Present Tense:Winter arrived this week. The clouds drew in, it grew darker, a chill wind came blowing in and the newspapers headlines brought ominous rumbles, writes Shane Hegarty
Once more into forecasts of a gloomy season of cloud, rain and occasional outbreaks of economic catastrophe. It happens every now and again, these moments when the nation takes a collective look at itself and realises that it needs a week on the beach, or a decent sporting result. Maybe the rugby will have delivered the latter last night. If not, then it'll reinforce the idea that we should just stay in bed lest the week get any worse.
There was the run on Northern Rock, job losses at Intel, a creaking health service, a slumping property market. The stock market nosedived, with traders telling The Irish Times that it was "absolute carnage" and "simply all doom and gloom".
The tone was set on Monday night by David McWilliams, who informed any twentysomethings with aspirations of a happy life that they can forget about it. They are stuck in their soulless estate in Meath, where the closest thing to culture is Eurospar. Ireland is on the verge of economic collapse and social disorder, he warned. It's going to be bad. The living will come to envy the dead.
It has come to something when, if you were looking to be cheered up by Monday night telly you had to turn over to Prosperity.
So, thanks to McWilliams, further angst wormed into the national psyche. On an RTÉ webchat during the week, the question most often put to McWilliams could be summed up as this: "Will I be all right? Tell me, David. Save me!"
Perhaps McWilliams was among the people that Bertie Ahern targeted when he observed that some were taking a "strange delight" in a possible return to the "bad old days". He's right. The Irish, so used to being thrashed that we developed an unshakeable habit of beating ourselves up, seem happiest when embracing doom. However, it's worth noting that we were not alone this week. An ennui has crept across the globe, infecting the thoughts of other nations and their media.
British confidence, of course, foundered on Northern Rock. The Scottish - whose soccer win over France gave them something to cheer about - woke up to find, as one columnist put it, that "Scotland is still a little nation with big social problems and guess what? It's still bloody raining."
In New Zealand - homeland of crisis-free rugby giants - the media has been gloomy over a recent run on finance companies by people concerned about their cash. Even the Australians - the sunshine and surf, barbie and beer Australians - have been griping their way towards a probable general election. And they're about to have a proper summer.
Meanwhile, in response to the waxing and waning of the American public's mood, a new standard has been created to track it. The Reuters/Zogby Index surveyed the public in July and set that as a benchmark of 100 points. Anything from here on in will be rated against how the nation felt during one July in 2007. It's currently standing at 98.8.
"The public mood is not just dark," observed pollster John Zogby. "What's darker than dark?" How about dark green? Because you realise that, if they had decided to gauge the Irish mood against that of our sodden July then it would have queered the benchmark forever.
The thing is that - for all the gloom, for all that we're wondering if we should hoard food or break out the Green Card, for all that we huddle against the chill - we still have a tell-tale skip in our step. Plenty of jobs have actually been created over the last week: 350 were announced by two US companies. After the ISEQ's early slump, it had bounced back strongly by the end of the week. The euro will get you a lot of dollars for the November trip to New York. And retail sales were up in July. In fact, consumer spending in the first seven months of the year outstripped the growth rate of the same period in 2006. Our GDP, said one analyst, should be "twice that of the Eurozone" while another observed that Irish consumers were "defying the negative sentiment that surrounds them".
The negative sentiment certainly surrounds us, envelopes us, causes much finger-wagging and end-is-nigh wailing. It's been one of those weeks. Next week may turn out to be yet another of them. And yet, the quieter corners of your newspapers contain thin rays of optimism. Maybe it's just that we feel happier when we're miserable. After all, the Irish love nothing more than a good wake.
• Ann Marie Hourihaneis on leave