Our giving, caring, bridge-building selves were lathered with plamas by candidates seeking a presidential vote. And now we have a President-elect who is a paragon of personal moderation. But let's not start getting smug. Since when are we so neat and clean and well-advised? Whatever happened to the thick Paddies and their slatternly women of long ago?
Actually - they're still there, but we have them hidden above in the shed. Let me give you a few instances. I think of a beautiful ruined abbey in the west - and in all the guidebooks - and the knots of bewildered tourists wandering around trying to find it.
"What happened to the signposts?" I asked a local. "Oh, the lads knocked them down," he said. "It's silage time, and the effing tourists' cars are getting in the way of their tractors. They'd knock the abbey down too for cowsheds only it would be too much like hard work . . . "
There's an unregenerate society out there, the memory of which the elites who live in international bourgeois style in the leafier parts of Sutton and Foxrock have managed to suppress. Have you ever been to the Ballinasloe Horse Fair? The hotel is lined with heavy-duty plastic covering, not just on the floors but stapled to the walls high up to cover the wallpaper.
In the mornings, you see into the back of parked vans where tousled litters of half-dressed men and women are stirring from nests of grubby blankets and bits of coats. Low-ceilinged dark pubs are raucous by mid-morning. On the field, they queue up for the fortune-tellers' caravans. Seventh sons of seventh sons will lay their hands upon you and tell you what lies in store.
Country 'n'Irish songs are playing on the ghetto-blasters boys in cowboy boots fondle with the arm that isn't leading a foal on a bit of baler twine. Everywhere there is mud and smoke and the rich odours of an antique way of life. President-elect McAleese told an interviewer that she occasionally takes a small glass of wine. This isn't that Ireland.
In a decorous lunchtime pub in Galway I was sitting beside a frail young man. He was attending a writers' workshop at the university. He was quietly eating a sandwich. A huge Connemara man with red eyes materialised in front of him. "Come outside ya little bollocks," he roared. "Come outside and fight like a man!" The writer was astonished. "But I don't want to fight with you," he said. "Oh please," the Connemara man begged. "Please."
LAST week the Garda Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, suggested that one way of coping with street violence would be to limit the opening hours of the fast-food restaurants outside which young people congregate late at night. If the takeaway shops and vans were not available, he was quoted as saying, they would have no natural place to gather. "They'd go home," he said.
Well - they might. They might go home, if they had homes to go to. Or they might not. They might want a fight, like the Connemara man. They might feel like slicing each others' faces with Stanley knives while the girls squeal. There's a lot of evidence that that is what quite a few young Irish people do for fun at night, when they're not idly gouging the paintwork of cars, or terrifying helpless dogs with fireworks, or kicking visitors with their steel-tipped boots.
Nowhere else in Europe do the police suggest eliminating the possibility of a late-night snack. OK, there'll be a heavy scene around the main railway station, and if you toy with drugs or prostitution you'll get into trouble. In Dublin, however, and the other cities and towns of Ireland, you may well end up in Casualty just because you were feeling peckish.
It's not the drink, the Garda Commissioner says. "Say there was no drink, but you had 300 people arriving at a chip shop at 3 o'clock in the morning. Do you think it's all going to be hunkydory? It is not." I agree with him.
But since it is not the drink, what is it?
It is that under its (newly) priggish exterior this is a profoundly uncivic society. The concepts of personal honour and personally motivated decent behaviour to others are as weak as new-born babes. Note, for instance, that we are in an era, 75 years after Independence, of tribunals made necessary by endemic furtiveness and occasional gross dishonesty.
We're mopping up after what we have been. Note that the outcome of the tribunals will do nothing to alleviate the unblinking cynicism with which the mass of the people view the political establishment in particular and the professional establishment in general.
Were there chartered accountants out there who failed to notice this little breach or that little breach of the noble accountancy code? That comes as no surprise to ordinary people who take it for granted that where self-regulation is the order of the day, and there are no monitors, corruption, mild or otherwise, will enter in. Did the estate agent get you all he could for your late mother-in-law's field? Did you really need all that expensive work the dentist prescribed? Is your local vet being absolutely precise when he charges £85 for his labour in treating your cat's sore ear? Well, maybe. Or maybe not.
And the system is too cumbersome to make up for our lack of civic virtue. Take black plastic sacking, for instance - specifically, the heavyduty, doubly-extruded stuff young trees come wrapped in (because they come drenched in chemicals, but let that pass). There are millions of trees being planted in Ireland because under the Common Agricultural Policy there's a lot of money to be made in trees.
And all over the country, the plastic wrappings are left behind, clogging up mountains streams, blowing across valleys, draping themselves skeletally on barbed wire fences, floating on the bogholes. They will be there for tens or hundreds of years. Every one of them. And does anyone care? Answer: no.
NOBODY cares. I saw a wild valley polluted by them recently. The land owner got a contractor from the midlands to put in the trees. The contractor's workmen didn't care what they did with the plastic, and threw it there. The owner didn't care, and paid them anyway.
Then we paid him, through the EU grants. Plantings are inspected, of course. By civil servants we also pay for. But the relevant Government Department - Forestry Services come under the Department of the Marine, Dr Michael Woods, and I hope you're listening - seems to have no views on plastic pollution. No grant has ever been withheld on the grounds of damage to the environment. "Anyway," the civil servant I was talking to said, seeing a straw he could grasp, "we're only in charge of Forestry. If it's environment you're interested in, should you not be talking to the Department of the Environment?"
O God.
I'm not saying this isn't a great little country. I'm only saying - spare me the self-congratulation. A decent President does not a decent society make.