PLATFORM: How quickly swings the pendulum of the national mood!

Only a bare year ago, the State was gripped by a mindless optimism, where 10 years of continuous prosperity blinded people to the sight of the economic storm clouds that were already gathering on the horizon.

The best example of this blindness was a general election campaign fought on the basis of two manifestos that were founded on assumptions that any rational observer could see were highly unlikely ever to be realised. An abiding question for me is the responsibility that attaches to the media for aiding and abetting this blindness, rather than drawing attention to it and calling the bluff of the political parties.

One year on, the pendulum has swung entirely to the other side. Now pessimism is the order of the day, and with it has emerged the debilitating Irish tradition of "no hopery" and its accompanying disease of paralysis through analysis. The self-confidence of the new generation of Irish people, which was such a remarkable byproduct of the Celtic Tiger years, has already begun to evaporate.

The doomsayers have once again come into their own, and their voices are virtually the only ones to be heard. The fact that the property market is experiencing a long-overdue correction is not seen as the benefit it surely is but as a major economic problem. The inevitable job losses in construction are being regarded as unforeseen disasters, rather than the inevitable consequences of the end of an unsustainable boom.

I believe we should abandon this pendulum of mood swings, which serves our interest in neither of its extreme positions. At the optimism side, it lulls us into complacency and prevents us from seeing changed circumstances emerging that need to be dealt with by prompt and effective action. On the pessimism side, where we are now, its vices are even more pernicious for they blind us to what is positive in our situation and discourage us from mobilising our energies to ensure a better future.

Our approach is based on the fallacy that the future will be the same as the past. This leads us to think, when things are going well, that they will always do so and results in dangerous complacency. When things are going badly, on the other hand, we are led to believe that there is nothing we can do to avoid an inevitable undesirable fate.

What we need now is not pessimism but a positive approach that is based firmly on realism. So the unsustainable property boom has ended? Let us welcome the fact that such an element is no longer the main driver of our economy and actively seek to replace it with ones that will, in the long term, prove more healthy. For instance, let us work to rejuvenate growth in exports, as a reflection of the truth that only wealth earned abroad can be transformed into true growth for our domestic economy.

Instead of bemoaning the departure of each multinational that ups its roots in search of a cheaper field to plough elsewhere, let us acknowledge the truth that our future prosperity must come not from those giant multinationals but from our own home-grown enterprises, most of which remain dangerously small and in urgent need of injections of capital, expertise and development support generally.

In recent years, our indigenous enterprises have been seen as mere icing on the cake; in the future, if we are to have a successful future, they must become the cake itself. But this fact has yet to dawn on us, let alone be reflected in the priorities of national policy.

Some of the recent bad news has been about our national competitive position. Instead of wringing our hands about this as if it were inevitable, it should become a wake-up call for us to realise the urgency of taking effective control of the problem and the extent to which the solutions are in our own hands. We cannot influence the price of oil, but we can certainly reduce the effect that price rises have on us.

I believe our economy is facing great challenges. We have the choice of drowning in our own pessimism or fighting back with a determination to succeed. I am sure that if we put our minds to it with sufficient energy we can overcome these challenges and reopen the road to future prosperity.

The question is: can we summon up that energy? Or have the years of partying softened our resolve to the extent that we are no longer capable of controlling our own futures?

Feargal Quinn is an Independent member of Seanad Éireann