The pace of change in Ireland these days is frightening. The latest illustration was the shock news this week that there are only 233 eccentrics in Dublin, according to official figures from the Eastern Health Board.
It's not so long ago when there were more than that in The Irish Times alone, many of them in senior positions. The fact that the whole city is now down to its last 233 should give us pause for thought. (The EHB survey did not consider how many "characters" there are left in Dublin, but my guess is the fall-off here is even more alarming.)
Naturally, Brussels is partly to blame for all this. Successive EU directives have outlawed whole swathes of eccentric activity which used to be considered harmless. But economic pressures have taken their toll too: as in all other walks of life, eccentricity has seen a drift towards casualisation in recent years. I'm sure we all know people who are great characters in the pub, but who when you meet them in the street are as straight-laced as bedamned.
When I first came to the city, characters were still plentiful. Dubliners talked fondly of people like "Bang Bang," and while I never met him or any of the famous characters, I do remember a little man who routinely boarded the 20 B bus and "inspected" everybody's tickets, writing details in a book. The drivers played along and passengers were relaxed about it all - even me, though I had often overtravelled the 26p fare. (Yes, I'm ashamed now, but those were hard times.) Sometimes the bus driver himself would be an eccentric, and he might drop us off in, say, Howth instead of Donnycarney. How we laughed.
Such idiosyncrasies are rare in the new Ireland, and I'm afraid economic success is to blame. Of course, eccentricity is not an absolute thing: Cork people are all eccentrics compared with the rest of us, for example, while being perfectly normal in Cork. The point is that as a people we are being sucked into a process of global homogenisation. Ireland is becoming more and more like Switzerland without the timekeeping, as one of these days we'll wake up (late) to discover.
The furore over EastEnders is another illustration of the pace of change. That programme's portrayal of "cattle, sheep and donkeys" wandering around a village street has been rightly criticised as hopelessly out of date. Unrealistic too. With traffic bumper-to-bumper in every Irish town and village, there isn't room for humans to wander around any more, never mind cattle.
Indeed, traffic is the most obvious metaphor for the new Ireland. En route to Clare recently for the homecoming of the victorious hurling team, I was caught up in a two-mile tailback the far side of Kildare. Assuming at the very least a major roadworks scheme up ahead, I chugged along at subwalking pace for half an hour, eventually to learn that the cause of the delay was nothing more than what the gardai termed "Monasterevin".
An even more striking metaphor (you'll have to forgive me, but column-writing leaves you very prone to be being struck by metaphors) occurred in Clare. It was particularly striking because at the time I was wondering in a superior kind of way whether the naked triumphalism I had witnessed in the county's hurling community was itself a symptom of a newer, less gentle Ireland.
Suddenly, I became the metaphor (very unpleasant, even for a trained columnist), when I found myself driving past hitchhikers even though it was pouring rain. And not mere rain as it is experienced in Dublin, but sweeping rain of the rat-drowning kind that you only get in Clare, Galway and parts of south-east Asia. I tried to tell myself that I was too embarrassed by the state of my car to stop (my wife thinks this is a very valid reason), but I knew it was not the full truth.
It occurred to me that five years ago, I would never, ever have passed a hitchhiker on a wet day. On the other hand, five years ago I didn't have a car, so I could afford to have deeply-held principles of that kind. But this was no help to my conscience, as I avoided the gaze of rain-soaked Swedish backpackers who had been fooled by the guidebooks into thinking we were friendly. When I finally resolved that the very next hitchhiker I met would definitely get a lift, you guessed it, not a single other hitchhiker was to appear for the remainder of the trip. I returned to Dublin with the lonely feeling of a man who has taken the road to Damascus and not been struck off his horse.
But enough gloom. The brighter side of the brave new world embraced Clare this week when Ennis was chosen as "information age town," which means that neighbours will be now able to teleconference each other instead of running the risks involved in meeting. What this will do for the town's eccentrics is still unclear.
Elsewhere in Clare, I can report, many of the old ways survive, stronger than ever. Fiddlers still play their fiddles and dancers still dance the Clare set (on the graves of Tipperary's hurling legends).
And in some less welcome respects, the west has not changed at all. I mean, of course, the weather. It rained non-stop the entire time I spent in Clare and it kept raining on the way back until I could see the orange glow of Dublin on the horizon.
It really isn't good enough, in a country with six per cent annual growth and an impeccable record on the convergence criteria, that we should still have to put up with that kind of thing.