As you must surely know by now, Ireland is in the grip of a serious identity crisis as it starts out on the third millennium. The problem, brought about by a combination of sudden wealth, the decline in influence of the Church and - in my personal opinion - Michael Flatley, has been exercising the minds of most of the country's serious thinkers. And this column is no exception.
Admittedly, the column hasn't done much serious thinking in recent years, due to the recurrence of an old metaphysical injury it picked up while trying to read Finnegans Wake as a schoolboy.
But walking home from work in a dense fog the other night (not the column's mental condition, this was an actual fog), it occurred to it that if this country were a person, he or she would be getting counselling by now, in an effort to cope with the pace of change and the loss of its traditional identity.
Ireland is certainly no longer the land of a "hundred thousand welcomes," if indeed it ever was. (This figure is presumably based on the 1961 Census of Population, which showed there were 101,627 welcomes in Ireland, with the heaviest concentrations west of the Shannon. But an estimated 40 per cent of these were only qualified welcomes, and many of the remainder were seasonal.)
Either way, while 100,000 would have been more than adequate to deal with the tourist numbers we had even 10 years ago, the relentless success of Bord Failte means this is no longer the case. Now, on a given day, there could be 100,000 tourists in Bewley's Westmoreland Street restaurant alone, and the number of welcomes available is pathetically inadequate to cope. No wonder there are so few left for immigrants.
But our physical landscape is fast-changing too. Specifically, Ireland is in danger of losing the title "Emerald Isle", a reputation which rested on its possession - prior to joining the EEC - of "40 shades of green".
Intensive farming and increased use of industrially-produced fertiliser has reduced this to about 15 shades of green at the latest count. Agricultural efficiency has improved in the process, but at a price, as you can see whenever you fly in to Dublin Airport. (The world-famous North Dublin shade of green disappeared, in mysterious circumstances, under a number of housing developments; a matter now being investigated by the tribunals.)
But to move from the big picture to a smaller one, a lot of serious thinking - around Dublin, anyway - is carried out in cafes; and these are the perfect places to reflect on how much we have changed. Cafes have become one of the symbols of the new Ireland, and the menu in many of them these days would be unreadable to an Irish person of even five years ago, in the same way that English shop signs used to be unreadable to our ancestors.
I'm not in a position to criticise this trend, being a member of one of the first generations who chose to drink coffee instead of tea: an act of reckless rebellion, from which it was only a small step to the society of rampant consumerism, Irish dancers in leather trousers, MOT tests and all the rest of the madness that we have today.
But one specific change in cafe culture is striking. If you want a plain cup of coffee now - as opposed to an espresso, or a capuccino, or a half-caf/decaf double latte with cinnamon topping - you don't ask for a plain cup of coffee any more. The new term in the trendy coffee houses is "Americano".
To have to call what used to be just a plain coffee an "American" coffee would be bad enough, acknowledging as it does the global cultural hegemony (when you're a serious thinker, you can toss these terms around all day) of the United States. But forced as you now are to ask for it in Spanish, you sound like you've just crossed the Rio Grande in a tyre.
Which in a sense, as a people, we have done. But having arrived belatedly in the first world, it's important that we don't now - to use the clinical psychologists' term - lose the run of ourselves completely.
One useful thing we can do is reflect on the experience of Japan which, great as has been its success, is also in the middle of a major identity crisis, according to an article in the Washington Post.
Japan has other current parallels with Ireland, not least in the fall of some of its sporting icons: it has recently been revealed that Sumo wrestlers, famous for throwing each other out of the ring, have been throwing whole fights as well, for financial gain.
But on the question of identity, a commission appointed by the government in Tokyo to examine the problem has concluded that the collective mentality which served Japan well in the past is also to blame for the ongoing recession. What the country needs now, the commission decided, is more individualism, more tolerance of difference and - I'm quoting from the article here - "more lawyers".
To which one can only say that, if that's the best advice available to them, the Japanese are in even bigger trouble than we are. Confused as we may be, I think we're all agreed that Ireland needs more lawyers like the midlands counties need an irrigation scheme.
It's not much to be going on with, but it'll do for the moment.
Frank McNally can be contacted at: fmcnally@irish-times.ie