The pace of change in Dublin is so spectacular that nobody has a handle on it - not Dublin Corporation, not the banks or property developers, not even the Government.
Since the mid-1990s, planners have been run ragged trying to deal with a torrent of planning applications and appeals, while the construction industry is so stretched that electricians, plumbers and carpenters are commuting from Holyhead every Monday in their transit vans; they have become known collectively as "the Welsh choir".
To an English visitor, Dublin is repeating, on a larger scale relative to its smaller size, the experience of London during the Thatcher years, when the promised deregulation of the financial services sector triggered a massive building boom, according to architecture critic Martin Pawley, writing in July 1999:
"To anyone who remembers London in the mid-1980s, the similarity is uncanny. There is the same sense of a city possessed by tremendous economic forces. The rules and regulations drawn up for the measured control of development in quieter times can no longer be made to fit. The forces of movement have seized the initiative and, on every side, there are indications that it is not time to pause, but rather to spring onto the back of the Celtic Tiger and ride, ride, ride." Whatever about Pawley's riproaring advice, there can be no doubt that the momentum generated by the current economic boom is confronting the city with huge pressures for development and expansion. As the City Manager, John Fitzgerald, said in April 1999, Dublin is awash with potential developers who have buckets of money to spend - some of them, indeed, at war with each other over the spoils in areas they would have ignored just five years earlier.
One of Fitzgerald's tasks is to manage the boom, insofar as he can, and seek to ensure that beneficial development is directed into the right areas before the economy runs out of steam. "It's a great time for me to be doing what I'm doing. There'll never be a better time," he declared confidently.
Never has the demand for office space been so strong, both in the city centre and out on the urban periphery. Never have we been faced with so many plans for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, office parks and leisure facilities. And never has Dublin had to deal with the immense challenge of providing at least 200,000 new homes - that's nearly half as much again as all the houses and apartments already built - to accommodate a steep increase in population over the next 10 years. Where these homes are built, and in what form, is clearly an issue of overwhelming importance. Because we are not going to get another chance. After 2011, when the present economic boom has fizzled out and the population of the Greater Dublin area begins to level off, we will have all the houses and apartments we need. By then, as the ESRI has said, Dublin will be "cast in concrete" and it will be too late to undo mistakes made or to mitigate the many errors already made during the past 30 years.
In the meantime, we congratulate ourselves on our new-found prosperity even though few among us have any real idea what exactly is fuelling the Celtic Tiger. All we know is that "for the first time in our history, we are able to decide what we want and go out tomorrow and pay for it", as the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, put it in August 1999. But the boom has yielded some strange results. There is a sense that Dublin has fallen into the hands of a changeling species, a new Me Generation with no experience of thrift, still less of poverty, and no folk memory of the Famine. "One of the things that acquisition and the pursuit of wealth induces is amnesia," according to poet Eavan Boland. "And those who seek them will not only forget, but want to forget, the levels of strength and survival and near-to-the-edge dispossession that we once had as a people. "
A culture of conspicuous consumption has taken a firm hold of Irish society, as we babble away on slimline mobile phones, leaf through brochures marketing exotic foreign holidays, purchase gourmet convenience food at outlandish prices and sign up for low-interest bank loans to buy the latest top-of-the-range car or that dream home on the Costa del Sol.
Idealism, too, seems to have been forgotten. Successful people, in the materialistic sense, care less and less about those being left behind; even the Simon Community has been having trouble finding local volunteers for its soup runs in Dublin's ever-growing homeless netherworld, and the same problem is reported by the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
Is it all a flash in the pan? Or is there something more fundamental going on? Perhaps what we are witnessing is the reclamation of Dublin by a new generation of Irish people who have travelled widely and even worked in other European cities, shed their cultural baggage, and now returned home to demand the same sort of lifestyle they experienced elsewhere. They see no reason why the Hibernian metropolis should be less civilised or interesting to live in than, say, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich or Barcelona.
But there are two seemingly inescapable downsides to Dublin's prosperity - horrendous traffic congestion and spiralling house prices. The city's diversity is threatened by the astronomical value we now place on residential property, because people on lower incomes - actors, artists, nurses and waiters, even teachers and gardai - may no longer be able to buy or rent homes conveniently located to their workplaces. With single-storey cottages selling for £150,000 or more and two-bedroom flats renting for £800 a month, they are being forced to look further afield.
God be with the days when Dubliners used to complain that the city was being overrun by Culchies; now some Dubliners who can't afford to buy homes in their own city are becoming reluctant migrants to provincial towns such as Gorey, Mullingar and Tullamore, where houses are considerably cheaper.
New housing estates on the outskirts of these towns and many others are, in effect, little bits of Dublin way beyond the metropolitan area. Do the children reared in such places grow up as Wexford, Westmeath and Offaly people, even while their Dublin-born parents continue to commute to work in the capital? But unlike those who travel by rail from as far north as Lurgan and Newry, most of the migrants to the outer Leinster towns tend to drive their cars on the much-improved national roads radiating outwards from Dublin. The provision of these virtual motorways has facilitated suburban sprawl, judging by the number of new housing estates springing up along their routes, and given long-distance commuters an edge over those living closer to the city centre in, say, Templeogue.
In the 30 years to 1992, an estimated 100,000 one-off houses - bungalows or two-storey dwellings on individual sites - were shovelled into the countryside throughout the Greater Dublin area, including Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, and there is no reason to think this trend is not continuing, even at an accelerated pace.
A drive along the back-roads from, say, Baltinglass to Oldcastle reveals the extent of this suburban colonisation of the capital's rural hinterland and the consequential traffic congestion in every village and country town. For the truth is that most of these houses are urban-generated, owned and occupied by people who work in Dublin or one of the towns in the region.
Over the years, landowners have found that many county councillors are well-attuned to the needs of the marketplace, demonstrating their willingness to rezone land at the drop of a hat - or, in some cases, a brown envelope - whether or not it makes any sense in planning terms.
In successive county development plans since the early 1970s, thousands of acres of good agricultural land have been rezoned for suburban housing against professional planning advice at six or eight houses per acre with little or no reference to the availability of public transport. But whether the planners won or lost, the result was the same - formless low-density housing that spreads across the landscape, engulfing whole villages along the way.
