Often the brightest display produced by a firework is right before it finally burns out. There's a sudden garish flash - and then the whole thing is over. That's what much of this year has been like; a last dazzling splurge of consumption at its most ostentatiously conspicuous followed by the darkness of an economic recession. The whole giddy experience of an economic boom would now seem not much more than a fading memory, were it not for the visible residue from that period hanging around like the unpleasant smell of sulphur after a firework has burnt out.
Much of the consumption, of course, was found in the private sector, taking the form of gaudy trinkets such as the latest overpriced car or over-decorated handbag, objects with large price tags and short shelf lives. But in 2001, the State managed to make its own contribution to crass expenditure thanks to the refurbishment of Farmleigh, the gaudy late-Victorian former home of the Guinness family on the edge of Dublin's Phoenix Park. Bought on our behalf for £23 million, the Government then saw fit to spend a further £18 million making an already ugly building still more unattractive; in its gaudy self-satisfaction, the final result - unveiled in late July with ceremony as ludicrously overblown as Farmleigh itself - resembles one of the late Nicolae Ceaucescu's grandiose architectural follies in Romania.
What makes the acquisition and refurbishment of Farmleigh so especially grotesque is that the taxpayer will have to continue providing funds for this instance of governmental nonsense. Intended to serve as a State guesthouse, the building rarely gets much chance to operate as such. Since opening for business, it has accommodated overseas guests for just nine nights; that is less than 6 per cent of its potential business. Nor does the place come cheap; when a Chinese delegation stayed at Farmleigh in September, the cost to the Department of Foreign Affairs - and therefore all of us - was more than £42,000.
Oddly enough, when the aforementioned Chinese delegation visited the capital in September, the State guesthouse was not even big enough to hold the whole party, so the overspill was obliged to stay in another piece of architectural folie de grandeur making its debut this year, the Four Seasons Hotel in Ballsbridge. A building that grossly overran initial budgetary expectations, the Four Seasons is like a cuckoo in the nest of Dublin's smartest suburb, bearing only the most fleeting resemblance to anything else in the vicinity. In the region of £70 million was spent squeezing 7,000 square metres of accommodation, public rooms and fitness facilities into less than two acres, the rest of the site being devoted to another obligatory feature of nouveau riche Ireland: the surface car-park.
Given its monstrous bulk, avoiding the spectacle of the Four Seasons is near impossible for anyone arriving into central Dublin via Ballsbridge, but at least the interior - which looks like the result of an explosion in a particularly overstocked chintz factory - awaits only those brave enough to cross the premises' threshold. The same is also true of another 2001 addition to Ireland's stock of de luxe hotels, the Westin. Located on a site facing two of the country's most exquisitely restrained structures - Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland - the Westin would appear to have been designed by architects who made the bold, even reckless, decision to ignore all immediate surroundings, including the facades of 19th century financial institutions incorporated into the finished structure.
Like so many of the flash new amenities opened here over the past 12 months, the Westin Hotel was intended to meet the demands of a seemingly endless number of affluent visitors to this country. Ironically, it began trading just days before the events of September 11th proved how quickly Ireland could lose its appeal for non-nationals and how fast a national economy could go into decline. It was, in effect, the last spurt of the firework display before darkness fell.