What a wonderful time to be alive in Ireland. Peace is dropping slowly but surely in Northern Ireland. No longer is the morning news leading on the latest atrocity - another RUC member murdered, an innocent civilian in the wrong place, an IRA volunteer blown to bits.

Now some of the former apologists for murder and mayhem are been driven around in ministerial cars, and the futility of bloody violence as a means of resolving political differences is shared by all but the most fanatical republican and loyalist extremes.

Here in the Republic, too, history is being made daily. For the first time since the foundation of the State (and God only knows if ever) we have full employment. Sure there is still the live register, but so, too, the thousands and thousands of job vacancies telling the true story of the jobs market.

Not only in Dublin, but in towns dotted up and down the State there is a new vibrancy and confidence, construction work everywhere, and the old sense of hopelessness and helplessness being banished from the national psyche.

At this seasonal time of Christmas the spectacle of sad farewells at ferry ports and airports is supplanted by job fairs seeking to entice those still domiciled abroad to return home. Remember an extra half-million people have been added to the workforce in the past decade. In April this year the number in employment stood at 1.6 million; in April 1989 the figure was 1.1 million.

Each year now there is a net inflow of people equivalent to the population of a sizeable town. In the year to last April the figure was 23,000. Over half those coming here are Irish people who were economic emigrants in the barren 1980s and early 1990s. The State's population now stands at 3.75 million, the highest level since 1881.

These are the marks of economic success and they reflect an extraordinary and positive revolution in Irish society. However, this is not the contemporary Ireland portrayed in some of our broadcast and print media, where a brand of whinge journalism that simply cannot - or does not want to - come to terms with the new prosperous Ireland holds sway.

True, the business pages reflect the seemingly endless spate of business and economic success stories. More and more Irish entrepreneurs taking on the world and winning, and making fortunes for themselves and some of their staff. Ireland continues to attract leading-edge technologies, typified by the decision of Nicholas Negroponte and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to locate their European Media Lab here.

But look at the rest of the media. It's all whingeing and begrudgery; bitter pens and moaning airwaves. Why, some of them are even asking if we want all this prosperity at all. Measures to make it more attractive for more women to join the workforce are traced back to a dark satanic force called IBEC. Does it really have to be stated that this is nothing more than a trade association of employers, who are generating the jobs that enable record numbers of our people to enjoy the dignity of work?

Have some media people really got such short memories? Just a decade ago they were writing about the efforts of Irish politicians to wring more Morrison and Donnelly visas out of the US, so that other family members and neighbours could get into the States to do the very jobs that we are now asked to scorn here at home.

WHAT many media people (and some politicians) need to realise is that for every whinger writing to the papers or clogging up the talk radio airwaves there are thousands of other people getting on with their lives, doing better economically than they ever thought possible, and actually enjoying life in Ireland in 1999.

Of course, we have our problems, but they are largely the problems of economic success. There was no traffic gridlock or rising house prices back in 1993 when the unemployment live register exceeded 300,000. Remember the stories then of job-seekers not even getting an acknowledgment to their applications? Now many large corporations are running media campaigns looking for thousands of workers.

Yes, it is right that the plight of the lower-paid gets real attention and more resources. Improving their lot substantially, and tackling remaining poverty traps where work and welfare interface, must be a cornerstone of any new national compact.

The scandal of the homelessness appears finally to be getting not only money (that was never the problem), but the political and administrative urgency so critical to putting some form of roof over everybody's head at night.

The media are absolutely right to highlight these issues. But where is the story of that extra half-million people in the workforce chronicled? Not the handful of software millionaires, but the hundreds of thousands of people who have been able to move from dole to work, or move home from London, New York and elsewhere.

They are the lifeblood of the new economically thriving Ireland. Remember the suburbs and sprawling housing estates ravaged by unemployment in the 1980s?

Part of the story is the bustling streets of our towns and cities, and the explosion of nightlife and entertainment. But consider what it means to families to have a breadwinner or breadwinners for the first time. The chance to move from job to job to improve one's lot. Something to get up for in the morning. There must be a great story here in this great little country of ours. Stephen O'Byrnes is a business consultant and was formerly press and policy director with the Progressive Democrats