Displaced in Mullingar Being driven through Galway today, it's hard not to conclude that Ireland has entirely lost its way, writes Michael Harding.

I was in Fox's fruit and veg shop on Dominick Street, when a customer picking tomatoes asked me did I do much acting. "I did," I said. "Did you ever play a monkey?" he asked. "No, although I once saw the Chinese Opera perform a work entitled The Monkey in Heaven," I said. "Playing a monkey requires a lot of skill. Why do you ask?" He replied: "Mr Fox is opening a new store down below the greyhound stadium; another fruit and veg outlet, with local produce, and quality pastas and bread, and fancy olive oil, and I was telling him he should do something unusual to publicise it." "Like what?" "Well, if he could get someone to dress up as a monkey, and pass bananas out at the roundabout, it might be a way of advertising that there was a new shop on the corner. If he could find someone to play the monkey. That's why I thought of you!"

I was gathering peppers into a basket. "The guards would have to be told about a thing like that," I said. "Why?" he asked. "Are you dangerous?" "No I don't mean you have to tell them about me; I mean you probably need a permit to stop traffic on the street."

"Will you do it?" he asked. I wanted to say no, of course I won't. But I didn't want to offend him. So I just asked him when was it opening? "Next Tuesday," he said.

"Oh, that's an awful pity," I said. "I'd love to dress up as a monkey, but unfortunately I've got one last class to teach in Galway next Tuesday." I love Galway, the middle of it, especially that little world of faded Gaelic chic that hugs the Druid Theatre, replete with street musicians, tiny restaurants, and Gaelic calligraphy squiggled over the doors of public houses.

Although the quaint Irishry of old Galway now sits uncomfortably against a backdrop of American skylines, in a sort of surreal way that reminds me of the James Joyce pub in Zurich.

Walking from Eyre Square to Spanish Arch is almost too real to be real; in the shops there is an all-pervading air of serious self-regard, and the streets are a trendy world of money-makers and retired liberals in corduroy trousers, tweed jackets, and Barbour hats, brash young women swaggering with confidence and chattering in the native tongue with an oral sensuality only equalled by the weatherwomen on TG4.

I hope the same fizz will soon hit Leitrim. When all the apartments are built and occupied and the auctioneers have made enough money to reinvent the 1950s as an architectural style, then will the public houses and grocery shops of McGahern's impoverished past tinkle with amulets, golden bracelets, and slim glasses of Budweiser.

I remember when a weekend in Galway meant staggering into Eyre Square and across to the Skeffington Arms, with my two eyeballs out on sticks as I surveyed the college girls. It meant meandering down the tiny streets, assured that I would bump into someone who knew someone else, who had a floor I could kip on, which I never needed in the long run, because there was always a session after the session, where some beautiful woman from Connemara sang all night.

But not once did I step into the heart of that city in the two days I stayed in Galway last week. In hindsight, that shocked me. Instead I was incarcerated in hotels, and lost in the industrial zone; the fields of Americana. I crossed the city in a taxi driven by a man from Lagos, from east to west and back again, through a maze of roundabouts and housing estates.

The traffic on the Quincentennial Bridge persuaded me that Ireland has entirely lost its way: shopping and working and watching drizzle through the glass window of a car is a poor excuse for living.

I returned to Mullingar on Wednesday and dropped into Fox's new shop. They were still fitting it out; two carpenters were trying to work out if the counter at the till was too high or too low for the average customer.

"Did anyone dress up as a monkey on Tuesday?" I wondered.

One carpenter looked at me as if I had two heads.

"No," he declared," not to my knowledge." "No monkeys?" "No monkeys," he repeated. "The monkeys didn't work out. But I'm told there are a few people coming today, dressed as bananas."