A Celtic Tiger moment from just last month: we are standing, self-conscious and fidgeting, in a happy little queue amidst the well-lighted clamour of Liffey Valley shopping centre. Waiting for Santa. Waiting for Santa. Waiting. "He's gone," said the shopwoman brusquely. "He'll be back in a minute." And just as the woman queueing in front of us turned to her kids and said brightly, "he's feeding his reindeer", Santa's middle-aged helper gave a big lewd adult wink to the queue. Writing his name in the snow, more like.
Soon two scutty, pimple-plagued little elves came out and asked us if we wanted the deluxe package. We said we did. We're merry sorts that way. Stand here, they said. We're going nowhere, we said.
A cheerless little man passed in through the queue a few minutes later. He looked like a jockey who'd been half gobbled by tumours. Minutes after he disappeared, our "deluxe" fees having been separated from our sweaty hands, the transition year elves ordered us into Santa's grotto, where we shuffled along in an S-shaped queue under the dim lights. They were no-nonsense elves and moved everyone along brusquely as if they were driving cattle across the old west.
"Look," said our eight-year-old, when she spotted Santa frail and yellowy in the gloom. "Hurry it up," said an elf. We looked sharp in case it would all turn to tears. "Well, what do ye want?" said the frail little Santa when we made it to the top of the queue and our kids towered over him. They reeled out the usual list. "Right so," says Santa and seconds later we were out in the mall again clutching a purplehued instamatic picture of the moment.
For weeks afterwards I wondered was it just me who had the problem in seeing the true meaning of the Liffey Valley Christmas. Then the dispiriting nature of Santa's hospitality tent and his spiky little helpers came flooding back to me when I read Ann Marie Hourihane's perfect piece on the Liffey Valley centre and its South Beach Food Court - an effortless bit of writing which, more precisely than any other I've read, sums up the morale-sapping consequences of the planning tribunals and the antics of little Frank Dunlop (was that you in the Santa costume, Frank?) and the Child of Prague himself.
Everywhere you go in this frantic boom time one is struck vaguely by the sense that we as a people are losing as much as we gain; that prosperity is driving us across the plains to some place that's as likely to be an abattoir as it is to be paradise. Nobody has coralled that inchoate sense of loss and dread into a more coherent picture than Ann Marie Hourihane.
Journalism has reacted more quickly than other media in dealing with the aching hormonal changes we as a people are experiencing - but little of what has been written will last the course. In 20 years' time we won't be pulling much of today's journalism out of the computer archives and telling kids that this is what it was like. It's finger along the map stuff for the most part, carefully plotting the changes on a day-to-day basis, chronicling the scandals and tut-tutting where appropriate. In She Moves Through the Boom Ann Marie Hourihane has pulled off a rare journalistic feat: she uses a mosaic of many real stories to give us the big picture. Hourihane's gift is for empathy and for people, and as such she is virtually unique among newspaper columnists today. Her Sunday Tribune pieces are neither filled with hectoring opinions or with self-absorbed extractions from her own life; they reflect rather the expenditure of time and shoe leather in finding ordinary people who have stories to tell.
From Liffey Valley and the bloodless artery of the M50 to the old-world snobberies of Dublin's yacht clubs, now sinking under the vulgarian tide of new money, Hourihane is precise and incisive on the flow of money through our little lives. She goes to Marie McLoughlin's house in Swords on the day Marie is moving to Drogheda and her husband is away driving a lorry in Kazakhstan. I can think of no other journalist who would bother to navigate Swords, let alone find a Marie McLoughlin and share with her such a fraught day.
From the over-reaching tweeness of Cork airport's heart-shaped sign - "little airport, big heart" - to the dun-coloured voice of the new prosperity which belongs to actor and voiceover artist Conor Mullen, Hourihane has a way of identifying the smallest changes in the wind. She never sets about any of her subjects with a baseball bat, never lets her voice betray anger or her prose become self-indulgent. The stories do the work and if she's going to mark you she'll do it with humour and a short savage sentence.
What's it like to attempt to open a bank account in Ireland if you have just arrived here? Harder than opening a shonky offshore account if you are already here. What's it like to be Ferdinand Sauza from Jakova in Kosovo being beaten up by three strangers in a pub in Swords? What is the link between sales of The Irish Times in Mullingar and the arrival there of a "wine cafe?"
Hourihane's work reflects the quality and style of Ian Jack's collection Before the Oil Ran Out, which dealt with the Thatcher years: there are echoes, too, of Jimmy Breslin's lifelong excavations of the stories to be found in Jamaica, Queens, New York. In a time of much faff and froth she has shown us a part of what we are. You may not like the big picture - indeed, you shouldn't - but the artistry in putting it together is what is special.
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist and author. His most recent book, Sonia O'Sullivan: Running to Stand Still with photographs by Patrick Bolger, was published by inpho last year