The pleasure at our prosperity is more analogous to that of the survivor of a shipwreck hugging the farther shore with relief than of a commanding athlete striding down the home strait. We have reached our present destination - a snug place in the developed industrial world - after an exhausting and often dangerous struggle
The more you have, the more you have to lose. And in 1997, Ireland started to look like a society suddenly granted a great deal and increasingly fearful of losing it. If there is a single note that has sounded beneath the year's events, it is a murmur of anxiety. We have arrived at a dreamed-of destination - a snug place in the developed industrial world. But we are not entirely sure how we got here.
Our relative prosperity has come, apparently, from nowhere. And things that come out of the blue have a nasty habit of returning to the blue again. Like Shakespeare's Macbeth after he got the throne, we find ourselves ruefully musing To be thus is nothing;/But to be safely thus.
On the face of it, we have never had it so good. The economy is awash with money, and we are spending not just like there's no tomorrow but like there was no miserable, insecure yesterday. Consumer outlets are sprouting like weeds after rain, and a new British invasion, with chain stores instead of gunboats, has been welcomed by the natives.
In 1997 and 1996 an astonishing 1.1 million square feet of new retail space was added in Dublin alone, with another 1.5 million square feet due to come on stream. The amount of shopping centre space in Dublin will soon be double what it was in 1990. Either the people who put their money into planning and developing such things are entirely mad, or Ireland can be safely assumed to have adopted shopping as its state religion.
But that careless consumerist rapture belies a deeper sense of dissatisfaction. We are finding that the pig's back affords no easy ride. There is an air of uncertainty, a tendency to say "yes, but. . .". Yes, the economy is wonderful. But as the Asahi and Seagate closures towards the end of the year so shockingly reminded us, we have come of age in an age of unprecedented economic insecurity. We have got where we are by succumbing to the logic of ruthless, globalized transnational capitalism. We have plugged ourselves into a powerhouse that generates both massive energies and deadly shocks.
And we have no other source of power to fall back on. No economy has ever done what the Republic's is trying to do - join the rich industrial world without its own indigenous industrial base. None has ever relied so heavily on foreign investment for its own development.
At the moment, the Republic looks like the exception that proves the rule. But when you're out on your own, you sometimes wonder whether you've discovered a new road to success or stumbled into a dangerous by-way.
So we get our "yes, but. . ." society. Yes, the new wealth is fantastic. But it makes, by contrast, the stubborn remnants of poverty and degradation all the more obvious.
The cosmopolitan sophistication of our society is impressive. But our cosmopolitanism doesn't extend to the notion of welcoming immigrants, and, as the C case demonstrated, we are still struggling with primitive brutalities.
The openness and tolerance that have come with economic development make Ireland in many ways a nicer place. But as the same case showed, we are utterly at sea about some basic values. We are becoming more honest about ourselves, more willing to ask hard questions. But some of the answers, revealing corruption and abuse at different levels, are deeply discomfiting.
The Northern peace process is the most hopeful thing in years. But it is also, in its own way, the most destabilising, forcing as it does a re-assessment of the Republic's own political identity. Our expectations are rising. But as Mick McCarthy's soccer team so kindly reminded us, expectation is often the first step to disappointment.
Our pleasure at our prosperity, besides, is more analogous to that of the survivor of a shipwreck hugging the farther shore with relief than of a commanding athlete striding down the home strait. We have reached our present destination after an exhausting and often dangerous struggle.
Because our current condition looks normal by EU standards, it is easy to forget the upheavals we have endured to get here. We have, as a society, gone through pretty much the same changes as everyone else in the industrialised world. But we have done so in an incredibly short period.
Some of these changes are big, epic transformations, like the one that changed a society that was still predominantly rural 30 years ago into one in which nearly 60 per cent of the population is urbanised. Some are calm, slow, pleasant changes, like the fact that we can now expect to live five years longer than we could in 1970. But some, like family sizes and fertility rates are so intimate and so fundamental that they give some indication of just how deep the changes have gone.
The transformation in the fertility rates of Irish women is especially eloquent both because of its scale and because it needs all sorts of other changes - in sex roles, in education, in the economy and, above, all, in the practice of Catholic orthodoxy - to account for it.
The total fertility rate in Ireland in 1980 was 3.2 children for every woman in her childbearing years. It is now 1.9 - pretty close to the EU average. The speed of this fall is, except for Spain, unparalleled in any developed country, and exceeded only by developing countries like Brazil and Bangladesh where the fertility rates used to be enormous. The rate of reduction of fertility in Ireland since 1980 is over eight times that of industrialised world as a whole.
The point of such statistics is this. If you read them for 1997, they make Ireland look like a typical EU society. But if you read them over the last two decades, you get some sense of the massive turmoil that has been necessary for this apparently "normal" state of affairs to be arrived at.
The most abnormal things - priests in the dock for abusing children, satellites in space spying on farmers to make sure they are not growing crops on set-aside lands, governments falling like rain, the transformation of large tracts of our cities into virtual theme parks - have gone into the making our normality.
Is it any wonder that we give off an air of weariness? Or that the batteries that seemed to power us from one epic drama to another seemed to run a little low in 1997?
Certainly, the so-called liberal agenda that shaped Irish public life over the previous decade was running on empty. It was, in a way, fitting that Mary Robinson departed the presidency, for there was, by the time of the election to choose her successor, a sense that we were already arriving in post-Robinson Ireland. The impulse of opening-up that she embodied and encouraged seemed, for the moment at least, to have run its course.
It is not that there is an overwhelming desire, except among conservatives who never wanted them in the first place, to roll back the changes. As the failure of Youth Defence to stir up any great public support for its interventions in the C case suggests, hardline right-wing reaction is still a minority taste. And even if it were not, the genie of modernity cannot be put back in the bottle. How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Temple Bar?
There was, nevertheless, a small but significant turn to the right in the course of the year. Fianna Fail, so badly damaged by its inability to sense the mood of change in the early 1990s, made a modest comeback.
It did so, admittedly, by adjusting to reduced circumstances, fighting the general election for the first time with a coalition partner and ditching its former leader in favour of an outside candidate for the presidency. But even if its return to power was hardly a triumphal restoration of the old regime, it did mark something rather striking - the failure of the alternatives.
For the one thing that was undeniable in the political confusion of 1997 was that the forces of change were, at least for now, running out of steam. And it didn't much matter whether the proposed change was to the left or right.
The Green Party failed to make its long-awaited breakthrough in national politics. The Progressive Democrats lost faith in their own right-wing economic agenda, panicked under pressure, and ended up as a party in search of an identity. Democratic Left just about held its own, but can have few illusions about the possibility of growth. And, most significantly of all, Labour's cautious but consistent efforts to turn the Republic into a recognisable European social democracy came off the tracks.
Dick Spring's political demise is, in fact, even more potently symbolic than Mary Robinson's departure. If there has been a strategic mind shaping Irish society through slow and careful adjustments in its underlying structures, it has been the collective wisdom or folly of Spring and the small group of intellectuals around him.
It would be wrong to credit them with too much genius, and they often miscalculated spectacularly, but they did barter a relatively weak political position into an extraordinary degree of power. And it was their agenda - liberal, modernising, pro-European, carefully reforming - that shaped the first half of the 1990s. Whether in power with Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, Spring was setting the parameters for social change. His departure summed up the weariness and wariness of a society that has been through extraordinary upheavals.
The great irony, though, was that the conservative mood took hold at a time when the modernising forces were actually scoring their most spectacular symbolic triumph. And the irony, for the modernisers, was a particularly cruel one.
The exposure and humiliation of Charles Haughey at the Dunnes Stores payments tribunal in Dublin Castle was historic in both senses. It cast a sickly light back over an entire era that began in the late 1950s with the First Programme for Economic Expansion. It was a moment of such epic significance that no history of post-war Ireland would be complete without it.
But that is exactly what it was - an event for the history books. The people who had done most to create the political conditions in which Haughey could be exposed - Desmond O'Malley, Dick Spring, Prionsias de Rossa - would not be in a position to take advantage of their vindication.
It was as if, long after Napoleon had been sent to Elba, Louis XVI had been caught and guillotined. By the time the old regime paid for its sins, the new one was already on the way out.
Again, it is not that there is nostalgia for the men in mohair suits, or any obvious desire to return to the days of the Garda being offered a pint or a transfer. That past retains its power to destroy, and the process of questioning, as Ray Burke learned to his cost, is unstoppable.
It will go on and it may claim more victims. But it is a process in which it is only slighter better to be the accuser than the accused. The exposure of corruption has created in the public a mood, not of righteous indignation, but of contempt for politics itself. The poor turnout at the general election and the abysmal lack of interest in the presidential election were symptoms of a serious loss of faith in politics.
It may well be that the corruption and scandal, the turmoil and unpredictability of, respectively, the Haughey and Reynolds years turned politics into a blood sport. We watch with varying degrees of amusement and amazement, but we see it as a game in which there is no reason for the spoils to go to the victor.
Overhanging all of this is the huge but incoherent effect of the peace process. There is hope, and a deep desire for peace. But there is no longer the euphoria that was evident in the wake of the IRA's first ceasefire of 1994. For the first half of the year, the IRA was back to its old ways - shooting a policewoman in the back in Derry, murdering two policemen in Lurgan. For the second half, it disappeared from view.
Everyone understands the delicate, provisional nature of the peace. The optimism is more sober, less millennial. More importantly, the realisation is beginning to dawn that the price of making the peace permanent is a disturbance in the settled, familiar shape of the Republic's own identity.
Just as the goal of being a typical, ordinary western European democracy has come into view, the peace process has posed a series of hard questions. Will closer involvement with the awkward North threaten the South's hard-won equilibrium? We have become Europeans but will new arrangements emerging from the talks put us back into the British context from which we have worked so hard to escape? And who, after all, is "us"? Is it nationalist Ireland or some wider, more inclusive set of associations?
The election of Mary McAleese to the presidency suggested that at least a substantial section of the population is prepared to include Northern nationalists in its definition of "us". The peace process has, moreover, given new life to old definitions of Irishness.
One of the paradoxical effects of the IRA's campaign was that the revulsion it generated in the Republic drove much of the ordinary, non-violent Catholic nationalism underground. Those attitudes were not destroyed, just frozen, and with the thaw of the peace process, they have began to emerge. But they did so in a greatly changed context, one in which an equally large section of the population would be quite happy for the turbulent North to float off towards Iceland and leave the Republic to its hard-won riches.
More commonly, though, the peace process encouraged in the Republic the feeling that this was a time to wait and see. Sudden moves could be dangerous. Long-term plans might be pointless, since some big transformation might be coming up soon.
In a sense, the North saved the South from facing its own hard choices about what to do now that it no longer has the excuse of poverty for its many glaring social failures.
It provided at least an apparently honourable reason for making 1997 a year of marking time. Without its promise of some big, historic change in the offing, we might have to look back with some discomfort on a year in which we were too tired, and too busy shopping, to deal with the embarrassment of riches.