From God to mammon

The American Dream of the 1950s worshipped the car and chased a better quality of life through the work ethic and fast roads; the Irish Dream of the 1990s celebrates the computer and seeks a better quality of life through the profitable movement of information through cyberspace.

At Gateway Computers last week, the US president, Bill Clinton, with the radar of a revivalist preacher, zoned in on the image as if he, too, had been seduced by it.

Up to 10 years ago, Ireland's greatest export was its people - its shining young priests, its brawny labourers and its good-natured nurses. Today we are exporting our analytical abilities - while the young men and women stay home in Ireland to become consumers.

In the old Ireland, you belonged - you were owned, in a way, by your circumstances. You knew your place or you emigrated. In Millennium Ireland, you stay home, you work hard, you acquire, you do better than your parents did and you move up in social class. In the new, consumer-driven Ireland, we've gone from spiritual inspiration to material aspiration, from awarding boys rosaries to adorning them in expensive trainers as sports stars eclipse priests as role models. In the past decade, the average parent has doubled the amount spent on boys' footwear (spending on footwear for men, women and girls has increased only slightly).

It's a telling detail, because while we've been making money to spend on runners and other purchases aimed at acquiring status, church attendance has fallen by at least 14 per cent, seminaries have closed and both priests and lay people have recoiled with disillusion from the church. At the same time, the rise in material prosperity between 1987 and 1997 was so extraordinary that the average household's disposable income increased by 50 per cent. Children's pocket money doubled - but church contributions increased by a mere eight pence per week, an average increase of five per cent.

While church attendance is dropping, sports club membership is booming. The tenacious GAA remains dominant in rural Ireland, but in urban areas an American style of belonging-by-membership-fee is replacing the community-based ethos. In the 1990s our spending on sports club memberships doubled in urban areas, compared to an increase of only 20 per cent in rural areas. Some go to the gym, others relieve stress by shopping. In urban areas, we have doubled our average household spending on jewellery, clocks and silverware, compared to a 25 per cent increase in rural areas.

Women are spending 50 per cent more on their clothes. We are spending 60 per cent more on eating out yet we are drinking more at home - sometimes to relieve stress. We have doubled the amount we spend on drink consumed at home and tripled the amount we spend on wine consumed at home. The wine, the new kitchen, the table laden with gourmet goodies are part of a larger trend: home has become the focus of conspicuous nesting. In the seven years between 1987 and 1995, we increased our average spending on home improvement materials by five-and-a-half fold. And we are more likely to take time out from all this DIY: the average family spent 25 per cent more on holidays abroad in 1997 than in 1987.

Much of the spending on home improvement is devoted to the kitchen at a time when women are leaving the kitchen in droves. Advertisers attempt to comfort us with the news that, 50 years on, every household in Ireland can still offer a warm welcome and a slice of Swiss roll (if anyone is at home, they fail to add). Magazine ads for expensive designer kitchens contain reassuring objects, such as Agas and 1950s-style toasters and food mixers, which are meant to symbolise a happy family life - with no family in sight. We have more money than ever before and we are also spending it differently. Main Street, Ireland is being transformed and upstaged by shopping malls with aspirational names like Athlone's "Golden Island" and Gort's "River Island" - consumer temples which combine leisure with shopping. These islands within an island have a discreet advantage for the upwardly mobile: exclusivity. Undesirables can be refused admittance, a symptom of our increasingly polarised society and a far cry from the traditional pub where rich and poor drank side by side. It's not just where, but also when, we shop that has changed us. The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary has called Sunday shopping "a sinister form of slavery" through which "the quality of life of a community is diminished". We need one day a week for rest, prayer and recreation. The Sabbath, he argues, sets a boundary which ensures our dignity, respect and freedom at least one day a week.

Yvonne Jacobson, a marital and sexual therapist with the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Services, agrees with him. "Are we losing control over how we live our lives and have the boundaries between work and rest, personal and professional selves become fuzzy?" she asks. "I would prefer to know that the shops are shut on Sunday so that I can get on with enjoying my weekend as a time of rest - not as an overflow from the week before and into the week ahead. How are the boundaries marked if there is no difference between one day and another?"

We're past shopping for necessity and are turning to shopping as a stress-reliever. In a world where we are constantly battling against rigid structures, shopping is one of the few means of self-expression we have left, although - as with drugs - the happy effects wear off only too soon. "One of the dangers of having too much is that the corresponding feelings of satisfaction get dulled, and as a result we need more and more in an effort to increase the levels of satisfaction," says Jacobson. She worries that we are starting to confuse acquisition with what it means to exist. "Erich Fromm, writing in the 1970s, made distinctions between people's need `to have' and `to be'. `Having' is associated with ownership of things, while `being' is about experiencing the sensations of pleasure, joy, love . . . It is quite possible that with today's affluence, the balance between having and being is becoming out of synchrony, even polarised." Perhaps our obsession with DIY and rearranging the furniture Feng Shui-style is because our interior lives are in such disarray. There is little space for abstract reflection when you're hell bent on instant gratification.

"Maturity in humans is to some extent dependent on our ability to postpone fulfilling our needs," Jacobson says. "Modern technology enables us to contact people by email the moment we feel like it, and sometimes this is highly desirable - in an emergency or when immediate advice is required or whatever. But there is a downside . . . The email analogy can be used in relationships, where people may be losing their patience with each other because they are so used to instant gratification."

Partners, trapped by the constant pressure of earning and spending, may become less willing to see each other through the rough times and parents may be unwilling to spend the long, aimless, dawdling hours which children crave and attempt to replace their attention with possessions and labels.

"Parents are being pressurised by children; children are being exploited by advertising agencies, by drink industries and the entertainment industry," believes Archbishop Michael Neary. "This pressure causes productivity and profit to take precedence over people and principles . . . Success must be achieved instantly. In that kind of culture many become wounded, find their dignity diminished and abandon hope."

There is a new culture of abandon humanity or fail. At its most trivial, this culture has made young, workaholic "City" men so antisocial in their values and behaviour that several trendy clubs in London have banned anyone wearing a suit and tie.

Mobile phones are the symbol of the consumer culture in the way they dissolve boundaries between rest and play, between the suit and the jeans, between the personal and the professional.

"Mobile phones are my pet hate," says Jacobson. "Do we really need to be `in communication' all the time? Is it not healthier to focus on one thing at a time rather than assume we can do everything at once? The mobile phone may seem efficient in the short-term, but how long-term is it? Because how long can we keep it up?" As consumers, we are rightly enjoying material improvements in our quality of life, but keeping it all afloat creates an intense lifestyle which requires us to be in constant communication with home, office, childcare provider and partner, juggling everything so that we can pay the bills. As a symbol of the new Irish consumerism, the mobile phone may be the coffin ship of the millennium.