In a week when Ireland earned an F-grade for its niggardly contribution to helping control world population elsewhere, Irish men and women in their 20s may have smiled.
Faith, fatherland and fecundity might be cited as some reasons why the country is so slow to help the contraceptive health of others, but on the streets of Europe's reportedly coolest capital, a very different F-word is at play.
Already, its effects are shocking. For once, the moral health of the nation may be at stake. The Irish mother, profiled as the only typical female citizen in the Constitution, is increasingly having none of it, just as everyone else was thinking that she had it all.
Women in their 20s are not bearing children. Already, one in five has decided she never will. A typical Irish mother now is aged about 30, and getting more decrepit by the day.
Where formerly a woman thought she had it made to get engaged on her 21st birthday and become a mother by the age of 23 - marriage intervening as a natural barrier - now many simply ditch one or the other.
The fastest-rising rate of births occurs to people outside marriage. And spinster-hood, that long-time outcast class, finally replaces sisterhood as the fastest-growing trend for Irish women, either way.
The F-words sometimes cited as a reason why are those aspirations for fame, fortune and fun which lead to easy myth-making about the possible rise of an Irish new ladette, or a breed of super "career women" whose secret mission is to neuter men.
As if we ought to be surprised that twenty-something people should prefer developing their professional selves, going clubbing, keeping up-to-speed on movies and daring to have foreign holidays to the more decorous life of responsible parenthood in the land of the Celtic Tiger. As if that was in fact a true profile of an Irish twenty-something.
Others blame a different F-word for making women lose themselves in trying to become like men: feminism, now often a dirty word, which believed biology need no more be destiny, and hoped for such a rush of women into the pastures of the public world.
It certainly had influence. To some extent, many of feminism's hopes are now part of the bloodstream - not the politics - of younger women.
Young Irish women probably do not differ all that much from their UK peers who recently placed having children fifth in priority, down-line from a successful career, a stable loving relationship, world travel, and making lots of money - this, when asked to imagine what they would regret not having done at the end of their lives.
No one ever fully asked young men what they think; common sense suggests a like reply.
Childbearing is not so umbilically linked to people's sense of self-esteem or personal identity as it was when the ever-problematic C-word was drafted by Eamon de Valera in 1937. If motherhood then identified typical citizenship, it also was the measure of parenthood itself.
Presumably when the Constitution was being written, most fathers were sitting reading the paper in their favourite armchair after a long day at work, and could not be disturbed. Hence, their almost total absence from the relevant sections on the family.
We know the family is in crisis. But a different F-word may account at least as much for the anxiety about it as for the dramatic changes in childbearing patterns. It is one we use frequently, embrace wholeheartedly, and find increasingly difficult to analyse. Funds. Finance. Also known as free enterprise.
Its roots may lie in the Celtic Tiger's own family tree. Perched on one branch are the liberal values which promoted equality of rights and of responsibilities. On the other, market deregulation and the blasting away of traditional employment promote a culture where insecurity is the norm.
Within that culture, the Celtic Tiger calls so deafeningly that putting the national biological clock on snooze mode can seem the only sensible response.
The result makes economics the new biology. Why build a home when you can't afford a house? Why rely on one breadwinner when the whole idea of a job for life, or at least for the years it takes to rear a child, has disappeared?
Virtually every aspect of how the State conducts itself in respect of future children and families militates against them having a chance. Property rights favour landlords, out of all proportion to what tenants ought to expect. No minimum wage assures the most vulnerable workers and carers that they will be able to provide for a child next week, too, let alone next year.
Less educated and therefore less affluent women are hardly going to be encouraged to marry their partners when the very act will disqualify them from many forms of employment assistance and training.
And many men may be reluctant to marry anyway, not for any lack of romance or chivalry, but because they find it hard to reinvent themselves in an identity other than traditional breadwinner mode.
The child care debate continues among older middle-class women as if younger and prospective parents had a realistic choice, while public planners - those senior civil servants among the few to have a secure and pensionable job - seem to act as if the problem will magically go away, or that the status quo of the 1950s will be the typical lifestyle of the next millennium.
Even the present Minister for Finance has chosen to ignore the real-life issues that face real people. No child care allowances or tax reliefs, no public care system, nothing that answers the question anybody seriously wanting children has to ask. Who will mind them? And how can we afford to pay?
Young women's rapid educational and professional advancement in the public world resembles that of Irish emigrants in the Diaspora days gone by.
Freed from all the old ways, they will work in insecure employment, take risks, seek adventure and believe they can achieve what earlier generations never did. In that, they seem more adaptable to current labour markets than their brothers.
If you are what you do, specifically you are what you earn. Work now defines status more wholly than the Constitution ever could, or did.
At a time when the status of a child is considerably more than that of a fridge freezer but less than that of a 1999 Lexus, it not only makes sense to postpone having children. It may increasingly make sense not to have any at all.