Well, we all had a good laugh at the Montego Bay Twelve, with their brassy blonde hair, and their well-filled Lycra leggings, and their noisy and inebriated shrieking to one another across an airport tarmac. They were travelling, so therefore they were travellers, and we all got a good laugh out of that too. Was ever laughter at the expense of others ever so misplaced? And did we really and truly fail to spot in that gaggle of drunken tinkers a perfect mirror image of the Ireland that we are now becoming?
In a few short years, virtually everything which distinguished Irishness - the characteristics of patience, gentleness, piety and courtesy - have been jettisoned. We have imitated others, and the imitations are flawed, ridiculous. We have chosen to draw virtually nothing from our own experience or history. Instead, we have watched those with different experiences, different histories, different cultures, and then sedulously tried to ape them.
Pseudo-American accents
Sometimes this is merely pathetic: for example, the plethora of pseudo-American accents everywhere; even local radio such as CKK uses American accents for station identification. Sometimes it is culturally and irreparably tragic, as with the dismal imitation throughout Dublin of the Irish theme-pubs of English breweries. The Dublin publican minding his own bar is now almost extinct; he has been replaced by a sad and silly series of bad replicas of bad replicas.
We wanted growth, and now we have it; and our political establishment, paralysed by flocks of fat chickens coming home to roost from the Haughey years and crash-landing through the Cabinet roof, is incapable of planning for a month, never mind for the 10 years of sustained and dynamic growth economists are now predicting.
Does that not fill you with terror? Look at what is happening now, all around us: traffic jams, urban sprawl, ruination visited on small communities everywhere, and the entire planning process out of control, like fissile material that has reached critical mass. The most important people in the country nowadays are county councillors; their powers are almost absolute. A single vote can bring social devastation for many, and vast riches for a few.
Are these people typical of the rest of us? Hardly. For who wants to spend unpaid hours in draughty council chambers night after night listening to cranks meanderingly chase whatever bee has landed in their bonnet? Councillors must be deviants, odd creatures from the margins of society, with an appetite for evening boredom, with a taste for tramping wet streets in winter looking for votes, with a yen for discussing drainage and refuse collections while the rest of us enjoy our families.
Control of countryside
And it is to such people we have handed the control of the countryside. Is it surprising that they make decisions that nobody can understand? Their day has come; it will continue to come over the next decade. And what will be left by 2010? What is left now?
We have all heard the story of the farmer who, when asked for directions, replies firstly that to get to that particular place, he would never start from here. That is what we have been trying to do over the past 10 years: to try to get to the future with somebody else's past, as if our own past told us nothing and was of no value. Thus the feminist agenda was imported intact from the US without any serious debate about its appropriateness to Ireland, or indeed its desirability anywhere.
In a fit of absent-mindedness, we created an economic model which is now imposing the feminist agenda. The impact of the double-income family on the property market obliges all but the most fortunate couples to seek two incomes, regardless. The stay-at-home mother is now regarded as a disordered freak or a professional failure; witness the brainless uproar over Finola Bruton's wise observations to Hillary Clinton about the virtues of traditional motherhood. So, instead of creating huge tax-breaks to properly reward the professional parent, we are looking for tax-breaks to pay for child-minders, we are demanding State-subsidised creches in the workplace and government-funded Montessori schools in every estate.
Sexual morality
We like to declaim about the morality of a woman's right to choose, or the right to life of the foetus; but it is politically incorrect nowadays to discuss the morality of young people engaging in activity which can lead to the most important event in their entire lives - the creation of another human being. In binning the traditional sexual morality of the Christian churches, we've lost sight of that quite awesome truth. How many teenage children are taught today about the monstrous immorality, not so much of frivolous sexual behaviour - which is after all, only human - but of not treating the consequences of the sexual deed, the male seed, with the care one would accord boiling plutonium?
We have lost the ability to say what is right or wrong, but instead we follow the lead of others; even to have an opinion about morality is being "judgmental". We mock the Montego Twelve and fail to see the posturing, clownishly mimetic figures alongside them in the mirror: the Vapid, Witless Twenty-Six.