Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
President McAleese has complained about "the comfort of consumerism". Comfort? It has obviously been some time since she tried to push a double buggy through a crowded shopping centre, with a giant Argos bag hanging from one handle and half a ton of Clarks shoes on the other, while her husband drives around and around the car park in the vain hope of getting a space within a mile of the front door.
Over the average weekend, a large percentage of the Irish population must be either in a shopping centre, coming home from one, thinking about going to one, stuck in the traffic caused by people going to a shopping centre or just driving around the car park in the vain hope of getting a space within a mile of the front door. The rest of the population, being a little more sensible about these things, is working in the shopping centre.
These places are often referred to as modern-day cathedrals, although that comparison would be more apt if, in a cathedral, having reached the top of the line to receive communion you were greeted by a 12-screen multiplex and a little smoothie stall. Certainly, though, the opening of a new shopping centre is greeted as the coming of age for a town. Its arrival is seen as the end of some consumerist isolation, as if people have been plucked from disaster by the combined rescue team of Next and Oasis. So shoppers descend on the place with great fervour and will absolutely refuse to leave unless they've fulfilled that deep human need to pay less than a €20 for a pair of Prada jeans in TK Maxx.
Meanwhile, the older shopping centres have become reminders of pre-boom Ireland, only a bad fiscal quarter away from being archaeological relics. They are rusting blocks in which the pound shops and unreconstructed supermarkets hold out against the spread of the shutters. We wonder how we survived with such meagre pickings. It is startling to realise that there is a generation that has never known an Ireland without Topshop.
Modern centres are given delightfully evocative names, such as Scotch Hall or Liffey Valley, rather than the more honest Yet Another Shopping Centre with Nothing Decent to Eat in It.
They are increasingly cavernous, with each new development bigger than the previous one, reaching out to a wider and wider catchment area. Eventually someone will have the idea of simply turning Westmeath into one big shopping centre. Athlone can become a new B&Q. The smaller villages can be pound shops.