This New Year will probably be remembered in the financial services sector and IT back offices as an oasis of calm.

The reason for this is simple: the year-end came sandwiched between the double-whammy of the introduction of the euro and the mania surrounding the Y2K, or Millennium Bug, computer glitch and next year's issuing of euro notes and coins.

Surprisingly little has been mentioned about this impending event as yet but it will no doubt spawn forests of newsprint and interviews with people who don't like whatever the notes and coins will look like and a report on why the coins don't work in parking meters or some other vital piece of equipment. It must have come as quite a shock to a lot of people to be told that they could, in fact, go out and party on December 31st rather than sit in the office and wait in vain for some kind of disaster to strike.

I was back in the IFSC a couple of times in December and it's interesting how it has continued to evolve. My biggest complaint when I used to haul myself in every day, of course, was the fact that there was nowhere to get a decent sandwich. Obviously Bendini and Shaw were only waiting for me to chuck it all in before their shiny new emporium opened up. Not to mention the fact that there's a new pub, Excise, which regretfully I haven't managed to check out yet, as well as the really nice Oslo restaurant in Connolly Station. O'Brien's have taken the lease on the overpriced Fisherman's Wharf eaterie and turned it into a sandwich shop as well as a cafe. I met my sister there for lunch recently (she's now my IFSC mole having moved in to the centre only a few weeks after I moved out) and discovered that I am partially responsible for the fact that you now have a choice of light-lunch establishments in the centre.

Apparently the owners of O'Brien's had seen my heartfelt cries of distress at the paucity of decent places to eat and decided that there was a gap in the market. So it seems that I was greasing the wheels of commerce even though I didn't know it at the time. There's no doubt that the centre has changed the face of Dublin 1 forever and the whole vista along the Liffey from both sides of the river is now absolutely wonderful. For someone who grew up in the grey and bleak years of the 1970s and 1980s, where business was a dirty word and the city was falling down around our ears, it's hard not to look at places like the IFSC and feel proud that they exist. When we complain about the unfeeling heart of the Celtic Tiger we also have to remember what went before. It's easy to say that we've become a nation of greed-mongers but, in reality, all that's happened is that everyone is equally greedy rather than a privileged few.

And, although we now worry that we're a nation without heart, I'm not entirely convinced that we were all bleeding liberals before the money kicked in either. The challenge for the year ahead, of course, is whether the money will continue to kick in. The dot.com and TMT cash has slowed to a trickle.

Venture capital companies are no longer willing to hand over cheques for a couple of million pounds to a good-looking girl and a bloke with a pony-tail just because they've registered a website that may or may not ever sell anything to anybody. The telephone companies which have spent fortunes on new generation licences are wondering how exactly they're going to make any money from them. While that great dynamo of the global business enthusiasm over the past 10 years, the United States, is examining its entrepreneurial and consumer navels and picking out the fluff.

Consumer confidence in the States is at its lowest in two years. That doesn't have to mean a disaster but it has also affected business confidence. The banks have lent a lot of money to a lot of new era businesses and it'll be a long time before the payback comes, if at all, as far as some of them are concerned.

Which means that credit is tighter than it was and borrowing criteria will continue to be more strictly enforced. As well as which, reserves for bad debts will increase. Meantime, the fall-back in equity prices has reduced the net worth of Americans as consumers and has also meant that the flow of money into the States is beginning to be reversed. Which is why, finally, the euro has made some credible gains against the dollar. Whether that shift will switch the balance of economic growth from the US to Europe is still open to question. Growth forecasts for Europe, at around 3 per cent, are slightly higher than for the US for the coming year although the concern is that a fall off in demand from the States will adversely affect European companies anyway.

But the structural labour reforms in Europe will help to keep the continent competitive and the weaker US economy plus a strengthening euro means that interest rates will probably fall some time this year. As for the Republic, growth is expected to be at its lowest levels since 1994. But at 7 per cent that's hardly a disaster. Manufacturing continues to expand even though the rate of expansion is slower. The global parties may be winding down. But we haven't swapped the champagne for sparkling wine just yet.