Apt, isn't it, that the decade should squeal to a close to the clamour of Mna na hEireann in full cry? Apt because, after all, it began with their glistening eyes raised to Mary Robinson as she urged them to rock the system. And such a furious, concerted uprising on their part, rooted surely in something truly grievous. . .? The doubling of the housing waiting list in 10 years, perhaps? The plight of young, low-paid couples? The hundreds of small children being reared in bed and breakfasts? The outrageous treatment of carers? The loss of an entire inner city generation? The fact that drug addicts, the mentally ill, the abused and deprived, make up the bulk of our prison population? Or that a quarter of the Tiger's under-30 cubs believe that suicide is sometimes or usually justified?
Alas no. These articulate women of middle Ireland, mothers of healthy children, with spouses earning well over one-and-a-half times the average industrial wage, flexed their powerful muscle in one cause: their own, fuelled by the perception that their hard-pressed, double-jobbing sisters were getting something not available to the self-sacrificing woman in the home. Nothing to do with money, of course; just "parity of esteem".
Idealism and hope. Victimhood and greed. Fitting bookends to the greasy, grasping 1990s.
More bookends. Remember the age of mourning as we reared our children for export? The throat-catching photographs of young emigrants pouring off the Boston and New York flights on Christmas Eve? And worse - the stories of the tens of thousands "illegals" forced to stay behind, lest they be caught and ejected forever from the land of plenty?
But that must be - oh - all of 10 years ago at least.
Now we inhabit our own land of plenty. Only ours is where the children of mourning parents from other miserable lands are treated like cattle. While they are left to queue in winter storms outside Irish government offices, nearby in the pastiche snugs and wildly expensive restaurants, we conduct leisurely debates about the economy's thirst for cheap labour versus the risk of being "swamped" by that sub-human species known as "illegals". No powerful Romanian-Irish lobby here to bang on the gates for justice. No visionary equivalent of a Morrison or a Donnelly to propose a visa programme. Amnesia rules.
More bookends. Who remembers that when John Hume reached out to Sinn Fein, coaxing the first seeds of peace, he was crucified in print, every week without fail? And now that his vision and courage have borne miraculous fruit? Why, the man whose newspaper harried Hume relentlessly, is voted Irish Person of the Year. Tony O'Reilly, exceedingly wealthy businessman, receives our highest honour. The businessman as icon of the decade. Amnesia rules indeed.
It was that kind of era.
And soon we will forget even to make the distinction.
"I'm convinced that one of the things that acquisition and the pursuit of wealth induces is amnesia," says Eavan Boland, poet and Stanford University professor. "And those who seek them will not only forget, but want to forget, the levels of strength and survival and near-to-the-edge dispossession that we once had as a people. But we must never forget that it was through that struggle that we found ourselves. We had nothing, nothing to help us survive but our portable arts, the arts of speech and poetry and story-telling, memory and language. These were the things for which Ireland was admired, the things we possessed even in dispossession. . .
"This is a moment when we feel powerful. We've proved our ability. But there was a time when we were a very powerless people and some of the great things we were, happened then. If in 1904 you had been in the building that was to become the Metropole Cinema, you would have seen two young men meeting for a cup of tea. To look at them then, you wouldn't have put sixpence on what they would become. They were Joyce and Yeats, two men who would go on to define the century in literature. But they had within them then what brought them there. What they had that made them different was the story. The Ireland of the past wasn't a smooth or comfortable place. It was lively, powerful, cantankerous and that's the place the imagination hooked on for everything... What worries me now is that we've become so contemporary, so smooth, so associated with new things that we are going to lose a lot of those angles and edges that made Ireland such a powerful place to be."
A hundred years ago, an anti-materialist, anti-modernist movement led by such eminences as Yeats, A.E. and Maud Gonne among others, held the firm belief that within a few years, the Celtic nations would usher in a new age, both spiritual and political.
It was a charming notion of course and though it was not to be, it demonstrates that the yearning for a radical re-think is not confined to a few oddballs in the Glen of the Downs. What the New Ireland forgets is that it was largely on the voices, vision and genius of Joyce and Yeats, Beckett, Kavanagh and Heaney, that Ireland assumed its status as a nation of eloquence and truth. And went on, on the strength of that, to become the decade's capital of cool. Could the smooth, contemporary businessman alone have accomplished that?
Yet our view of ourselves at the end of this extraordinary century, is firmly grounded in our economic miracle, in the passing power of the Tiger, in our second homes, three cars and four holidays, in our ability to mix it with the big boys.
WE have no idea of what or who we are any more, only that we have grown rather fond of ourselves and our own publicity. A question included in a 1998 survey of half a dozen European countries and the US was whether the world be a better place if every country was like ours. A quick preen in the mirror and the majority Irish verdict was. . . yes, it would. We topped the poll of self-believers in Europe. We are second only to the Americans in our high opinion of ourselves.
And so we should be, say those who can afford the premier cru, and doodle fat, round sums with their £2,500 gold-nibbed Mont Blancs. So we should be, says Dermot Desmond, dismissing a gift of £74,000 (for a yacht overhaul appropriately) as "insignificant".
So we should be, says the National Lottery, as it sues for commercial ownership of the word "millionaire", another neat encapsulation of the New Ireland. Enough of this modesty stuff, they say. We've made it. We rule. A Newsweek analysis published this month, delivered the required top-up. It placed us up there in the top three of Europe, on nodding terms with Sweden and Luxembourg. See, stupid - the mirror doesn't lie.
But mirrors can be treacherous things. They can be made to reflect anything you want them to. We have always been burdened with a need to see our own images of sacrifice, rebellious spirit and native genius reflected back at us. A harmless vanity if it only feeds our self-esteem. The danger arises when an entire nation begins to embrace these distorted reflections, when it knowingly averts its gaze from a less palatable truth. We have lost that which made us different.
The great irony is that while the smooth voice-overs tell us we never had it so good, the culture of complaint, resentment, begrudgery and litigiousness deepens and quickens. A vicious anger seems to seethe below the surface, primed to explode at the smallest nudge. Oprah Winfrey, after years of listening to tales of woe and victimhood, now puts much of America's dysfunction down to a perception that "everyone else's life is happier than mine". Translate that to Ireland, throw in the notion that we are vastly superior to everywhere else, and you have the New Ireland mindset in a nutshell.
David Rose, an English journalist and long-time devotee of the west of Ireland saw it coming a couple of years ago. He summarised the New Ireland as: "Not quite rude, but almost; brusque; businesslike; pressed for time; keen to get on to the next customer".