Ship of Fools

‘The “Island of Ireland” is strategically located at the centre of “The World”.’ As a statement of the self-absorption and grandiose delusions of Celtic Tiger Ireland, this one would take some beating. But it is intended literally. The ‘Island of Ireland’ is not the island of Ireland. ‘The World’ is not the world. The island is part of a man-made archipelago off the coast of Dubai, 300 artificial platforms in the Arabian Gulf, surrounded by an oval breakwater shaped to form the map of the world.

On the 225,000-square-foot Island of Ireland, owned by a consortium led by the Galway-based property developer John O’Dolan, the plan was to have just a hint of ‘the architecture of Ireland through the ages’. In case potential investors might be put off by the thought of damp thatched cottages festering in the rain or dreary bungalows on windswept hills, the promotional brochure stressed that this would mostly consist of a ‘landscaped courtyard area, evoking the wide Georgian squares of Dublin’. For older property developers, there would presumably be a warm glow of nostalgia for the Georgian squares that they and their mentors had done their best to obliterate in the 1960s and 1970s.

The plan, aptly enough, was endorsed on the scheme’s website by the serving Taoiseach Bertie Ahern who evoked ‘substantial Irish achievement across a wide range of human endeavours’ and expressed the hope that the ‘Island of Ireland’ would be ‘seen as symbolic of the best of those achievements and reflect the confidence and vision of Irish people in the new millennium’. These achievements, the brochure made clear, were those of the millionaires who had made Ireland what it was and who now deserved a literal place in the sun: ‘We had a vision . . . to bring a little piece of Ireland to the sun. To create a luxury hotel resort to which those who have shaped our modern, thriving nation can escape as a little reward once in a while, without ever losing touch with home.’

The pitch was perfectly tuned. The great men who ‘shaped our modern, thriving nation’ could have their Irish pride in villas with ‘more than just a hint of Irishness to them’, but they would not actually have to be in Ireland - a particular advantage for those among them who were tax fugitives. This would be the perfect Ireland, with a vague sense of ‘history’ in its mock-Georgian squares but no politics, with a simulacrum of Irish conviviality (‘bars that will remind you of home’) without the bother of an unruly plebeian populace (this is ‘the most exclusive real-estate development on the planet’). It would also be the perfect form of globalisation - a world with Ireland at its centre, like Jerusalem in medieval maps. The multi-millionaire’s solipsism and self-regard would mesh seamlessly with the fantasy of a Hibernocentric universe: ‘The World can actually revolve around you!’

The Island of Ireland in Dubai was the incarnation of a fantasy that had hovered around the collective imagination of Ireland’s elite for a long time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Irish intellectuals revived the idea of the Fifth Province (Mary Robinson evoked it in her inaugural speech as president in 1990). They meant a place of art, ideas and ideals. But the real fifth province of the Irish imagination was a sunny Ireland, washed by a bluer, warmer ocean, where there were no taxes, no history and no social obligations.

In Charles Haughey’s era this fifth province was Grand Cayman island, where money frolicked under palm trees, free from the predations of the taxman and the prying eyes of those who wondered about its origins. In Bertie Ahern’s era, it was Bermuda, whose tax-haven status Ireland hoped to emulate. It was not for nothing that while English critics referred to the Irish Financial Services Centre in Dublin as ‘Liechtenstein on the Liffey’, the Industrial Development Authority preferred, as we have seen, to aspire to be ‘the Bermuda of Europe’. The Island of Ireland in Dubai brought these two notions together - a sunny island that was far away but still, somehow, ‘home’.

Even when this fantasy had to be actually brought home to the process of making money from property development in dark, rainy Ireland, it retained its grip. In the Celtic Tiger era of property development, Ireland was always subtropical. As the property editor of the Irish Times, Orna Mulcahy, noted of one of the iconic (doubly iconic in being unbuilt) developments of the boom years, Seán Dunne’s would-be ‘new Knightsbridge’ in Ballsbridge:

I dug out the architects’ drawings from the bottom of a heap under my desk and yes, there it was: sunshine, flooding the imagined plazas and courtyards and bouncing off the glass of towering apartment blocks. Pert-breasted women strolling around in T-shirts and sunglasses. Even the underground shopping mall appeared to have an abundance of sunlight spilling in via a mini Eden project jutting up at ground level, filled with palms, orchids and cacti. The central piazza, with 14- and 15-storey buildings all around, had the baked ochre look of a Las Vegas resort slumbering in 100 degree heat, with office windows above flung open . . . On the property developer’s compass, you see, there is no north. Invariably, their computer-generated plans for housing or office schemes are forever drenched in sunshine, no matter what the aspect. High noon-type shadows are cast by computer-generated people . . . the vast majority of balconies built during the boom faced south - even the many that actually looked due north and enjoyed direct sunlight about once a year, Newgrangestyle, on June 21st at four in the morning.

In other countries, global warming is a threat. In Ireland it is a fantasy. The sun-drenched country of the developers’ plans actually became the place in which much of the population took up mental residence. During the boom years, people under forty stopped wearing overcoats, even in the dismal winter. The Atlantic wind that stabbed through a flimsy jacket and T-shirt or turned the bare legs of short-skirted girls blue was really a gentle zephyr. Cafes and restaurants began to colonise the footpaths outside their doors for the alfresco dining appropriate to the rain-free, sunlit climate.

There was, moreover, a physical extrusion of Ireland to the world’s sunspots as Irish people invested enormous sums in property abroad. Of the €50-plus billion of Irish money spent on buying foreign property, much of the large-scale commercial investment was in the UK or the US. But a substantial amount was spent on acquiring either second homes or investment properties in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic or even further afield. No location was too exotic, especially if it was an island and sunny. At the height of the boom a not untypical report in the property pages of the Irish Times stated that ‘Cape Verde Development, a company started by Tom Sheehy, a Clonakilty-based property fit-out specialist and backed mainly by Cork and Limerick business people, sold 200 units of its 449-unit scheme off plans when it launched a few weeks ago, most of them to Irish buyers’. It is questionable whether most of those buyers had never even heard of the Cape Verde islands five years previously.

This imaginative displacement was part of the larger confusion of space that came with Ireland’s experience of extreme and rapid globalisation. The question of whether Ireland was a balmy subtropical paradise or a wet, wind-lashed rock on the eastern Atlantic was a subset of a larger question - what continent was Ireland in anyway? That in turn was part of a wider problem - the uncertainties of both space and time that made it hard for Irish people to be quite sure where they were living, and when.

The question of which continent Ireland belonged in was famously posed by Mary Harney when she told the American Bar Association in 2000 that ‘History and geography have placed Ireland in a very special position between America and Europe . . . Geographically we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin.’ This idea of Ireland as a liminal space, between one continent and another, its proximity to continental Europe a mere factual detail, was of course highly political. It was intended to identify Ireland as an outpost of American values at the physical and political margin of European ideas. Ireland was really a part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economy, sharing the thirst of the US and the UK for frantic consumption, property bubbles, free-range banking and the elevation of the private sector above all public purposes.

Harney, to her credit, was quite explicit about this. In that speech, she defined ‘the European way as being built on a strong concern for social harmony and social inclusion, with governments being prepared to intervene strongly through the tax and regulatory systems to achieve their desired outcomes’. She contrasted this with the ‘American way . . . built on the rugged individualism of the original frontiersmen, an economic model that is heavily based on enterprise and incentive, on individual effort and with limited government intervention’. Ireland, she said, ‘sailed closer to the American shore than the European one’. In this tectonic shifting of continental plates, Harney was assuring her audience that Celtic Tiger Ireland was not much interested in ‘social harmony and social inclusion’ or in governments that use taxation and regulation to limit the inequalities and instabilities of the market. It was interested in those mythically rugged values of the American frontier. This was perhaps just as well, since, in line with Harney’s ambitions, Ireland would indeed go on to develop quite a line in cowboy economics and earn the title of the ‘Wild West of European finance’.

Yet Harney’s figurative shifting of Ireland a few thousand miles to the west was not seen to be absurd. This was partly because of the close historical ties between Ireland and the US and the large scale of American investment in Ireland. But it was also because the Irish sense of belonging in Europe turned out to be much weaker than it had seemed. The EU had been a crucial part of Irish identity between the 1970s and 1990s when it had been the form in which Irish modernity sold itself to a rural and conservative population. It has, paradoxically, vindicated Irish nationalism by finally breaking the dependence of the Irish economy on trade with Britain. It was not surprising that enthusiasm for the European project was particularly high in Ireland.

Yet, as it turned out, it was also particularly shallow. Linguistically, for example, Ireland remained a relentlessly monoglot subset of the English-speaking world. For all the talk of globalisation and cultural complexity, the Irish were stubbornly attached to English as their sole means of communication. In fact the Irish were more loyal to English than the English: 66 per cent of the Irish population speaks only English, compared to 62 per cent of Brits. By contrast, just a third of Germans speak only German.

On the political level, there was an obvious contradiction between the message coming from government that the Irish were more American than European on the one side and, on the other, the message from that same government that the Irish should vote for treaties enhancing and expanding the EU. The Nice Treaty was defeated in a referendum in 2001. Though it was subsequently passed in a re-run in 2002, the defeat prefigured the initial rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by Irish voters in 2008. The underlying scepticism about where Ireland belonged, largely created by the government itself, could not be turned on and off at will. The Celtic Tiger’s tendency to snap at the European hand that had fed it in its infancy was encouraged by the same politicians who, when it suited them, insisted that the Irish should be good Europeans.

These confusions in the big picture were also felt at the level of everyday life. If Ireland was metaphorically wandering all over the map of the world, the Irish were literally wandering all over the map of Ireland. Rampant, badly planned development destroyed a coherent sense of place. A vast amount of effort in the late 1990s was put into the development of a National Spatial Strategy, under which regional ‘gateways’ and ‘hubs’ would develop a critical mass of population and employment and become sustainable urban centres. It was not simply ignored but actively destroyed by the government. When Charlie McCreevy announced in 2003 a plan to ‘decentralise’ 10,000 civil and public sector employees from Dublin to the regions, three-quarters of them were to be sent to towns that were not planned for growth under the strategy. It was a clear signal that the whole idea of organising space in a rational way was being abandoned. In 2007, five years after the strategy was supposedly implemented, the president of the Irish Planning Institute, Henk van der Kamp, pointed out that population growth in many counties with ‘gateways’ or ‘hubs’ was actually much lower than that in counties without them. In other words, the spatial strategy was completely meaningless.

The effects were felt both in the cities and in small towns and villages. On the one hand, rising house prices in the cities forced would-be home owners out into new commuter belts. Just 4 per cent of the growth in the Irish population between 2002 and 2006 took place in the five main cities combined. The result, especially in relation to Dublin, was a vast expansion of the effective area of the city, in terms of the places where those working within it had their homes. Large swathes of Wicklow, Wexford, Meath, Louth, Westmeath, Carlow, Offaly, even Cavan and Monaghan, became parts of outer Dublin. The very concept of Dublin became extraordinarily diffuse. As early as 2001, the president of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland, Tony Reddy, pointed out that Greater Dublin ‘could occupy an area the size of Los Angeles by 2010’, even though it would have just a quarter of the American city’s population.

On the other side of this equation, builders, aided by complaisant local authorities, slapped up huge numbers of houses, usually in identikit suburban estates, as appendages to old villages. Many of these villages were simply swamped. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of households in Stamullen increased by 726 per cent; in Ratoath by 651 per cent; in Sallins by 417 per cent, and in Kinnegad by 379 per cent. Even a village like Virginia in Cavan, all of 83 kilo - metres from Dublin, grew by 124 per cent. With both men and women having to work in Dublin to pay what were still very high mortgages (and to pay for the cars that were now an absolute necessity: 90 per cent of households in commuter counties like Meath and Kildare had at least one car), maintaining a strong sense of place was always going to be a struggle.

Even within the core of a city like Dublin, new apartment complexes often lacked any real sense of connection to the old working-class areas in which they merely happened to have been built. Mary Benson, in a study of the inner-city district of Ringsend, just two kilometres from the city centre, found that those living in new apartments tended to have a very weak sense of place: ‘For these residents, Ringsend does not hold any intimate meaning. They do not involve themselves in any meaningful way at a local level. Their social networks are located in specific places away from Ringsend rather than being anchored locally . . . Although they share spatial proximity, there is little evidence of spatial association. ’

The Irish boom coincided with not just one ‘end of history’ but four. There was the general Western illusion that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘history’ was over and the American model of free-market democracy would be established as the universal norm. There was the complementary illusion that the historical cycles of capitalism had been ended by the sheer brilliance of the masters of the universe. Gordon Brown was making this claim as early as 1997, but it was a commonplace, especially in the Anglo-Saxon economic world of which Ireland was a part. And there was a specifically Irish ‘end of history’. Two of the great continuities of Ireland since the eighteenth century - mass emigration and political violence - seemed, by the late 1990s, to be definitively over.

Together these forces fed a feeling that the past had little relevance to the new era and that it should be, quite literally, obliterated. On a visit to Shanghai, Bertie Ahern sighed with envy at the power of the city’s mayor to bulldoze everything in his way: ‘Naturally enough I would like to have the power of the mayor that when he decides he wants to do a highway and, if he wants to bypass an area, he just goes straight up and over.’

This fantasy of absolute power over the landscape and its awkward remnants of history was symbolised in the crassest, but perhaps the most characteristic, action of the boom years: the driving of a motorway through the Tara/Skryne valley in County Meath. The Hill of Tara and its surrounding valleys are an ancient sacred landscape, with at least seventy major archaeological monuments, ranging from a Neolithic passage tomb to Iron Age ceremonial earthworks, in and around the hill itself. Because of the spread of commuter dormitories into north Meath and Cavan, it was deemed necessary to build a motorway. The planners and Fianna Fáil seemed to take a perverse pleasure in rejecting alternative routes and insisting that the motorway should go through the Tara valley. The sheer glee with which this was done was a symptom of a deeply neurotic kind of temporal arrogance. Nothing mattered except now.

Paradoxically, this obliteration of a sense of historical time also suggested that the future would be pretty much like the present. The operative tense in the grammar of Ireland’s boom was the present continuous. The idea of the future as a different time, with its own imperatives, was largely absent from the Tiger mentality. Sustainability - a concept that incorporates a sense of the future into the present - was the great unthinkable. Thus the utter contempt for planning and environmental considerations expressed in Bertie Ahern’s irritated complaint in 2003 that every big infrastructural project had to ‘go through eight hoops, through all environmental, planning and blah blah blah, and every blah costs a few hundred million’, and his loftily surreal dismissal of all objections to motorway routes as being about ‘swans, snails and people hanging out of trees’.

The non-existence of the future meant that it was okay to build huge numbers of one-off houses in the countryside where the inhabitants were assumed to be ageless - otherwise it might have seemed wise to think about issues like isolation and immobility that might arise when they got old. It also underpinned the decision, in the age of global warming and peak oil, to create a completely car-dependent society. With very limited fossil fuel resources of its own, and a share of energy from renewable sources that was less than half the OECD average, Ireland became one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world. Ireland’s total energy consumption increased by 83 per cent from 1990 to 2007 - a bad enough record. But transport energy use increased by 181 per cent. The future that Ireland was imagining was an American motopia of the 1950s in which petrol was dirt cheap, guilt-free and infinitely available.

The consequences of this inability to imagine the future were not at all abstract. Since the present was one in which property prices were constantly rising and the historical experiences of boom and bust had been rendered irrelevant, there was no point in listening to those who droned on about what had happened before. To insist that all known housing bubbles had always burst was to miss the point that this was a new time with its own new laws of perpetual motion.

The process of speeding up was a function both of work and of the property market. The pressures of highly productive workplaces and of juggling paid employment with childcare made a nonsense of the old Bord Fáilte image of Ireland as a place with a relaxed pace of life. In a 2006 study from the Economic and Social Research Institute, 57 per cent of working people and 62 per cent of dual-earner couples reported feeling rushed or stressed on weekdays. Even simple tasks that allowed for a degree of dawdling were speeded up: the proportion of children walking to school was cut in half in the boom years.

Meanwhile, in their book The Builders, Kathy Sheridan and Frank McDonald quoted one property industry insider on the shift in the idea of a ‘phase’ in relation to construction and sale of housing estates: ‘Before the boom, it used to be Phase 1 this year and Phase 2 the next; now there was a day between them if that.’ Builders would set a price, sell a lot of houses quickly and then decide that the price was too cheap. ‘What happens then is that you call the next bunch of exact same houses “Phase 2”, and the price is hiked maybe 15 per cent. And that could all happen in a few days or in an afternoon. ’

In the property bubble, the clock was always ticking loudly - time really was money as prices rose by the day and the pressure to buy something, anything, right now became irresistible. Yet partly as a result of that same property mania, much of life moved at a teeth-grindingly slow pace. In the 2002, the main opposition party Fine Gael was much mocked for an ad campaign suggesting that the Celtic Tiger was really a Celtic Snail. The imagery was hopelessly out of tune with the popular mood, but it was not inaccurate.

The poor level of investment in public transport and the consequent dependence on cars made Ireland into the traffic jam capital of the world. Seven out of ten Irish workers were travelling to their jobs by car, and the average distance was nearly 16 kilometres. By 2006, there were 1.2 million cars on the road for a population of 4.2 million - more than one car for every four people, including children. The number of people travelling to work by car increased by nearly a quarter between 2002 and 2006. The results were predictable.

A Small Firms Association study, published in 2001, found that the time taken for a small packet of goods to travel five kilometres in Dublin - 57 minutes - was effectively the longest in the world. This journey time compared to 13 minutes in London, nine in Singapore, and 37 in Mumbai. The only city in the survey to be slower was Calcutta, where most business deliveries were still made on foot. For the same reasons, the average speed of buses in Dublin dropped steadily as the property boom gathered pace. In 2001, it was 15 kilometres an hour, compared to an international average of 20. In 2003, it dropped to 13.5 and in 2005 it was 12.9. In a society that was always telling people they had to move fast, moving very slowly was an increasingly common experience. Waiting - in a car at the infamous Red Cow roundabout on the M50 into Dublin, on a very long list for hospital treatment, in a serpentine queue at the overcrowded Dublin airport - was one of the characteristic modes of life in a frantically fast society.

Perhaps the most confusing thing about the Irish sense of time was that its grand narrative refused to go in a straight line. For what the Irish in Ireland were experiencing as new - rapid urbanisation, multiculturalism, the need to make one’s way in a polyglot and physically unfamiliar society - was a recapitulation of the experiences of their own ancestors when they emigrated from rural farms to huge metropolitan centres in the US or Britain. The diasporic life was now lived at home - a logical outcome of the economic reversal in which, instead of Irish labour moving towards American capital, American capital had moved towards Irish labour. The sense of estrangement felt by generations of emigrants could now be felt without actually going anywhere.

What made it even more so was, paradoxically, one of the great strengths of Irish culture: its capacity for double-think. For a range of reasons - the simultaneous existence of paganism and Christianity, the ambiguous relationship of indigenous society to a colonial power, the long experience of emigration - Irish culture developed a particularly strong capacity for operating simultaneously within different mental frameworks. This is one of the reasons for the rich inventiveness of Irish artistic life and for much of the humour, teasing and wordplay that enliven social interaction. Irish double-think is wonderfully summed up by the old woman in the 1930s who, asked by Seán O’Faoláin if she believed in the little people, replied, ‘I do not, sir, but they’re there.’

Yet this same capacity to be in two minds has also been at work in many of the most shameful aspects of Irish society. Hypocrisy, in which Irish life abounds, is one of its forms: double-think is closely allied to double standards. So too is the extraordinary capacity of the society to both know and not know things simultaneously. Irish people knew very well that the appalling system of Church-run industrial schools existed in order to inflict pain and punishment on children, yet there was genuine shock and disturbance when the systemic abuse was revealed in the 1990s and confirmed in 2009 in the relentless and devastating report of the Ryan inquiry. In Ireland, there was a refinement on Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ramblings about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. The Irish added another category: unknown knowns, things that were understood to be the case and yet remained unreal. At its most extreme this worked as a kind of collective psychosis, analogous to the idea of dissociation in psychiatry, where, in response to trauma, the mind distances itself from experiences that it does not wish to process.

This mechanism was at work in relation to corruption. Charles Haughey understood this with a clarity approaching genius. Instead of hiding the vast wealth for which an innocent explanation was impossible, he flaunted it, relying on the capacity of the public at large both to know that he must be corrupt and somehow to confine this knowledge to a dark corner of the brain where it remained inert and irrelevant. His success strengthened the workings of the unknown knowns - when his gargantuan appetite for other people’s money was formally and undeniably revealed, it was necessary for the large swathe of the population that supported him to believe that it had not known about it all along. With this habit of mind so well ingrained it was possible to vote for a fraudster while believing that this was not an act of collusion but merely, for example, an expression of sympathy with a man who was good to his Mammy.

Gradually in this way, the Irish power of double-think became less charming and playful and more like George Orwell’s definition of the word he invented in his novel Ninteen Eighty-Four: ‘The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.’

Again, the consequences of this way of thinking were not abstract. The greatest unknown known of all was the fact that property prices were artificial and unsustainable. This was known both from history and from common sense. Economists and regulators knew it from studies and statistics. Ordinary punters knew through the operation of basic intelligence. It simply made no sense that a three-bedroomed semi in a Dublin suburb was ‘worth’ €1 million or that an apartment in Cork had the same value as a chateau on the Loire. Yet these realities were also unknown.

One contributor to the sense of displacement was undoubtedly the slow death of Catholic Ireland. The institutional Catholic Church had dominated both the public identity and the personal values of a majority of the population from the middle of the nineteenth century until the institution itself began to implode in the 1990s. The gradual rise of urban, secular and Anglo-American cultural norms on the one side and the revelation of horrific crimes of child abuse on the other broke that dominance. What the sociologist Tom Inglis called the ‘moral monopoly’ of the Church was ended.

For social conservatives, the loss of religious faith is an adequate explanation for the confusions of Irish life in the Celtic Tiger years and for the amorality that ran through them. But this explanation does not bear much scrutiny. In the first place, the Church was not a beacon of moral certitude - it was a deeply corrupt institution that tortured and enslaved children in its industrial schools and that placed the need to protect its own reputation by covering up child abuse ahead of the safety of vulnerable children. And secondly, the great nexus of amorality, Fianna Fáil, was arguably never more closely aligned with the Church than it was under Bertie Ahern. It was Ahern who passionately denounced as ‘aggressive secularism’ any attempt to debate the Church’s continued control of the education and health systems. It was he who attempted to enshrine Catholic teaching on abortion in the constitution. Above all, it was he who used over €1 billion of public money to save the Church from the legal and financial consequences of its tolerance for child abuse when he agreed a deal to indemnify the religious orders against being sued. The institutional Church was not edged out by the governing culture of the Celtic Tiger - it was closely allied to it.

The real effect of the loss of Church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place. The Irish had been taught for generations to identity morality with religion, and a very narrow kind of religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not in boardrooms. It was about the body, not the body politic. Masturbation was a much more serious sin than tax evasion. In a mindset where homosexuality was much worse than cooking the books, it was okay to be bent as long as you were straight. This nineteenth-century ethic was not pushed aside by the creation of a coherent and deeply rooted civic, democratic and social morality. It mostly collapsed under its own weight of hypocrisy. The familiar code of values, the language in which right and wrong could be discussed, lost its meaning before Irish society had fully learned to speak any other tongue.

One of the few areas of Irish life that had any continuing sense of integrity was artistic creativity. But here, too, there were no easy ways to get one’s bearings. The last big economic and cultural shift, the opening up of the country to foreign investment in the late 1950s, had been played out with remarkable potency in the theatre, as a brilliant generation of playwrights (Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, John B. Keane) created vivid dramas of a society torn between past and future. This was possible because there was a single governing narrative - the conflict between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global, between the values of a rural, Catholic society and the aspirations of the young for personal freedom, emotional satisfaction and material abundance.

The problem with the world of the Celtic Tiger was that there wasn’t a single big narrative that could be shaped into a clear conflict. The personal choices thrown up by social change were rather less heroic: agonising about whether to stay in a small village in Donegal or to emigrate to Philadelphia is rather more dramatic than wondering whether to buy a holiday home in Bulgaria or Florida. The sense of conflicted spaces (going into exile or staying at home) that shaped so much of the Irish artistic imagination in the twentieth century was not easy to generate for a generation that treated Ryanair like its bus service and did its Christmas shopping in New York. It is not for nothing that conflict (as opposed to bickering) virtually disappeared from Irish drama in the Celtic Tiger years and that monologue replaced dialogue as the preferred form for the younger writers.

A particular problem was that Ireland did not have a tradition of large-scale social realism. Irish history and society had been too angular, too discontinuous, for a realistic literature to thrive. Indeed, the glory of Irish writing had long been the distorting strangeness of the ‘cracked looking glass’ that did not so much reflect society as rearrange it into dreamily disconnected shapes. In the Celtic Tiger years, however, there were times when the country could have done with a kind of art that was forensically descriptive of contemporary Irish society, ordering its chaos into a recognisable whole. There were occasional triumphs of Irish realism on screen, like Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran’s superb conjuring of unofficial and invisible lives in Adam and Paul, Prosperity and Garage, or Eugene O’Brien and Declan Recks’s micro-studies of Midlands anomie in Pure Mule. It was also true that the emergence of the Irish crime novel in such small masterpieces as Gene Kerrigan’s Little Criminals and Dark Times in the City suggested that international genres like the thriller might be more useful in depicting a globalised culture than the more specifically Irish traditions proved to be. But no one in any form could manage the kind of realist epic that would give a multi-layered and shifting society a sense of where it was and how it got there.

It may have been, in fact, that the disruptions of time and space in boomtime Ireland were simply too complex to be dealt with in the same work. On the whole, Irish literature was far better at dealing with time than with space. It had relatively easy access to a framework - the extended family - in which time unfolds naturally. The great familial myths of Sebastian Barry or Marina Carr, or the more intense and intimate worlds of, say, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, were very powerful correctives to the sense of a continuous, timeless present tense that dominated the boom years. They reminded people that the past doesn’t just go away.

On the other hand, the rarer engagements with the fractured sense of space (Tom Murphy’s The House, say, or Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn) dealt with the idea of living in two places at the same time, but did so by projecting themselves backwards to an era long before the Celtic Tiger was even imaginable. On the whole, it was easier to deal with that unruly beast either by confining it within the cage of familial intimacies or by seeking the possibility of narrative order in older, more distant settings.

There was also the paradox that the most thoroughly globalised brand of Irish culture in the boom years was also the most conservative. Aspects of Irish culture were commodified as never before in boybands, popular women’s fiction and Irish dancing shows. At least the first two of those, however, tended to be peculiarly archaic. The Boyzones and Westlifes were little more than the Irish showbands of the 1960s, scrubbed up, slicked down and without the cumbersome need to play instruments or be particularly good at music. The popular fiction writers who sold vast numbers of books in shiny covers around the world were of very mixed quality, but in broad terms their work derived (at worst) from jazzed-up Mills and Boon and (at best) from the Irish short-story tradition of the 1930s. In both cases, the trick was to package and market aspects of pre-Celtic Tiger Irish culture as globalised commodities, not to actually respond in any real way to contemporary Ireland.

One of the real markers of this was sex. It is a lavish understatement to say that Irish sexual mores changed in the 1990s. Yet, while the end of the Franco era in Spain, which produced a surge of sexual energy in a previously repressed Catholic country, gave the world Pedro Almódovar and Penélope Cruz, the breaking of Ireland’s sexual Berlin wall gave the world Boyzone. What the boybands and much of the chicklit shared was a strangely antiseptic, coy sexuality. They were, after all, sometimes overlapping worlds: in Cecelia Ahern’s P.S. I Love You, the heroine dreams of listening to ‘the soothing sounds of her favourite Westlife CD’. The same heroine has a ‘neat little chest’ instead of breasts, and on being given a present by a friend giggles, ‘It’s a battery operated . . . oh my God! Ciara! You naughty girl!’

The dance shows, however, did, in an odd way, respond to the changing nature of the Celtic Tiger - they got infinitely worse. Riverdance, which created the genre and became the most commercially successful Irish cultural export of all time, was actually a highly sophisticated piece of work. It created and enacted a myth that really did capture something about the way Irish people hoped to see themselves in the 1990s. It took a traditional and rather despised form - Irish dancing - and injected it with the steroids of sex, speed, Irish-American optimism and fake tan. But it was a genuine synthesis of traditional forms and music (composed and performed by people who really understood and valued it) on the one hand and Broadway pizzazz on the other.

And its narrative was actually the nearest thing the first phase of the Celtic Tiger created to a myth of itself. It played out a story of globalisation (Irish dancing evolving in the mists of time, being taken to America by emigrants, fusing with other cultures, and then, by implication, returning on the winged feet of Michael Flatley and Jean Butler) that was also a comforting narrative of cyclical continuity. What was coming to Ireland now was simply what had left it before. Life in a multicultural society wasn’t a threat to tradition, but an enhancement of it. Along with the spectacle and the showbiz, Riverdance was a statement about how it was possible to be Irish in the twenty-first century.

If Riverdance was the great mythic spectacle of the first phase of the Irish boom, before it became a bubble, the characteristic spectacle of the second part, appropriately enough, was Michael Flatley’s 2005 show The Celtic Tiger. In its precisely calibrated mixture of stupidity and lavishness, it was the perfect show for a society that had more money than sense.

The Celtic Tiger broadly replayed the narrative of Riverdance , from the Celtic mists of time to American emigration to cultural fusion to triumphant transatlantic return. But this time it was not a broad metaphor for the globalisation of Irish culture, but quite specifically the unfolding in dance, song and spectacle of the Celtic Tiger itself. The tiger was now the prime emblem of Ireland - two huge, Disneyfied tiger faces flanked the screens and one of the climactic dances featured slinky women in tiger-striped costumes crawling, pawing and rubbing themselves in ecstasy (house prices must have been up again) as if they were escapees from a porn remake of Cats.

The extravagant ludicrousness of The Celtic Tiger did not make it any less authentic an expression of its subject matter. Indeed it probably made it more so. One of the fascinations of the show was its high kitsch presentation of Irish history as a pure pastiche in which whole eras melt into each other. Thus, it began with Flatley dressed presumably as a Celtic warrior but actually as a cross between a particularly louche Roman general (Caligula playing at soldiers perhaps) and Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. All Irish history is sweet - up to a point. Devout monks dervish-dance with lurid temptresses, with nary a word about the corruptions of the flesh. Horny-headed Vikings dance chastely with Irish maidens. An Irish Garden of Eden blossoms.

But then the chorus line of Brits invades, identifiable by their red coats and powdered wigs, goose-stepping and robotic, like clockwork Nazis. They burn a thatched cottage. (The Irish maidens barely escape the fire, but, distressingly, the bottom three-quarters of their skirts have been consumed by the flames.) There is much writhing around to indicate the Famine. Father Michael Flatley enters in a nineteenth-century soutane intoning the Lord’s Prayer. The Brits surround him and shoot him dead with their fingers. A man sings ‘The Four Green Fields’ (a traditional nineteenth-century ballad written in the late 1960s). A boy playing, of all things, soccer is blown up by a British tank (presumably one of the little known nineteenth-century prototypes exclusively used for oppressing the Irish). Then Michael Flatley leads the 1916 Rising. It is not surprising that he wins, since the Brits are still in their redcoats and powdered wigs and are still using their fingers for guns. Everybody sings ‘A Nation Once Again’. Ireland is free and triumphant.

But there’s not much to do in Ireland now that it’s free, so everyone goes to New York. They dance with homeboys and Spaniards and Michael dances dressed as a gangster with nifty spats and a Tommy gun, so he’s clearly doing well. But what of Ireland back home? It’s struggling to become modern: here’s Kathleen ni Houlihan as an Aer Lingus stewardess in a green uniform, dancing a jig in high heels - modernity and tradition. Then Michael and his crew of sun-glassed beefcake boys in Pan Am uniforms fly her over New York. She sees Ireland’s destiny. She does a striptease act, peeling off her green Irish uniform to reveal underneath a bra and panties imprinted with the Stars and Stripes. Ireland was really America all along and now the Celtic Tiger has allowed itself to reveal its true identity. All that suffering - the Famine, the evictions, the murder of Saint Michael Flatley by the redcoat Brit bastards - has been repaid at last. Flatley leads the chorus line in a big, rapturous tap-along to ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. The triumph has come: we are real live cousins of our Uncle Sam.

Risible as all of this is, it is the best that Irish culture could do in constructing a mythic version of the meaning of the Celtic Tiger in its manic, delusional phase. It was crass and bloated, vulgar and ridiculous, but it came to a conclusion that made some kind of sense: Ireland is not Ireland any more but someplace else. And it came up with a name for that place: America.