In late November, a friend got a letter from a bank urging her to start her Christmas preparations early: "You've been approved for a loan up to £10,000!" Deadline for acceptance, December 22nd. Already struggling with a mortgage the size of the Ritz, she chucked it in the bin.
They tried again about 10 days later. This time, the offer had been extended to January 17th. And this time, as darkness drew in and a gale howled, she read it again. Just five working days for the cash to reach her bank account . . .
The day was bleak, the children fractious, the Christmas bills mounting. Suddenly, the Maldives were swimming into the mind's eye . . . or maybe a tennis court in the paddock . . . or a bijou residence near Biarritz . . . and a couple of those new Sony PlayStations to shut the kids up for a while. What price an APR of 11.8 per cent when instant silence and sunshine and strawberries and cream in your own mini-Wimbledon come June, beckon like sirens?
Is this the flower-strewn road to hell?
If it is, then it looks like my friend is not the only one heading there. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a vast amount of the cash crashing down the high streets this Christmas is borrowed. Banks and credit card companies confirm this; private sector credit is showing an increase of nearly 25 per cent over 1999. In the 12 months to June this year, we borrowed a staggering £21 billion.
And we're no beginners. For five years, credit has been growing at four times the rate of the economy. All to fuel more facelifts in a jar, more Prada bags and Smeg cookers, more Sony mini-discs and widescreen televisions, more second and third holidays (don't even think about it, many Christmas packages have been sold out since June), more second homes in Marbella (because they're full of Irish folk like yourself and because you're worth it).
Have you noticed how difficult it is to negotiate Dublin airport without meeting a clutch of red-eyed lads fresh from their second Spanish golfing trip this year? How pitying the glances if someone questions a bar bill nowadays? With what contempt restaurants slap a £25 charge on a savagely abused piece of Dover sole, or £4.25 on a small bottle of Tipperary water or £12 a head for the cheese board?
Who are these people?
Is anyone going to shout that the emperor (always excluding developers, lawyers and the dot.com-ers who got out six months ago) has no clothes? You must be joking. You want to look like a loser when the whole point is to look like "loadsamoney" who "got in early"? If you know what's good for you in the conspicuous spending stakes, you'll be largin' it round town this Christmas, with your blindingly belogo-ed Louis Vuitton clutched ostentatiously to your Prada-clad bosom, while prattling about the Christian kitchen (£10,000 will hardly make a dent, my dear) that's due for delivery any day.
There was an era way back in the 1980s, when city graffiti merged with public opinion and urged the sad and oppressed to go mug a yuppie. Now we're lost in Lotto country, begging to be humiliated on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or forming lynch mobs when a gamble on the stockmarket goes belly up.
It's amnesia once again. The noisier elements of the points race generation, fuelled on vodka 'n' Red Bull and large dollops of complacency, fan their banknotes in the faces of the middle-aged, along with their wilful ignorance of recent history and their self-centred conservatism. The rest are too busy working 12-hour days to pay the rent or travelling two-hour commutes, to get involved in anything socially useful.
The middle-aged shift uneasily in the confusion, quoting one Jesuit who urges them to enjoy the boom, while another urges them to rage at the growing imbalance triggered by the same boom. Some appease their social consciences by gracing the glitzy charity balls, straining madly to re-invent themselves through the pages of VIP while drowning in a spiritual vacuum. The rest look hunted and haunted; one well-known political scrapper recently confided he'd like to break a leg or something "minor", just to legitimise a brief respite from the battlefield.
The old - who battled the hungry years, had hearts freshly broken with each child who took the boat and lived to witness the fall of every icon and social pillar of their youth - struggle to buy meat once a week, or something as basic as a cinema ticket or a packet of biscuits.
Meanwhile, the poorest of the poor, the ones who don't match up to the bankers' criteria for pre-approved loans (and get a second smack in the teeth when the same banks close down branches in their areas) turn to the money lenders. It is estimated thousands of families owe some £60 million to the 65 licensed moneylenders, some charging almost 200 per cent interest.
Can the Budget's £8 a week for these people even begin to address the gulf? Hardly.
Can they ever catch up?
That depends. How long do we have before the bubble bursts?
As usual, no two economists seem to agree on anything. But leaving potential credit squeezes aside, it is no longer a question of whether the boom will last. The question now is: will the economy's trajectory stabilise gently and fly straight or will it take a dive?
There are straws in the wind. Already, indigenous industry is producing its own modern parables or tragedies of Greek proportions, depending on your world view. They include the humiliation and dizzy downward spiral of the society darling and "celebrity chef", Conrad Gallagher; the collapse of the old, established Kavanagh grain business in Maynooth, leaving £24 million debts and the formerly highflying family "destitute", according to a director; the wipe-out of Transaer with its £30 million debts and its founder, P.J. McGoldrick, who only recently was listed as one of Ireland's 100 richest businessmen.
And these are only the high-profile cases. While Irish company liquidations are rising, external influences are also making their presence felt. The 750 job losses announced last week at the north Dublin plant of Motorola marked the single largest redundancy announcement for almost four years; 2,000 jobs are threatened at Rank Xerox; and Intel - that great, galloping personification of the Tiger - has issued a profit warning.
According to business watchers, we can expect more of the same.
Unnecessarily bleak? Maybe, but whether these troubles turn out to be single spies or battalions, the sense that we've blown the greatest opportunity we have had - or will have - to heal our social divisions, grows with every passing day.
So what have we done with our riches? For growth of a perverse kind, take a look at the homeless. Dublin now has more rough sleepers than Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Liverpool combined and more than two-thirds the number in central London. But while rough sleeping in London with its notorious "cardboard cities" has fallen from 1,200 in 1991 to 302 today, in Dublin it has steadily increased. A street count by the Simon Community showed that the numbers - two out of three mentally ill and one in 10 of them teenagers, some as young as 14 - had increased by 60 per cent since December 1997, to about 202.