There are numerous signs that mark generational change. Many of them are technological, indicating a quantum leap: latterly from ‘personal stereos’ to ipods, emails to tweets, the coming of social networking, the arrival of the first genomic medicines, widespread adoption of the internet for shopping…

What distinguishes them all is the almost-immediate assumption by the coming generation that it was always this way.
Those who have just taken their Leaving Certificates are of the post-digital generation. And in due course they will encounter what some geneticists and neurologists are calling H2, the next evolutionary stage of humanity. Some of them, for sure, will be alive to greet the next century. Their world is utterly unlike that of their parents.
Still, look back even twenty years and you’ll find just how much change we have all embraced without really noticing. If you’d told a farmer in a field in rural Ireland in 1990 that he could call his daughter backpacking in Australia on a tiny portable phone he’d have thought you were mad.
Likewise, if you’d predicted how almost everything would revolve around the internet in 2010 you’d have been dissed as a crazy dreamer.
Mad as it might seem to many of the Leaving Certers now contending with their CAO offers, some people actually remember when the internet was, like, actually beginning?
There you go. It was 20 years ago, come September, when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau made a key proposal to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology.
Nobody adopted their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet in 1990. It took another five years for the project to really lift off. But in 2010? Well, now we take it for granted. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine what we’d do without it. Just watch yourself if the broadband fails…
Twenty years ago there was far more speculation about the implications of a mammoth political development, the reunification of Germany. The Iron Curtain, symbolised for many by the Berlin Wall, had collapsed. Well, from this distance we can see that German reunification precipitated a couple of crucial changes.
First, the EU’s centre of gravity shifted significantly eastward. Although the Irish presidency of the EU was central to the acceptance of reunification, the eastward move was not to our advantage as the German economy, which had powered Europe for two decades, turned inwards, pouring resources into building up the old East. Coupled with the arrival of charismatic leaders in the US (Clinton) and UK (Blair) and a Government here that leaned towards Boston rather than Berlin, our old love affair with Europe cooled.
Secondly, it marked the end of what you might call German penitentialism, that is, an over-compensation for the horrors Germany unleashed on Europe during two world wars.
In a truly German way, they just set about making reunification work. While we had our boom and bust, they soldiered on. And what do you know? A couple of weeks ago we learned that the German economy has powered ahead with growth far in excess of everywhere else.
Curiously, while we are told here that our future is in the knowledge economy, this renewed German prosperity derives from older virtues and activities just as much as from new.
The Germans were inured to the worst of the financial chaos of the last three years by their (comparatively) solid and cautious financial system. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger prosperity was a mirage, a cloud of dust kicked up by people who brought the culture of the Cheltenham festival and the Galway Races to financial affairs and gambled what turned out to be our money like drunken cowboys.
So, it’s infuriating to read a column in a major Sunday paper that complains that we are now to be an economic colony of Germany. This is typical Euro-sceptic shite. After all: who paid for all the farm subsidies over the years? The Germans and the Dutch!
In industrial terms, Ireland is largely an American colony. In media terms, it’s largely a British colony. It’s an island with a small population, for Christ’s sake. That’s how it survives.
So, it would be a good idea now to turn eastwards awhile, and make common cause (as we did so adroitly in the past).
Somewhere in our recesses are the skills and knowledge that created the conditions blown by the cowboys and these are still tradable; indeed, as the dust settles on the new economic order, they are particularly so.
One other point. The Goethe Institute is found worldwide. It was set up to be a kind of cultural outpost for Germany in a time of reconstruction and rehabilitation.
Sipping a coffee in the GI in Hanoi, the Hog wondered why there was nothing comparable for Ireland. We’ve done a lot of boasting about our great cultural resources, but at the end of the day, we’ve effectively relied on the love of others outside Ireland and the often Herculean but largely unsupported efforts of a few at home.
We trust too much in fate. The Germans, on the other hand, try to make it happen their way.
After twenty years, we’ve made the web our own. But we need to rebuild much like Germany in 1990. Let’s remember, we do a lot of things really well and many people like those things a lot. It’s time to exploit them and, in the spirit of the moment, let’s all go German for a while…