “riots” and panto queen Twink’s enraged phone message to her former husband as examples of two internet phenomena that Google fails to mention.

“Judging from my own web records, the biggest online thing in Ireland this year was the famous Twink voicemail,” Mulley said.

The end-of-year zeitgeist list compiled by Google earlier this month found the Ryder Cup and Munster Rugby among the most popular searches.

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