An Irish journalist, long exiled in England, comes home to take stock of the phenomenal changes the boom years have wrought. He is struck by the transformed attitude to sex, the casual way in which previously taboo subjects such as homosexuality can be discussed on the airwaves. He is dazzled by the bright lights of Dublin city centre, the trendy new restaurants, the fast-breeding coffee bars, the slickly modernised pubs. He is discomfited by the naked display of wealth, as he is nearly driven off the road by a "great, black arrogant Mercedes". He meets an old friend who is cashing such a large cheque he assumes he must be going away for a while, and is stunned to find he is merely planning a night on the town.
He talks to self-satisfied Government leaders who extol the rewards of making the economy attractive to multinational capital. The Minister for Industry and Commerce tells him about the bad old days of emigration and unemployment and assures him they are gone for good.
The journalist believes it because he can feel it in the air: "Wherever I went throughout the country, I sniffed in the air a tang of vitality that I had never known before."
This is a story so familiar by now that it has become one of the great clichΘs of international journalism. The extraordinary boom which petered out in the year 2001 was memorialised by almost every major media organisation in the world in precisely this form.
Except that the account just summarised wasn't written in 1999 or 2000. It is from Alan Bestic's The Importance of Being Irish, published in 1969. Looking at it now brings home two realities. We've told ourselves this story of miraculous transformation before. And we ought to have known that miracles leave a hangover.
When we were experiencing it, the 1960s boom felt like it was forever. We would never know hard times again. Yet it was followed by a slow slide back into failure. There was mass unemployment, a huge outflow of economic refugees, a spiralling national debt, serious talk of the country going down the tubes.
For all but the young, the background noise of the last months of 2001, with daily job loss announcements, an international recession and the return to political discourse of phrases that had dropped out of currency such as "the current budget deficit", brought back unpleasant memories. It seemed all too appropriate that in early October the Abbey should have revived Tom Murphy's 1970s play The Morning After Optimism.
Perhaps, as we look back on the long boom that dribbled to a halt in 2001, the quintessential memory, both private and public, will be of money slipping through our fingers. As we entered the last year of the Celtic Tiger, we were spending astonishing amounts of money. The average household was shovelling out the cash at a rate of £455.47 a week, nearly half as much again as in 1995. Even taking inflation into account, the real increase in average household expenditure over five years was 35 per cent.
Considering that the people at the bottom of the heap still had very little disposable income, this means that those in the top one-tenth of households were spending well over £1,000 a week.
As a proportion of what we were spending, basics such as a roof over our heads, food on the table, clothes, shoes, heat and light, were going down. On average this year, we spent more on cosmetics than on spuds, more on hair products than on tea, more on wine than on clothes for any one child, more on sweets and chocolate than on central heating oil.
We spent the boom years accumulating lots of stuff. The big leap in spending was in household durables, up by an astonishing 87.5 per cent. The average family was spending well over £1,000 a year on these goods. As the high tide recedes, therefore, what is left on the shore is an awful lot of consumer durables: dining room suites, coffee tables, televisions, camcorders, CD players, microwaves, home computers, mobile phones. Half of all households now have at least two televisions.
In 1987, when we were in the depths of recession, 13 per cent of households had double-glazing. Now, it's 54 per cent. And this, perhaps, is the perfect image of what we have gained: we can look out at a darkening world through thicker and more expensive windows. So, as the harsh winds begin to blow and the average family retreats into its nest, there is the comfort of knowing the nest is much more snugly lined and we can entertain ourselves in style at home.
The public life of the State mirrors this reality. Here, too, we inherit lots of stuff from the boom. When the Taoiseach said early in 2001 he saw the proposed Stadium and Campus Ireland as the legacy of the economic miracle to future generations, he was revealing a parallel between private and public consumption. Public money, too, has slipped through the State's fingers, leaving us, at best, with a new accumulation of furniture and appliances: motorways, magnificent edifices for visiting dignitaries, transport infrastructure, sewage works, perhaps the Bertie Bowl.
The State, too, has splurged money on cosmetics rather than spuds. The basics of what a State puts on the table for its citizens - a decent health service, affordable housing, a guaranteed income sufficient to live with dignity, a way of getting around the place that doesn't destroy the social fabric, a humane life for people with disabilities - have been neglected. The ordinary quality of life has not improved, and in some areas has got appreciably worse.
If the downturn is long and severe, moreover, we will end up with something we have never had in the history of the State: a coincidence of high expectations and low possibilities.
For most of our history, most people expected things to be tough. Even at the end of the 1960s boom, we could look around and still know we were materially worse off than our neighbours. Our standards of living were still well below the western European norm. What we accepted as normal, was, to them, relative poverty. Now, having lived our own legend for the best part of a decade and achieved the European norms we so desired, we have a different sense of what normality is.
We have a very large group of people who are used to having money, who have very high fixed outgoings such as mortgages and bank loans, and who feel too old to emigrate.
If things get nasty, so may we.