Bertie Ahern's warning from afar about an economic downturn raises questions that were first asked when the period of prosperity began in the mid-1990s but have not been satisfactorily answered since.
I once tried putting these questions - about the origins of our extraordinary growth, who benefits most from it and what happens if and when the downturn comes - to Charlie McCreevy. But he was too busy claiming victory over his critics to explain how it was done.
And an economist whom I've known for years was even more baffling when he dismissed any and every criticism of the way we are with the counter-claim that it was simply inspired by the spite and jealousy of the left.
The left, he said, would like nothing better than to be able to report the collapse of every enterprise, the failure of every investment, the bankruptcy of every profitable industry - home-grown or foreign - and the overwhelming growth of dole queues in every quarter.
I tried reminding him of an old acquaintance in London, a man who'd astonished the company one comradely evening by refusing to drink to the collapse of the system. He was older than the rest of us and he'd been through the mill: left unemployed and hopeless after the first World War and homeless in the 1930s. Whenever the system collapsed, Bill and his friends were under it, at the bottom of the pile.
Now, in another country and another century, we are once more perched between success and failure with uncertainty growing daily about the side on which our chips will fall. Report after report sings the praises of an economy which has not only thrown off the shackles of its own past but avoided the pitfalls in which others now stumble.
And, even before Ahern sent his characteristically vague message from Brazil, report after report had warned those who didn't already feel it in their bones that this was a crazily lopsided society in which too many people were left undefended by the State - the only body capable of defending them.
It was at the meeting convened by the Irish Autism Alliance to discuss the Jamie Sinnott case in HQ/Irish Music Hall of Fame on Tuesday that the vulnerability of so many in such a lopsided society struck me.
Here were people like Jamie Sinnott's mother Kathryn, dedicated and determined; campaigners like Seamus Greene, with an eye on the political edge, and up to 1,000 others representing the handicapped of every kind and in every way.
People who had for so long been told that society couldn't afford education, care or other services. People who'd been fobbed off with lies and bland excuses, not only by politicians but by officials practised in the art of dismissal - who had learned to blind themselves to people's needs for the sake of a few pounds.
BUT those for whom autism is the primary concern should take the advice given by a seasoned campaigner on Tuesday. He shrewdly observed that the worst position they could adopt would be to stand alone and find themselves in isolation.
Were they to stand alone they'd be picked off, one by one, by political cynics or their officials.
Parents would be told that what was on offer was all the Government could afford. If everybody's needs were met - certainly the wider needs of handicap, not only in education but in health and care - the State would be bankrupt.
You may have noticed that the spectre of bankruptcy is often raised in some quarters, as a rule by the same smart-aleck commentators, to make a case against meeting the community's obligations to the less well off - never to block payments to the rich and super-rich.
It's the kind of rubbish vulnerable, generous and considerate people have been sold for years. They're urged to think of ever-increasing taxes on the assumption that the burden is borne by people like themselves.
The trouble is that this is partly true. The burden is disproportionately borne by people like themselves. They pay when public money - their money - is spent on public services.
And they pay when public money - their money - is not spent on public services, of which they and their poorer neighbours are most in need.
The lopsided imposition of tax and the even greater discrepancy in need are accepted as a law of nature.
Simply stated, those who ought to be paying their way pay as little as possible. And they get away with it because politicians and banks connive with them and suited ranks of accountants, lawyers, tax consultants and sundry corporate advisers work for them.
Some are the 21st century's absentee landlords or are in companies up to their necks in transfer pricing or double-crossing their own governments by taking advantage of the schemes obligingly laid on by Cayman Ireland.
And while the absentee landlords and their foreign counterparts are served by an army of well-schooled lackeys, who do we have to look after our interests? As often as not, a pack of fumblers to whom you wouldn't lend a fiver at a poker school on a Friday night.