"THEY float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years, all those plazas and malls and esplanades." Joan Didion's description of the growth of shopping centres in the United States in the 1970s could be applied just as easily to the Ireland of the 1990s.
Our boom years are changing the landscapes of our towns and cities, marking them with pyramids and domes, with giant glass bowls in which, blissfully forgetful, we circulate like human goldfish.
They are the outward signs of inward economic grace, and we should, I suppose, be proud of them. Why, then are they so very depressing?
If you ever go to Disneyland Paris (or, I assume to Disneyland or Disneyworld in the States), the first thing you have to walk through is Main Street America, a parade of ersatz shops that is supposed to be a recreation of some anonymous middle American town centre. It is flagrantly and unashamedly phoney, this displaced streetscape plonked onto the French countryside. It used to be fashionable to talk about such Disney places as a nightmare of inauthenticity, but instead of being sinister, this is actually rather innocent and unthreatening. For it is now merely a mild and self-conscious version of a reality that we live with every day.
The truth is that if all you wanted from Disneyland Paris was the experience of walking through a foreign shopping centre, you would do as well to stay at home and take a stroll round Dublin's city centre. The only difference is that instead of Main Street America, you would be walking through Main Street Britain.
Last year, in the Albert Reynolds libel case against the Sunday Times, a great deal of time was taken up with trying to explain to an English jury what a "gombeen man" was. The difficulty was a bizarre reminder that there had once been a distinctive, if not particularly pleasant, kind of commercial culture in Ireland.
Yet, if a London jury wanted to imagine contemporary shopkeepers in Dublin or Cork, its members would simply have to close their eyes and think of Oxford Street. Everything in, for example, the new Jervis centre in Dublin is a replica - brick by brick, marble veneer tile by tile - of the high street of any English provincial city.
To walk through any of the new shopping centres in Irish cities is to be in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. You pass Next on your way into Top Shop. You compare the prices of jumpers in Debenhams with those in Marks and Spencer. Pausing to look at the computers in the window of Dixons or the slogans in the window of the Body Shop, you consider whether to buy that new novel in Waterstones or Dillons, which may call itself Hodges Figgis but is very obviously a branch of its British parent. Or you might choose between Virgin and Tower Records as the best place to buy the new U2 single.
THIS is not an entirely new phenomenon, of course, for as with most industries, we have relied for the most part on outsiders to do our retail developments for us. In 1964, the Irish company Quinn's Supermarkets announced that it was going to open the first American-style shopping mall in Finglas. But the plan came to very little, and in the event it was a British property company that developed Ireland's first mall in Stillorgan.
Since then, and with a few obvious exceptions such as Dunnes Stores, Ireland has been a province of British retailing. But in the last two or three years, even the local colour that belongs to a real province has been washed away in a new flood of British shops. It probably didn't help that Irish shopkeepers had such a bad name - gombeen men.
It is not accidental that the ultimate image of stultification in Irish theatre in the 1960s - in plays such as Brian Friel's Philadephia, Here I Come and Tom Murphy's A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant - is the family shop. Nobody could mourn the passing of the drab retail world described in Neil Kevin's reminiscences of Templemore, Co Tipperary, published in 1944: "A draper's life had consisted in moving and dusting and dressing-out vast piles of tweed, cutting up innumerable lengths of grey calico and army grey shirting, measuring and trimming great quantities of single-width coarse frieze for conversion into the everlasting suits that farmers wore on Sundays..."
Compared with that mind-numbing boredom, the clean, bright chain-stores, offering range, value and a kind of privacy, were a godsend. But now, instead of increasing choice, the growth of shopping centres is beginning to narrow it down. Shopping has become like watching television: the more channels there are, the smaller the range of programmes.
There are more and more shops, but all are clones of an original, almost invariably English, model. Like the Borg in the most recent Star Trek movie, the apparently separate creatures are merely outlying manifestations of a single being.
Thus, there has been a noticeable rise in nostalgia for old shops. Dubliners still living in the city have become like James Joyce in exile, obsessively recalling the names and locations of shops they once knew. When home looks like abroad, you don't have to go far to feel homesick.
It is not hard to see where the nostalgia comes from. All you have to do is to take a walk around the hideously bland interior of the new Marks and Spencer in Grafton Street and contrast it with the Brown Thomas department store that it has replaced. It is not that the old shop was a wonderland, or that it did not have its own kind of social claustrophobia, sealed off as it was in a bubble of wealth into which no breath of economic reality could intrude. It is that the claustrophobia of the new shop is physical. After a few minutes, you begin to feel that the walls are closing in because, in a sense, they are. Space has disappeared - in here, Dublin is a drab suburb of London. The world has become a smaller place.
IT IS rather ironic that as the economy and politics of the Republic of Ireland drift further and further from England, its cities are becoming more and more indistinguishable from those of the old mother country. It is also, in economic terms, rather odd. This is supposed to be the age of consumer specialisation, of the market responding ever more sensitively to the individual demands of the individual customer.
The old Soviet-style command economy, where central planners in Moscow decided what the workers and peasants of Uzbekistan would be able to buy in their shops next year, is supposed to be dead. But is the endless chain of franchised branches now woven into the fabric of our cities really all that different?