Gabriel Byrne on Tubridy Tonight on Saturday mumbled about the changes in Irish society in the last 15 years, changes he could not quite define but which leave him feeling an outsider, writes Vincent Browne.
There are obvious changes: the increased prosperity, so evident all around the country, aside from the wastelands of disadvantaged areas; the regeneration of the Dublin quays; the huge construction projects undertaken in the last decade, the roadways; the fall in unemployment, immigration and the new Irelanders; the confidence that is now so evident, as compared to 20 years ago when we began to wonder if Southern Ireland, like Northern Ireland was not also a "failed political entity"; the ending of the Northern conflict and the peace dividend accruing from that.
But there is a sense that something has been lost along the way. No, not that identity thing, I think, and anyway what would that matter?
Aren't we as identifiably Irish as ever? Just observe the passionate support for the Irish rugby and soccer teams. Local identities seem to have strengthened also. The enthusiasm for Munster rugby, the support for county GAA teams.
So what is it?
I offer this observation tentatively. It is a sense of local community.
A sense of knowing one's neighbours and being involved in each others' lives. Of a strong sense of solidarity with one's local community, being able to drop into neighbours' houses unannounced, children running from home to home. Knowing everyone in the locality and almost everything about them.
Being part of the social and sporting clubs and associations, the drama groups, the local church, if one was a believer or even if not.
Oneself living as a community being, one's identify caught up with being part of a community, not just an isolated individual or part of a nuclear family.
I know there is a great deal of blarney talked about the old days, and a lot about the old days was miserable and terrible. There was child abuse on a scale most of us never imagined and community solidarity did nothing to protect against that, indeed it might have covered up for that.
There was snobbery and class consciousness that negated much of that solidarity. Society was judgmental. But there was a sense of neighbourliness. And I think what did most to undermine that was the car.
Not just that the car allowed people to develop associations outside their locality or enabled people to "escape" their locality and what was oppressive about it. But that society came to be shaped by the car. We began to build our society around it.
The huge infrastructural projects nowadays are not schools or hospitals or centres of culture or entertainment or sport, they are roadways.
Roadways hewn out of our landscapes, changing it as nothing has changed it for hundreds of years.
They have provided the opportunities for shopping centres, dazzling but entirely anonymous.
They have encouraged the emergence of the commuter, people living forty, fifty, sixty miles from their work and spending hours every day commuting in enclosed steel bubbles, cut off from everyone, including those immediately surrounding them.
I think the car has changed people, made them more individualistic, less socially minded. How otherwise can we explain conduct on the roads that would never happen elsewhere.
I think, perhaps, this has had a political effect, people concerned with themselves and relatively little with society.
Traffic is the ubiquitous topic of conversation, and maybe the main political issue of our times.
That is aside from crime and accident and emergency departments. And both crime and accident and emergencies are directly related to the car.
The rise in criminality is associated in part by the weakening of social ties and in part by the opportunities for criminality which the car provides. A&E departments are clogged by casualties from car accidents.
In an unthinking way we have allowed society to be changed in ways I believe we would not have agreed to if asked at the outset. But this did not occur by the discreet actions of hundreds of thousands of individuals exercising their free choice, we facilitated and encouraged this by building motorways, bypasses, dual carriageways and huge car parks. And worse, we made it necessary by building society around the car.
The car initially offered extraordinary choice and freedom to the select few who could afford one. But the flexibility and freedom that was first available has now disappeared due to the number of cars.
We travel now in many areas at a rate far slower than we did twenty, fifty or even a hundred years ago. And to help it all along, the Government has removed the Groceries Order, which will propel further this descent into an Orwellian future of life in a steel can.