One of the unexpected (and to others extremely irritating) spin-offs of a temporarily disabling car crash is that, at seasons such as this, it lets you off doing the cooking, but puts you briefly in a detached supervisory position. You instruct others in stuffing, basting and timing techniques and wax philosophical about culinary things.

"Ingredients are not as important as how you measure them," I observed at one stage in the production by my husband of this year's Christmas dinner. This seanfhocal-in-waiting arose because of a confusion in recipes between cups (American measures), millilitres (European) and ounces (maternal cookbooks). If you use the wrong measure, the best ingredient can distort and destroy a dish.

The same budding seanfhocal applies to how we assess Ireland's position in the world at the start of the new year; method of measurement is key. Use one method of measurement, and we come out as the driving success story of Europe or maybe the world. Use a different one, and we are an unprincipled, undifferentiated nation of obedient yuppies going nowhere.

The first method is the balance sheet approach; look at the evidence, tot it up, and the totals will announce it in terms once used by Macmillan when prime minister in Britain. We've never had it so good.

These are the days not just of wine and roses, but of tiramisu and share options.

Sit in a hostelry near concentrations of high-tech industries at lunchtime, and you'll hear executives in their 20s talking about peers being offered "10K more" to go to a different employer.

There are, of course, simultaneous conversations going on elsewhere between couples dismayed by the prohibitive level of the mortgage to which they have to commit if they're to buy a home during the current property boom. It all depends on where you sit.

If you're sitting pretty in a highpaying job with a manageable mortgage and you measure Ireland by accountancy or economic standards, the end result is as positive as a smile badge.

To be euphoric about Ireland as measured by the pre-Christmas spending or the numbers in the queues for the post-Christmas sales seems crazily short-sighted to me. Because there are other measures of more genuinely prophetic significance.

One surfaced just before Christmas, when the management of the Seagate plant in Clonmel announced it was uprooting the operation and transplanting it to the Far East. Some 1,100 full-time and 300 part-time employees received tidings of not such great comfort and joy.

The company didn't quite enclose P45s in the corporate Christmas cards, but it would have been a logical extension of its approach, which was characterised by absolute accountancy thinking.

If your bottom line is profit to your shareholder and nothing else, then, when an alternative overseas location for your operations becomes available which - by IDAtype inducements, tax concessions or a cheaper, more submissive workforce - is likely to contribute to that bottom line, you move as expeditiously as you can. Loyalties? What loyalties?

This is not the first time this has happened. It is likely to happen more and more often in the future and we must hope, when it does, not to see a repetition of the abject pattern of Government response. There is something deeply embarrassing about that approach, which typically consists of the Minister responsible for enterprise rushing to the scene to say, in effect: "How could you leave us? Haven't we been good to you? What has this new location got that we haven't given you?"

No matter what the outcome, this approach is shameful. It either produces an agreement on the part of the multinational to stay because, in effect, one economy out-bribes another; an agreement to a slower departure to allow the inevitable local task force to seek out an alternative; or the adoption by the multinational of an implacable, no-U-turns position, which results in the Minister saying, in effect: "Well, we'll make them pay back their grants, anyway, so we will."

What's wrong with us that we have allowed ourselves to get used to this crawling, this begging, on the part of the ministers responsible for industrial development?

The answer is very simple. What we're using as a tool of measurement is 30 years out of date. We're measuring today's Ireland using tapes marked out by the IDA in the 1960s. Lemass's men, like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, set out with a clear mission and an almost missionary sense of pioneering. They were the hunter-gatherers with briefcases.

In the briefcases were a set of incentives, stated and un-stated. Come-ons. Inducements. Introductory gifts.

It was revolutionary thinking and it worked. It transformed Ireland and made it an equal partner in the global economy. But the problem about the global economy is that its success stories are not copyright, and so the industrial development model was copied and added to, all over the world.

Today's Irish hunter-gatherers are up against bright-eyed briefcase carriers from Singapore, from China and from Australia who can match and exceed every grant, every tax concession and every competence available in Ireland.

It may suit us to believe that, because we have such a high level of education within our workforce, this puts us in an impregnable position. But the reality is that for the vast majority of jobs a narrow set of trainable skills is what is required, and if those skills can be delivered by a country where wages are one-eighth the European going rate and where industrial unrest is unheard of, so much the better.

The end result, in the past five years, has been a trend towards investment in China and other underdeveloped economies by industrial entities which regard human resources as just another raw material to be bought as cheaply as possible.

But if we persist in using the wrong measuring tool - the bottom-line accountancy approach - to judge where Ireland stands as we end the century, we are heading for trouble. Big trouble. Because that measure only shows current profit.

It shows the pay-off on past policies. But it says nothing about preparedness for a future where the big players are getting bigger, more mobile and less rooted with every passing week.

That kind of preparedness requires someone at, or near, the top in government who has a Lemass-like grasp of what needs to be done today in order to be economically healthy 30 years from now.