One of the things we have come to realise in Ireland today is that change happens fast. In the blink of an eye, in fact. Think on it, all that poverty and emigration and angst and courting Irish Americans and tilling European fields. And how it paid off. Oh, the Celtic Tigers, the fast-thinking freewheeling techno-wizards, paving the way to a brave new world! We were good, no doubt about it, but we were full of it too, to the brim, overflowing with confidence and genius and daring. We came closer to Boston than Berlin. Our streets were full of visitors, marvelling at our music, our miracles and our élan, and hoping some might rub off on them. We loved it.

We were, I suppose, like the French football team, and like them this summer, we suddenly came unstuck.

All come and gone in a decade. We have gone from beggars to brigands, saints to sinners and heroes to villains in less than a decade. Visitors would salute few of us as scholars and gentlemen today. Thieves, thugs and twats might be more accurate. Some of us could even be called cheating, lying, extorting bastards, but that’s only some of us.

This has been the summer of discontent. It’s not just the prices and the cutbacks, though they’re there. It’s the sense that we’ve been had, that we were taken in, that the people who claimed to have promised the good times blew our stash unwisely. It’s the feeling that they took us for fools and still do (and they might be right) and that the key quality of the last election was duplicity. And if summer was bad, wait until winter comes.

A lot of the Ireland we find around us sucks.

And a lot of smart people are already moving on. It’s too expensive here, too aggressive, too surly, too dirty, there’s too many stupid drunks and dangerous oafs, there’s too many pissed-as-farts tourists from you-know-where. And it’s too expensive to enjoy eating out, or having a beer. It’s a mess. Better to go where there are decent communications and transport infrastructures, reliable health and social services, relatively cheap lodgings and civil and efficient service in bars and restaurants.

Not a lot to ask, really. So why is it so hard for us?

Yeah, I know, everyone blames everyone else. Insurance costs have skyrocketed, and they blame the claim culture. There are shortages of qualified staff in bars and restaurants, we have a population bulge in the drinking age range, there was September 11, there were the accounting scandals in the USA. It goes on.

Well, the PDs said they would tackle the insurance question. We’re still waiting. Where’s the open European market? Where’s the commission to set awards? Where’s the basic legislation that says that if you trip on a footpath, you only have yourself to blame? We’ve had all the rhetoric. Where’s the action?

As for the qualified staff in bars and restaurants, we’ve grown fat and complacent. We’ve priced ourselves out of many markets. So greedy are we to feed on the Celtic Tiger’s droppings, that we’ve lost sight of where we’re going.

Meanwhile, we still have poverty, and a class-ridden society. The rich are relatively richer now than they were before the boom. Working class kids don’t go to Trinity College. Traffic has increased, as much thanks to rigid control systems set in place by local authorities as anything else. Most galling of all, we are in the grip of property speculators and landowners determined to control the supply of housing so that it always remains expensive.

It ain’t that pretty at all. Worse still, there’s no sign of any improvement - indeed, the present Government may further enrage us all by increasing taxes on the so-called old reliables, thereby feeding into yet another cycle of inflation. Nor is there any sign of a meaningful debate about how we get out of all this shit. It’d make you weep if you weren’t already crying into your soup...

Meanwhile, there’s the rude awakening in Moscow. The summer is getting clearer. Henry Rollins quoted Nietzche’s comment, “the victor does not believe in chance”, in The Observer recently, adding that “it means prepare because trust me, the other guy is...” Isn’t that what Roy Keane said?

In that regard, what’s to be made of Stadium Ireland, and the hames that has ensued? For the record, I agree with Keane that this country should have the very best in everything. The sad compromise that is the National Concert Hall in Earlsfort Terrace should alert us all to the dangers of half-measures, and to the culture of making-do that has bedevilled our efforts to compete in so many arenas.

All this anger and discontent is likely to have an impact on the vote on the Nice treaty. It shouldn’t, but it will. People are trying to predict when it will be. I’ll tell you this, it will be before the budget. But I’ll return to this again.

The Hog