Present Tense: During the week, a great many Irish people will have heard a lot of talk about something they had doubted really existed.
They might have presumed it was a myth; a bogeyman; something parents use to scare their kids. But now there was something coming and, even if they couldn't recognise it, they knew it was ominous. It was the sound of unsold villas and unsailed yachts; of restaurant shutters and bank managers' frowns. This was the sound of an approaching recession. And they may have wondered: so what that they're losing all this money on the stock market. Can't they just get a bank loan?
Anyone entering college this year - and plenty of those who have left - will have no memory of economic gloom. They have grown up in a country that got itself together just in time for their arrival into this world.
The tales of the old Ireland are to Irish teenagers what stories of the second World War are to a generation of British kids. There goes the old man with his recession stories again. Yes, we know you didn't have lattes in the 1980s. And that you only went on one foreign holiday a decade. And that you couldn't have gone for a shopping weekend in New York for fear of screwing up your Morrison visa. You've told us about it a thousand times already.
Some parents talk of their teenage children as having no concept of money - or, rather, no concept of what it's like not to have it. I don't know if that's true, and I don't want to generalise, but I also hear regularly of new graduates who walk into companies with the expectation - demand, even - of outrageous starting salaries. I don't believe for one moment that this younger generation is less caring or more selfish than any other, but they have grown up in a different country from the rest of us. They may be so used to skimming the fat that they don't realise that they might some day hit the skeleton.
They might have no sense of what it takes to survive a recession. Worse, if it hits they'll know only of what it's like to live in a golden age, and what it's like to lose it. So, in a sense, they could have it tougher than those who remember that things were once so bleak in this country that they spawned Self Aid.
The Government has recently announced that it is sending every house a booklet containing details of what to do in a major emergency. The thing is, we haven't had an earthquake in these parts for a few centuries; no volcanoes look as if they'll erupt any day soon.
But because an economic disaster appears inevitable at some point, perhaps they should send out a booklet explaining how to survive that, so that the day that we turn on the news and find George Lee grinning, the younger folk will know that it's not a time to panic.
It might include some sensible advice along the following lines:
"The bank manager is not your friend. When things go to the wall, he'll stop offering you money and plastic and the chance to put pictures of your cat on the plastic. Instead, he will use everything from your credit history to your Bebo page to confirm how unsuitable you are for a loan. And wait until mortgage interest rates creep as high as your age.
"Taxis are not part of the public transport network. In fact, until 1989, there were only a handful of taxis on the public roads, and they were for use by an exclusive number of people. In this respect, they were the helicopters of their day.
"When Paddy O'Gorman approaches you in a queue, this is not a good sign.
"Things will be at their absolute bleakest when a country with a devastated economy and massive unemployment organises a large concert through which business can call in and pledge jobs that don't actually exist."
Other advice might include how it is not a human right to have one car per person. How, in a time of recession, bread comes in two colours, white and brown. That when the crash comes, party planners will be among the first against the wall. That we will survive when the tanning industry collapses. That the civil service will become both your enemy and an aspiration. That a budget is something you must do every day, not what Brian Cowen does once a year.
And if we return to the economic dark ages, they will be able to look back and tell their offspring about those great times. When bouncy castle rentals comprised a significant chunk of the economy. When "luxury" meant "everyday".
And their kids will roll their eyes and sigh. There goes the old man with his stories of the boom again, they'll say. Why doesn't he just shut up and throw another Habitat chair on the fire?
