At some time in the past few months, we passed a major threshold, one that makes nonsense of almost every expectation of the Irish people through their history. The housing market broke Mach One.
Thousands of houses in the Dublin area exceeded a notional value of £1 million each: and were their owners to decide to retire to Chad or somewhere similarly warm but cheap - and possibly at times a little uncomfortable, and provided they did not all attempt to do so simultaneously - they would all be actual millionaires.
Maybe some clever soul somewhere understands the cultural and political consequences of the process of thousands of people getting rich at the same time simply by standing still. Maybe some clever soul somewhere understands the broader machinery which is making us so rich. Maybe some clever soul somewhere even understands how the FTSE 100 contains at least a dozen new companies which have never made a penny in the three weeks they have been in existence, indeed, have lost billions.
Vast investments
Such companies seem to be driving the megagrowth of world stock markets, drawing vast amounts of investment (including, I suspect, my future pension funds: since I have a greater mastery of Old High Aramaic than I have of money, I have no doubt that the fine fellow or fellette who manages my account is right now finishing off a champagne lunch at my expense. What? You want another champagne cognac? Of course my dear pension-fund manager. Help yourself).
Maybe it's because we lack the history of success to cope with the impact of steadily rising growth, year upon year upon year: certainly we don't seem to possess the moral or psychological tools to put make sense of the world we are living in. Certainly, part of me, a very large part of me, simply doesn't believe in the endlessly rising economy bringing us all, grinning like Cheshire cats, up the one-way escalator of prosperity, above Britain, look, there goes Sweden, ah, auf weidersehen Germany, and look, there, we just passed Switzerland; maybe soon we'll overtake the dunes, the oilwells and the executioner's block of Saudi Arabia as we move right up into orbit.
Who believes this? Who actually, heart and soul, believes that this is an irreversible and continuing process of enrichment? Even putting that doubt aside, who is actually comfortable with the thought of rising prosperity occurring indefinitely? Who looks forward to the day when every family member has their own car, and their own television set in their room, and we can eat out at restaurants every night, dining on truffles and foie gras and sea-bass?
But even the most stupid of us must realise that it cannot go on; that sooner or later we might get notionally wealthier, but there will be nothing to do or buy with our money, except to invest it in companies . Consumerism must and will inevitably meet the disciplines not of demand and supply, but of simple exhaustion. What price the non-existent?
Inevitable scarcity
The world only has so many sea-bass; Ireland has only so many fields (nowadays called "sites"); there is only so much space for roads and cars, so much petrol in the ground, so much beef on the hoof. Sooner or later the economics of inevitable scarcity will give us a wake-up call, and the ghost of Malthus, dragging his chains, and with worms dropping out of his nose, will leeringly shamble into our lives and remind us: the resources are thin and growing thinner. All the money in the world will not bring back the dodo: the wealth of the Gulf will not restore the leathery flap of the pterodactylwing to our skies again; no wise wealth in the future can rebuild the landscapes despoiled by the cretinous wealth of today.
So as we move towards the Mach Two economy, abandoning religion, politeness, restraint, courtesy, tolerance, good manners, patience, stoicism - the qualities born of adversity and bred in a culture of philosophical resignation that worse must inevitably follow - what mental equipment have we for the storms which must inevitably follow? When our hopes are invested in the certainty that only growth lies ahead: steady as she goes, proudly unsinkable, the lookout in the rigging without binoculars, and not enough lifeboats on the decks, because this vessel doesn't need to worry about that piddling little iceberg ahead?
Notional value
An entire class of millionaires, thousands strong, has emerged in Ireland in the past two years - often with the unwarranted conceit which follows upon the acquisition of a few zeroes in a wholly notional assessment of one's value. It is all rather sad and pathetic, like the islanders who appeared in the Robert O'Flaherty-made Man of Aran, and who as "filmstars" thought they were several cuts above those of their neighbours who were not in the film.
In addition to new divisions, shutters are coming down on past experience, past knowledge, past culture, past stoicism: and as we soar beyond country after country in our rise to prosperity, we are probably soaring inescapably beyond the very qualities which both defined us and would defend us in adversity. What need have we of such things now? We have wealth, huge, multi-roomed ranch-type bungalows in very field from Malin to Mizen, traffic jams in every town, even the tiniest country lanes turned into race-tracks, and the landscape covered in a carpet of litter.
In other words, success.