In November 1998, in the Co Clare town of Ennis, the two main banks and most of the local shops tried to get their customers to replace loose change with an electronic purse. The townspeople were invited to get Visa Cash smart cards that would be loaded with money from their bank accounts and used for small everyday transactions - buying a newspaper or some sweets, feeding the parking meter, grabbing a cup of coffee. The newsagents, bakeries, cafes, and car parks installed the necessary machinery. The people were offered personal loading devices, allowing them to put money on their cards over the phone.
Ennis is an ordinary town, typical of Catholic, nationalist Ireland, and once famous as the electoral base of Eamon de Valera. It has no major information technology industries. Two years ago, for a population of 18,000, there were just 430 Internet connections - about the average for Ireland as a whole. Then it won a competition to be Telecom's Information Age Town, a kind of social guinea pig to test "what would happen when an entire Irish community was equipped with information age technology".
Every home was offered a cheap PC and more than 80 per cent took up the offer. Apart from specialist digital cities or technology campus towns, no urban area in the world is so awash with computers. The hotels, supermarkets and the town museum have installed public access Internet kiosks. Experimental technologies are being tried for the first time anywhere in the world.
So how did the locals react to the electronic purse experiment? Did they mutter darkly about new-fangled nonsense and continue to count out the pennies? Or did they embrace the wonders of new technology and flash their Visa smart cards as if they were passports to an earthly paradise? Would they prefer to stay in an old, conservative Ireland where faith and fatherland were the smartest cards to play? Or would they gamble on the new gods of e-commerce?
Neither. What occurred instead was a small sign of how profoundly Ireland had changed in the course of the 1990s. The people of Ennis didn't resist the electronic purse and they didn't fall in love with it either. They gave it a try, enjoyed the novelty for a while, and then got bored with it when it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Neither cagey nor awed, they found themselves able, as few Irish people had ever been, to take the new world on their own terms. That, by the end of the 1990s, it was possible for ordinary Irish people to test the fabulous totems of technology against the familiar social pleasures of buying sweets in a shop or a cup of coffee in a local cafe, and find the technology wanting, was in its own way a mark of extraordinary change.
Technology itself would have altered the nature of Ireland, but its effect was multiplied by the fact that the economy - and therefore the society - was driven by investment from global technology companies. Since 1980, 40 per cent of all new US inward investment in European electronics had been in Ireland. So, in the 1990s, Ireland became the second largest exporter of software in the world, after the US. Three thousand electronics companies based in the Republic generated a third of the s country's Republic's exports. Forty per cent of all PC package software sold in Europe was produced here.
With chemicals, pharmaceuticals and international banking adding to the high-tech mix, the flow of history was reversed. For 150 years, the Irish had gone as economic migrants to the world economy. Now, the world economy had come to Ireland. Abroad had become home.
A country in which, even in the late 1970s, it was an ordeal to make an international phone call, is now saturated with software. A country in which artificial contraceptives were first made legally available to married people with a doctor's prescription in 1979 is now the main exporter of Viagra. A country that used to be admired, not least by its own citizens, for the alleged authenticity of its culture, has now given the world a new word for the virtual economy - Enyanomics, named after the Irish new age singer and musician who has sold millions of CDs around the globe without ever giving a live concert.
From being an underdeveloped backwater on the margins of the world economy, Ireland has become so open that nearly a quarter of Irish employees work for companies based outside the island. A state founded with the ideal of preserving what was thought to be a timeless civilisation untouched by modernity has become arguably the most globalised society in the world.
In this process of change, some things became more homogenised, while others took on a new and often joyous variety. The almost operatic range of Irish accents has been increasingly flattened into a narrow drawling of puckered-up vowels, from which all traces of personal biography have been removed. The pace of life in the main cities has speeded up to New York levels and beyond. The shops and main streets have become pale imitations of English provincial cities. Even the Irish pub, manufactured for export in Dublin and assembled everywhere from Barbados to Barcelona, has become a homogeneous international commodity.
But in other ways, things have become infinitely more varied. The new economy has brought, for the first time, a wave of immigrants, breaking the automatic link between "Irish", "Christian" and "white". And all sorts of other varieties of Irish humanity have become visible.
At the start of the 1990s, male homosexual activities in private were a criminal offence and divorce was prohibited by the Constitution. In the course of the decade these laws were scrapped. The language of inclusiveness that began to be made official with the election of Mary Robinson as President in 1990 articulated a recognition that there could not be, in this new world, an identikit Irishness in which full citizenship was effectively the preserve of heterosexual male Catholics. Legal change did not create new kinds of Irish people, it merely recognised their existence.
Those transformations did not happen without a great deal of personal and social dislocation. For many people, the new Ireland was a foreign country.
For some, this country was a bleak estate, a reservation of the unemployed on the margins of one of the bustling cities. For others, it was a godless impertinence, trampling over cherished beliefs. Those outsiders rarely spoke with one voice and many of them became electorally silent as participation in elections dropped. But the near defeat of the referendum on divorce in 1995 was a reminder that very large parts of the population experienced change, not as a liberation, but as a loss.
The question, indeed, is why the extraordinary transformations did not generate more resistance. The answer, in part, is that the benefits of the new economy, though by no means evenly spread, did touch most of the population. But it is also that just as the new Ireland was being let loose, the old one was losing much of its shine. The first victims of the new openness were the great institutions of church and state. In the Republic at least, the politics of revelation took hold.
The beef tribunal that sat from 1991 to 1994 may have been, by turns, tedious, byzantine and melodramatic but it was nevertheless an unparalleled exercise in accountability, forcing some of the richest and most powerful men in the State to answer some very awkward questions. It created a vast and messy canvas of business and political intrigue, tax evasion and bad government that would, over the course of the decade, be clarified by the McCracken, Ansbacher and Moriarty inquiries, with an increasingly repellent portrait of Charles Haughey emerging at its centre.
But Haughey's was not the only disgrace. Almost every repository of public trust provided evidence of hypocrisy. The Catholic church's early fall from grace was symbolised by the revelation that the two men who had warmed up the crowd at the Pope's Mass in Galway in 1979, Bishop Eamonn Casey and Father Michael Cleary, turned out to be fathers in more ways than one. But the real mark of the church's anguish was that, by the end of the decade, when dozens of clergy and lay brothers were serving sentences for child sexual abuse those scandals, once so earth-shattering, seemed almost innocent. Father Brendan Smyth, a serial paedophile allowed to prey on children over four decades, provided the leering face of corruption in a supposedly more innocent Ireland. That his fall entangled the Fianna Fail/Labour government, leading indirectly to the resignation of Albert Reynolds, was bizarrely symbolic.
AND if the church's trauma was the most painful, the clergy had the cold comfort of knowing that they were not alone. Reverence for sporting heroes was rocked by the revelation that Michelle Smith de Bruin, who had transfixed the country by winning three gold medals for swimming at the Atlanta Olympics, was a drug cheat. Confidence in the legal system was undermined by the Sheedy affair which led to the resignations of judges of the High and Supreme Courts. Trust in bankers was eroded by the Dail Public Accounts Committee hearings on tax evasion. The world that was passing did not seem so wonderful after all.
Yet the change which brought cynicism also brought hope. The sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland gradually wound down, not least because the sense of difference it was supposed to express had largely evaporated. With the emergence of a new and infinitely complex Ireland, the deadly clash between what used to be two closed and narrow identities has lost its meaning. As they had been constructed historically, British Protestantism and Irish Catholicism were statements not just about religious belief or political allegiance or even about the intertwining of the two. They were also - crucially - statements about much more mundane aspects of people's lives. They said, or were supposed to say, a great deal about not just how you voted or where you went to church, but about where you lived, how many children you had, what kind of work you did.
They hinted at whether you lived in a city or a village, what kind of job you did, whether or not you used contraception, how you thought about foreign countries. These distinctions were always crude but they were also effective. You could actually tell an awful lot about people's mundane realities - their jobs, their houses, the number of children they were likely to have, even their sex lives - once you had slotted them into their national and sectarian categories.
But one of the effects of the economic changes that came to a head in the 1990s was that these differences ceased to operate. Just as, throughout Europe, the industrial revolution and Protestantism tended to advance hand-in-hand, the new prosperity created by Ireland's post-industrial revolution also saw an ambivalent kind of mass conversion to Protestantism.
A poll for The Irish Times in December 1996 indicated that the most important tenet of Protestantism - the right of individual conscience - is now accepted by the great majority of Irish Catholics. Just a fifth of Catholics said that they followed the teaching of their church when making "serious moral decisions", compared to 78 per cent who said they would follow their own consciences. Those consciences were formed now in a world that offered more choices and fewer imperatives, more destinations and fewer maps. By the end of the century, Ireland had become a place with no certainties, only possibilities. But those possibilities were no longer tantalising dreams or empty slogans. They were there waiting for a society with a sense of purpose to come along and make them real.
