Business Opinion/ Emmet Oliver: How did you spend the weekend? At Croke Park? In front of the television watching your favourite DVD? Doing up the house? Maybe watching the Olympics?
The standard reply is: "I just relaxed". But examine the social patterns underlying this apparently innocuous statement and you soon realise that the way Irish people are spending their free time is changing the economy and business quite profoundly.
Put simply, we are spending more and more on leisure-related activities and this is going to produce a range of winners and losers over the next five years.
Consider some of the statistics from home and from our nearest market in Britain and you get at least a partial insight into the kind of economic choices consumers are making.
Take TV viewing for instance. Last week, the British regulator Ofcom (something akin to the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland in the Republic), revealed the astonishing figure that the average British person watches 26.1 hours of television a week.
The British television industry now makes more money from subscriptions to pay-TV than from advertising.
Ofcom's analysis was blunt: "Consumers are setting aside more of both their time and their money for media and communications services."
This was described by Ofcom as a "fundamental economic shift in the market with long-term significance".
In other words, the consumer's love affair with the box means we are spending more money on it than advertisers are prepared to hand over to the television companies.
In the Republic, such trends would obviously be good news for companies such as Sky, which now has 323,000 digital subscribers or almost one in four Irish homes.
It should be good news also for RTÉ, even though it is not a subscription-based service. This is because any increase in viewing should produce a positive spin-off for the State-owned broadcaster.
As spending on TV rises, it also increases the value of televised events and "properties" such as sporting tournaments and once-off national events.
Take the GAA for example. It is difficult to put a monetary value on the hurling and football championships, but you can be certain they are worth multiples of their value a decade ago.
This is not an academic discussion. Setanta, the privately owned sports television company, said earlier this month that it would be keen to strike a deal with the GAA on broadcast rights for the association's major events. The GAA's deal with RTÉ expires at the end of the summer and, while few people expect the GAA to switch allegiance, who is to say what the association might do in 10 years' time?
These are just isolated examples of the increasing economic power of leisure-related activities. Similar trends can be observed in other sectors.
A good example is telecommunications, which has a strong leisure aspect.
A recent report from ComReg, the Republic's telecoms regulator, included even more astonishing figures than those covering TV viewing.
Its quarterly key data to June 2004 revealed that we spend €3.57 billion per annum on fixed-line, mobile and other telecoms services. Certainly, much of it is work-related, but one suspects a lot of it is calls which do not strictly need to be made.
We have 3.5 million mobile subscribers, up from 3.1 million the year before. We are about to break the country's record for text messages sent in one quarter. The last ComReg figures showed us sending 910 million messages per quarter. How long more before we break the one-billion mark?
And yes, the Irish are more text and mobile mad than most other races - we spend the second-highest amount per month on mobile services in the whole of Europe.
So amid all the texting and TV watching, not to mention the explosion in DIY, what else are we doing?
Well going out quite a lot too. But even then we are sitting down to consume more entertainment.
Cinema attendances were 17.4 million at the end of last year (a new Irish record) whereas, in the early 1990s, they were far more modest at 8.2 million.
So, what meaning does all this texting, TV viewing, cinema going and sport watching have for businesses?
Well, it means companies involved in leisure areas in the Republic are set to experience a lot of growth by just standing still. Unless they seriously mess up their corporate strategies, there should be a strong stream of revenue growth for companies such as O2, Vodafone, Meteor, Sky Ireland, RTÉ, NTL, the cinema groups, restaurants, off-licence chains such as O'Brien's, bookmakers, DIY chains and a plethora of sporting organisations.
Emerging trends suggest the pursuit of weekend (and weekday in many cases) leisure activities may not be so good for the pub sector - at least if you listen to the publicans. Consequently, it may not be so good for the big drinks companies.
Equally, it may not be so good for An Post, which is already suffering great financial pain because of the switch to e-mail.
It may not be such good news either for companies such as DCC which has seen its snack-food business undermined because teenagers are spending so much on mobile phones.
But while the explosion in leisure spending seems to be all-pervasive, there are also signs that it might yet find its level.
Subscription numbers for pay-TV companies are starting to plateau, there is an increasingly noisy campaign against the price and prevalence of mobile phones and at least some people are still sending old-fashioned letters.
