Do we have any idea where we're going? Any idea at all about the kind of three-dimensional Ireland now being created during these years of prosperity? Or about the indelible imprint we're making on the landscape and the woeful legacy of "development" we're leaving for future generations to clean up - if they can?
"Digger bucket teeth in stock," said a hand-scrawled sign outside a general store in Castlebar, Co Mayo, at the height of the building boom. What it was advertising was the arrival of steel dentures for JCBs whose original teeth had been worn out excavating sites for the so-called Celtic Tiger economy.
Some of those who have questioned the rip-roaring nature of this phosphorescent phase of Blake's "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright" have even received anonymous phone calls containing veiled death threats; the imperative is to make hay while the sun shines, so any objectors who get in the way of "development" must be swept aside.
Many places have already been ruined, with State encouragement. The seaside resorts are littered with tax-incentiveised clusters of holiday homes while the Upper Shannon Rural Renewal Area, covering all of Co Leitrim and Co Longford as well as large chunks of Co Cavan, Co Roscommon and Co Sligo, is in the process of being turned into another visual slum.
So what happened to planning? Well, according to the Ombudsman's most recent annual report, the system "is in a state of collapse". With a flight to the private sector leaving little more than half the number of planners to process twice as many applications, forward planning has become nearly impossible and enforcement something of a joke.
"The thrust of economic and political pressure is towards the completion of developments in as short as time-frame as possible," said, as the Ombudsman, Kevin Murphy, said in his report. "Never mind the quality, feel the quantity" would be another way of putting it. There is no time to think, still less to reflect - all we can do is to get on with it.
Despite being a small island country, we still believe in the myth that space is unlimited and that there is no end to the volume of development Ireland can absorb. And it's no consolation that a National Spatial Strategy is being cobbled together in at the Custom House, because there isn't an ounce of political will to implement it.
What hope can we entertain that this much-vaunted strategy will tackle the sprawl of Dublin, not just throughout the so-called Greater Dublin Area but far beyond its boundaries? How can we have any confidence that cliente list politicians can bring themselves to make the hard choices necessary to promote balanced regional growth? Whatever about all the official guff about "sustainable development", nobody can ignore facts on the ground. And those facts include the staggering statistic that 18,000 of the record 50,000 new homes completed last year were consisted of one-off houses in the countryside. Bungalow Blitz and Mansion Mania rule in the Celtic Tiger's lair.
As long as young people find it much less expensive to acquire a half-acre site in a rural area and build a pattern-book house on it than, say, purchase a cramped artisan cottage in Stoneybatter, this terrifying trend will probably intensify. And the same is true of all the Dublin-driven suburban housing estates being tacked on to provincial towns.
Rochfortbridge in Co Westmeath used to be memorable mainly for its Bord na M≤na model housing scheme, designed in characteristic style by Frank Gibney. But what Gibney could never have imagined, even in his worst nightmares, was that a bit of Ballinteer would appear right across the road to leer at his carefully- considered work.
The new housing estates springing up at the edge of Rochfortbridge, 80km kilometres from Dublin, are not unique. It is a phenomenon that's happening on the outskirts of almost every town and village within the capital's hugely- extended commuter belt; in effect, Leinster is being colonised by refugees from Dublin's inflated property prices.
Those who choose to buy the cheaper semi-detached houses in Rochfortbridge - or Dunleer, Co Louth, or Virginia, Co Cavan, or any number of other places - are, of course, condemning themselves to a lifetime of commuting by car.
Except at weekends, they will never be part of a "community" in any meaningful sense of the word.
As Robert Putnam wrote in his recent book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, "the car and the commuter are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers, the evidence suggests that each additional 10 minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 per cent".
Clearly, the development of "sustainable communities" cannot be advanced by allowing Dublin, willy-nilly, to sprawl all over Leinster, willy-nilly.
Yet who among the authorities will shout stop? Who will admit that what's going on is profoundly unsustainable? Who, apart from the likes of economist Colm McCarthy, will make a case for consolidating the city? As critic and lecturer Raymund Ryan suggests, though Temple Bar can lay claim to be "the most photographed project in Irish architectural history", it's the M50 with its flyovers, roundabouts and car parks that "may prove to be a far more significant artefact in the Irish environment, greatly increasing Dublin's urban scale".
Whatever about Temple Bar's fine-grained urban renewal, Ryan believes that other paradigms may be needed to put some shape on our prosperous little patch of "the 24-hour global village". If architects were to make their mark, they would have to "invest at least as much energy in suburbia and in infrastructure as in single figurative objects".
Writing in the current Irish Architectural Review, Ryan is concerned that Architecture with a capital A is being left behind by Ireland's unprecedented rate of change. The boom has left Cork, Galway and Limerick with sprawling peripheries and "an abundance of kitsch", while Dublin continues to absorb "multifarious influences from abroad".
The "mini-metropolis" proposed for Spencer Dock and rejected a year ago by An Bord Pleanβla suggested, at least for a while, that Dublin was "torn between its recent Euro-centric affinities - in particular the urbane, often micro-scaled revitalisation of Barcelona - and re-emergent aspirations towards some shiny transatlantic New World".
Importantly in the case of Barcelona, the impetus for regeneration was politically driven by its Ssocialist former mayor, the inspirational Pasqual Maragall. "The trick in Barcelona was quality first and quantity second," Maragall once said. "A commitment to develop networks of new plazas, parks and buildings was the cause of our success."
However, because quality counts for nothing here, what we have ended up with is "a hybrid architecture", according to Ryan, with "Barcelona Cool and (now) Rotterdam Thinness from the design elite, mixed up with pretend contextualism (cartoon proportions, cheap materials) and the worst excesses of infantile historicism".
Inevitably, globalisation has played a role. As Saskia Sassen, one of its leading querists, has pointed out, a city that strives for inward investment must provide the "state-of-the-art" urban infrastructure demanded by global capital. Hence, as Paul Keogh notes in another essay, the impact of flagship projects such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
Cities had to go for the "big fix" to put themselves on the global map, many imagineers maintained. As Raymund Ryan says, international architects are being parachuted in to design "signature" buildings as part of a re-packaging of urban identity. What the Guggenheim was about was a shock-and-surprise "branding" of the Basque city.
In the new international weave of money and media, he fears that urban design "may be little more than a fancy theming strategy"; the new squares in Temple Bar and the reorganisation of both Smithfield and O'Connell Street had all been consciously designed to create "unique destinations in a metropolitan mix of heritage and fashion".
Dublin Corporation paid the world's best-known bridge-builder, Santiago Calatrava, to design two new bridges for the Liffey - one in Docklands, which is still before An Bord Pleanβla, and the other at Blackhall Place, in front of Joyce's house of The Dead. And Cork has commissioned Beth Gali to redesign Patrick Street and the South Mall.
Like other cities, Dublin now has many new buildings in what Ryan terms a "debased neo-Modernist style" - the current globalised architectural coinage. Often using materials shipped in from the far corners of the world, these were "bland functional boxes skinned in glass with thin stone trimmings, fancy foyers and gratuitous works of art".
He can't resist trendspotting. "Progressive architecture in 2001 divides, perhaps too neatly, into two camps ) may usefully be categorised as Slow New and Fast New,", he writes. The first group "concentrates on material substance", while the second wallows in the computer revolution and the "fluid reality of a mobile Celtic Tiger".
Ryan doubts that the "enormous new office parks, assembly sheds, shopping centres and entertainment complexes mushrooming around Irish towns" have learned from either model. In nearlyalmost every case, they are nothing more than simple boxes "dressed up in quotation marks or at most token architectural 'moments' .... toy-like motifs".
Whatever its visual sophistication, this sort of stuff is "merely a stylistic veil (more Wallpaper than Wired) behind or in front of which real life is little affected or enriched." In the future, though, he believes urban elements "may be categorised not only by style...but by genre: Thriller Bridge, Romance Interchange, Porn Plaza.
"For Ireland, cyberspace may prove to be a 21st-century version of Dancing at the Crossroads. Whether or not the real can integrate aspects of the virtual - and commercial, ambitions would suggest that this is inevitable - the traditional, stable world of the three-dimensional city can no longer claim to be the sole locus of Irish public activity.
"In contemporary Ireland, social space is both the nightclub bar and the hospital waiting-room, the virtual space of the Internet chatroom and the residual green areas 'found' as swathes of nature in and around otherwise mostly monotonous housing estates."
And because of social changes "home", in any case, "simply ain't what it used to be".
Looking through this year's crop of RIAI Rregional Awards, Ryan found "a paucity of critical projects" dealing with housing, landscape or infrastructure. The awards conveyed little sense of contemporary Irelands constant chatter about house prices, indigenous dislocation.. and the intake of refugees and/or World migrants.
Of course, the lack of experimentation with housing has a lot to do with the fact that most Irish people still aspire to that quintessentially English development detached or semi-detached house with front and back gardens. The very idea of bringing up a family in an apartment, like most of our continental cousins, is foreign to us.
And so, the featureless suburban housing crawling across the landscape as Dublin Corporations deputy cityplanning officer, Dick Gleeson, has put itwill continue to proliferate as long as Irish people remain wedded to the Garden City ideal or, rather, the bastardised version of its the norm in our suburban estates.
Real-estate pressures result in the most banal solutions to maximise the commercial potential of any site, according to architect Paul Keogh. Estates lack any structured pattern of open spaces... The design of the public realm is neglected: spaces between buildings are left-over spaces rather than places with their own identity and character.
He brands the failure of policy and development plans to give priority to design and the creation of communities as one of the greatest indictments of planning in this State; by seeking merely to mediate in real estate development, they had produced a form of settlement which is unsustainable in environmental and urban design terms.
Keogh asks what urban models will be used to deal with Ireland's projected population growth. Will the numbers-driven agenda of the construction industry go on delivering housing estate after housing estate? Or can we make the political choice between the dynamism of urban culture as against the endless expansion of suburbia? Thus, Dick Gleeson is not alone in complaining that the debate about Irelands housing needs is far too focused on absolute numbers and population projections when the central challenge is to create good places for people to live and work in a more dense, less car-dependent urban setting, linked to high-quality public transport services.
And its not as if there are no models. Those attending the National Housing Conference in Galway last April were particularly inspired by examples of sustainable housing in Denmark and the Netherlands which are successful by any social or environmental yardstick. So why do we always seem to believe that we must re-invent the wheel? Even the message about increasing residential densities is garbled and misinterpreted as a move towards high-rise housing, perhaps even on the Ballymun model, when its nothing of the sort. All thats proposed in the Residential Density Guidelines is a modest increase in the number of units per acre, particularly in the vicinity of public transport nodes.
Brian Brennan, the South Dublin County Architect, warned the housing conference that unless we increase average population and employment densities in our existing suburban neighbourhoods, we risk the implosion of our low-density housing model and the financial and operational collapse of our entire urban management infrastructure.
Policy initiatives such as the Strategic Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area do not address this issue at all, other than holding out high prospects for Docklands; indeed, as Colm McCarthy has warned, the SPGs will lead to more car-dependent sprawl rather than turn Dublin into a compact, sustainable city on the European model.
As for the provision of a modern, European-style public transport system, Dublin can look forward to the completion early in 2003 of the first two Luas lightrail lines linking Sandyford and Tallaght with the city centre. Grandiose plans by the Dublin Transportation Office for a metro and other goodies will take much longer to realise.
An Eastern Bypass is firmly back on the agenda, even though it can offer no magic solution to gridlock in the long term. In the meantime, the National Roads Authority is forging ahead with a massive road-building programme. And based on past performance, the new motorways will provide the sinews for yet more suburban sprawl.
Whats really disheartening, as architect Sen Laoire said recently, is the absence of discourse and leadership on the one hand and, on the other, the Irish ability to speak out of both sides of the mouth at the same time. The greatest failing in this area is the approval of aspirational plans and then the refusal to implement them.
Speaking at the national sculpture Designing Cities forum in Cork on June 26th, Laoire squarely blamed the dynamics of our governmental system suffused, as it is, by bureaucratic in-fighting and political clientlism saying that this has strangled the adoption of solutions in the race to save our country and its countryside.
Certainly, Dublin is out of control. What we have in the capital is an increasingly European-style city centre, peppered with apartment buildings and cappuccino bars, surrounded by an expanding American-style edge of suburban housing, business parks, shopping malls and, in Abbotstown perhaps, a sports stadium as big as Croke Park.
What its like out there in this parallel universe was encapsulated by Ann Marie Hourihane in She Moves through the Boom, her revealing book of Celtic Tiger vignettes, with a vivid description of the Blanchardstown shopping centre, where there's colour-coded parking corrals and a leisure centre that stays open 24 hours a day.
The shopping centre is open all weekend, its busiest time, she writes. The Fact File says that Blanchardstown shopping centre is visited by 280,000 shoppers each week. The Fact File says that 650,000 people live within 20 minutes drive of Blanchardstown shopping centre, but in fact they all seem to be here, all the time. They are hopping on buses, towing trolleys - Trolley Management, says the littlejeep and crossing the road to Petstop Superstore and McGuirks Golf, and to the Leisure Centre where you can drink a cup of Nescaf in the diner and think, Where do we live? Where do we live?
Irish Architectural Review 2001, edited by John, is published by Gandon Editions/RIAI (£27.50-£19.50) She Moves through the Boom was published last year by Sitric Books (£7.99 in paperback).