I READ that Aki Kaurismaki, the Finnish director of the new movie Drifting Clouds, has no esteem for films in which people are slaughtered with guns in the name of entertainment: "If one starts to shoot and play with explosives, nothing will ever be enough. But if the film is pitched on a minimalist level, even the sound of a cough becomes dramatic." Aki is dead right, and I am after him to direct my own screenplay, tentatively entitled Phlegm. It's a fairly grim tale with a lot of coughing, and worse, and I will be relying on Aki to do a good job and put it right up there with the great consumptive movies of all time.

Right. In the new postelection dawn, what sort of image sums up today's Ireland? Guardian reporter Matthew Engel hit the Irish campaign trail the other week, and found himself alongside Michael D. Higgins in Galway's Knockacarra estate on a warm Bank Holiday evening when "just about everyone seemed to be preparing to cook steaks on their barbeques and eat them on their sunloungers. This is the new Ireland, and it seems enviably at ease with itself." Yes and why wouldn't it be? That's us all right: chargrilled steak city, sunlounger paradise, marinade mecca. We have worked hard to create the barbecue society and are finally enjoying it.

Or so it seems. But when I went over to Galway to talk to some of the Knockacarra crowd, it was a different story. Certainly, the sun was shining and the barbecues were busy. But the tension! You could cut it with a knife. I had to make my inquiries very discreetly, but the problems all boiled down to a single word: oneupmanship.

The main standoff was over gas barbecues versus charcoal. On one side of the estate, there were old barbecue hands from the fabulous summers of 78 and 82 who absolutely refused to use gas under any circumstances - I need hardly tell you these were all men. Their wives had spent years, and many tears, begging for new gas equipment, to no avail. Some of these oldtimers had brickbuilt homemade barbecues from the 60s, and nothing was going to make them change. MEANWHILE, over on the other side of the estate, gas had totally prevailed, and huge new Broil King and Magic Cook out appliances towered over the brick patios. You could sniff the superiority in the air.

The snobbery over plastic versus wooden sunloungers was even worse. I was invited to join two competing barbecues over the evening but the tension was so bad I felt it diplomatic to decline both parties and ended up going back into the city for a mixed grill in the Skef. In a way, I felt this was still a more genuine image of the real Ireland.

But the Guardian reporter found that there was a moment during Bertie Ahern's campaign when he shook hands with a man "who epitomised it even better. He was sitting with a pint of Guinness and a copy of Moby Dick at a pavement cafe, next to what used to be a Dominican convent, and is now a design centre." It is a terrible thing when a fellow cannot sit down for a few minutes' relaxation without being taken as a symbol of modern Ireland. However, the young man in question, when I approached him that same day, was not particularly upset.

It turned out that Hughie McLean for that was his name was part of a stag party over for the weekend from Milton Kenyes. He had lost his friends earlier in the afternoon but was quietly confident he would find them again sooner or later. At least, that is what I think he said, because the pint of Guinness he was drinking was not the first he had drunk that day.

Intrigued by the paperback on Hughie's table, I began to ask his opinion of Herman Melville, his contribution to American literature, and the theory that the great white whale represented not the fear of the unknown in the American consciousness, but the fear of the known, in particular mortality.

Hughie looked at me strangely. Then he told me there was no Herman Melville in his party. Then he told me it wasn't his book, it had been left on the table "and my morality is my own business.

He asked me what Moby Dick was about. I said, rather inadequately, that it was a story of a shale.

He asked if it was a whale of a story, then started hooting with rather silly laughter.

All around, I could sense the presence of the long gone Dominican nuns. It was a more benign presence that I might have expected, given the situation, but of course they inhabited Temple Bar long before it was even a gleam in the developer's eye.