During the 1990s there was a great deal of talk about how much things were changing in Ireland. In truth there was probably more talk about change than there was of change itself.
But in the past five years, the pace of change has been such as to almost catch up on the rhetoric about it, which, oddly enough, has meant that people tend to talk less about change than they used to.
I know Ireland is changing when I see my home town, Castlerea, going through a radical transformation inconceivable a decade ago. Its basis remains something of a mystery, but this seems not to be an obstacle. Although there is no significant industrial or entrepreneurial revolution at play, and therefore a sense among the more pessimistic of horses being lived to get grass, the nature of the change is spectacular and broadly to be welcomed.
Castlerea Prison, although not the problem predicted by some, has not contributed significantly to the changes, which seem to owe as much to magic as to reality. On the streets of Castlerea, black faces and foreign accents are no longer a novelty. The amount of building going on, mostly driven by tax incentives, has to be seen to be believed.
There is a piece of waste ground behind where I grew up, between Main Street and the River Suck, which, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I would have nominated it as the last patch of land in the country to qualify for development. Now it is the site of a massive block of apartments, with talk of a creche, a restaurant and a boardwalk along the river. And on the Arm Road, there is a branch of Lidl.
There was a time when I would have lamented such a development, but now I see it as a part of a necessary democratisation. Towns like Castlerea have, until the recent past, exhibited all the disadvantages of the old, pre-Celtic Tiger realities, and little of the benefits of belonging to the most successful economy in Europe.
A great deal of the problem has resided with the culture of small towns, perhaps particularly with Roscommon towns, which tended to be much more stratified than in other western counties. Rigid social hierarchies, based largely on economics, had long prevented radical transformations from within. This had to do with the stultifying pyramid-structures of these towns, almost entirely based on property, wealth and local economic muscle, with a handful of shopkeepers at the top.
From the most prosperous retailer down to the most modest roadsweeper, everyone knew his or her place, and everyone seemed determined to ensure that this order would be maintained. The levels of economic dependency generated by these realities created all kinds of negative forces within the communities embraced by the town - snobbery, prejudice, timidity, and a kind of layered caste system that, though never articulated, was understood by everyone.
This climate was inimical not merely to entrepreneurial risk-taking but to any kind of innovative thought or action by anyone other than those at the top of the pyramid. I would state it almost as an iron rule: anyone from such a town with ambitions to make something of himself would need to move a minimum of 12 miles from home before setting himself up as an entrepreneur. While the businesses of those at the top continued to prosper, this was less of a problem than it might have been.
Traditionally, the family business would have been handed on from one generation to the next; but, in the recent past, the younger generations have tended, on completing education, to go into the professions and to move far away from the town. The result has been a decline in the main business of many such towns, and by extension a decline of the towns themselves.
And, because of the nature of the culture, there were little resources of creativity, initiative or energy with which to fill the gap and enable the towns to survive the decline of the traditional businesses.
This is why, contrary to long-held loyalties to the small operator over the conglomerate, I welcome the arrival of such as Tesco and Lidl, not as an ideal panacea to the ills of towns like Castlerea, but as a necessary shift in the culture which may yet result in better things. Their arrival marks the final breaking of the economic stronghold of the local retailer, a significant step along the way to eliminating the baneful hierarchies which have dogged many western towns for so long.
A town with Lidl or Tesco at the top of the pyramid is intrinsically different to one dominated by the personalities of the local business aristocracy. It is less aristocratic, for a start, and that may be enough to be going on with.
The standard joke notwithstanding, the Celtic Tiger has finally arrived in Connacht, albeit tail-first. Perhaps, after all, it is possible to live horse and get grass.