Some images of Ireland in what was regarded by journalists as a slow news week at the end of August 2000: the most compelling and intimate political drama in the Republic is coming to a head, not in the Dail, at a tribunal of inquiry in Dublin Castle or even in Brussels, but in the most obscure of European Union countries, Luxembourg, and in the headquarters of an institution few Irish people had even heard of at the start of the year, the European Investment Bank.
The bank's directors quietly refuse to vote for the Irish Government's chosen nominee for the position of vice-president, the disgraced former Supreme Court judge, Hugh O'Flaherty.
In the most dramatic example of a new kind of civic democracy, public anger at the nomination eventually leads to O'Flaherty's decision to withdraw his candidacy. Some new form of civic power has been stirred in Ireland, but the first to recognise it is not the supposedly responsive local political institutions but a faceless, faraway Eurocracy.
A popular young comic actor, Robbie Doolin, best known for his role in a bland and gormless TV soap called Upwardly Mobile, dies as a result of a latenight fracas on a Dublin street. As his coffin is carried into St Berndatte's Church in Crumlin for his funeral Mass, it is draped with a Tricolour and crowned with a black beret, apparently confirming widespread reports that he was associated with the terror gang responsible for the hideous atrocity of the Omagh bomb of 1998. Upwardly mobile Ireland still has its dark secrets.
A group of British soldiers is held hostage by a gang called the West Side Boys in the bush in Sierra Leone. The voices on the radio that inform Irish listeners of the progress of negotiations for their release have the clipped, precise tones of the English officer class. But the soldiers, it turns out, are nearly all Irish. Most are from Northern Ireland, two from the Republic. Irish lives, in the most unlikely places, still spill over the neat borders of nationality and statehood.
Two soccer players are kicked out of the Irish international squad preparing to play Holland after they are arrested on charges of drunken behaviour and causing criminal damage to a car. The airwaves and newsprint are full of outrage at the way these well-paid men have "let down their country".
Most of the anger is directed at the elder of the two, Phil Babb. No one finds it odd to accuse Babb, a black Londoner, of disgracing his country, Ireland. He has become, quite naturally, a symbol of the nation. Yet on those same night-time city streets, a black Londoner is vastly more likely to be the victim rather than the alleged perpetrator of a crime, and to be told in no uncertain terms to go back where he belongs.
An all-too-familiar violence returns to the working-class housing estates of Belfast and other towns in Northern Ireland. Men are singled out for assassination. A young girl is badly wounded when shots are fired through the window of her home. Families are intimidated out of their homes in a deliberate campaign of "ethnic cleansing".
But this time the perpetrators and the victims are Protestant, as the UVF and the UFF fight out a vicious feud. The familiar violence has taken a bizarre turn.
And through all of this, by far the most famous Irish person in what are now known as "these islands" is someone who was obscure a few weeks previously. Anna Nolan, a contestant in the British "real-life" voyeuristic game show Big Brother, touches on many of the cliches of Irish womanhood. She is an ex-nun, an exile, and with her warm personality has become a surrogate mother to all the other contestants.
But she is also an out-of-the-closet lesbian, astonishingly at ease in a media-saturated virtual reality. She just might be the new model for Irishness.
Between them, these more or less random images give some sense of what it was like to be Irish at the turn of the century. The strange had become familiar and the familiar strange. The big picture was made up of odd, incoherent details. Old stories were playing themselves out in unsettling new contexts.
Flagrant exposure went hand-in-hand with continuing secrets. Contradictions abounded. It was all, in other words, not that different from what it was like to be Irish at the turn of the previous century.
Back then, as now, the very notion of what it meant to be Irish was entirely up for grabs. It had to be contested in a thoroughly globalised context (then the British Empire; now the new transnational economy).
New sights, sounds and technologies had to be woven into the fabric (then cars, phones, electricity, X-rays; now the Internet, cheap air fares, dramatically expanded electronic media). And it had to negotiate, then as now, a new set of relationships between Irishness and Britishness while constructing a democracy that transcended sectarian divisions.
From the perspective of the year 2000 it was possible to see that the really odd time in Ireland was the period between the 1920s and the 1980s, when it was possible to pretend that Irishness was a simple thing that fitted into a single frame. In those years, albeit at the expense of a great deal of denial and repression, the fusion of nationality and Catholicism had created a powerful set of values and institutions that any citizen could identify with or reject.
We came to believe there was something natural and inevitable about this state of affairs. Only now, after it has all collapsed under the weight of violent conflict, political corruption, church scandal and a new kind of globalisation, can we see that it was neither.
If that collapse creates a rueful sense that "Ireland" has gone to the dogs, it is well to remember that Ireland has always been going to the dogs. The distinctive values of the nation are perpetually being swamped by the forces of bland international modernity. The young have always been increasingly vulgar, feckless and hedonistic. The deep-seated values passed down from our immemorial ancestors are forever on the verge of extinction. Material progress always seems to heighten rather than to dispel an underlying sense of unease.
So it was in Ireland at the start of the 20th century, when many of the country's leading artists and thinkers felt an urgent need to form or join associations dedicated to rescuing the nation from the terrible fate of becoming just another outpost of global modernity. So it was in 2000 when neither the joys of surviving the millennium nor a barrage of stunning economic statistics could dispel a pervasive mist of discontent.
If, in the latter half of 1999 and through most of 2000, the people running the country often seemed completely at sea, most notably in the farcical handling of the O'Flaherty affair, it was, in some ways, hard to blame them.
The basic belief that animates the behaviour of governments is that success will be rewarded and that spectacular success will be rewarded spectacularly. Here, then, was a Government that had achieved, or at least presided over, two epic improvements in the quality of Irish life which, taken together, ought at least to have cut off some of the major sources of gloom.
However slowly, painfully and uncertainly, devolved democratic institutions had been re-established in Northern Ireland. The IRA had agreed to something most sane and sensible commentators thought would never happen, independent inspection of its arms dumps.
The notion - in the realms of science fiction until very recently - that Martin McGuinness would be a minister at Stormont in a government led by David Trimble had become an accepted, almost unremarked, fact. The biggest source of depression and despair in Ireland, the daily grind of horror and atrocity, had begun to dry up.
After the Northern Ireland conflict, the next-worst reason not to be cheerful had been mass unemployment. While the problem had not been entirely solved and its long-term social consequences remained very evident in high and persistent levels of poverty and illiteracy, the improvement was startling.
Just a decade ago the notion that Ireland would enter the new millennium with sober predictions that unemployment would be below 4 per cent by the end of 2001 would have seemed an impossible dream.
In 1987 the unemployment rate was 18 per cent, and thoughtful commentators were telling us there would never again be full employment. In the first half of the 1980s the number of people at work in the Irish economy actually fell by 6 per cent. Since 1993, by contrast, it has grown by an astonishing 25 per cent. The biggest economic problem is getting enough people to fill the available jobs.
And it's not as if the surprisingly unhappy mood could be explained by the Irish suddenly becoming dour and thrifty. If there was still a nagging fatalism at the back of the mind, whispering that it was all too good to last, it manifested itself in a determination to spend it while we've got it. The most eloquent numbers in this regard were the 00s on the registration plates of the armada of automobiles on the new motorways.
But the bigger numbers were even more striking. In 1998 private consumer spending in the Republic totalled £30.8 billion. In 1999 it reached £34.6 billion. In 2000 the Economic and Social Research Institute estimated that £39.5 billion would pass through the tills and credit card accounts. And in 2001 we will, apparently, spend almost £44 billion. Here, conclusively, is evidence of the Irish contempt for the domination of money. We despise the stuff so much we can't wait to get rid of it.
How could it be, then, that in the most important electoral test of the year in the Republic, a by-election in South Tipperary, the Fianna Fail vote, at just 22 per cent, suffered a cataclysmic collapse? How could an important, but seemingly obscure, issue like the appointment of Hugh O'Flaherty to the EIB ignite a firestorm of public rage and render the Government virtually helpless? If "it's the economy, stupid", how did the Irish people wise up?
Some of the discontent is rooted simply in the fact that a sense of being well off is not shaped only by how much disposable income you have. The ability to afford one's house is still, in Irish culture, a crucial mark of prosperity and, from being the cheapest in Europe in 1989, Irish houses had become among the most expensive 10 years later. A typical urban house that cost 11.3 times average annual disposable income in 1989 now costs 18.2 times the average.
Basic health services, meanwhile, plunged ever deeper into crisis with recent improvements (for example, the availability of epidural pain relief for women in labour) actually being undone in some parts of the country.
And that sense of the quality of life becoming tangibly worse was reflected most obviously in the sheer difficulty of getting from A to B. The chaos in public and private transport, bringing greatly increased journey times, meant that a small island had become, in a sense, far bigger. A hefty slice of the global economy had been plonked down on the rickety infrastructure of an underdeveloped country, and the strain was all too obvious.
Yet the rage that gripped the public was not mere road rage. It was clearly provoked by much more than the daily stresses and irritations of a society that had outgrown its own public structures.
For behind it was a clear feeling that, whatever it actually was in the 21st century, Ireland still mattered to its citizens. Unfamiliar as the place had become in so many ways, it still existed as an idea.
And that idea still contained many of things that people at the start of the 20th century, about to embark on the painful process of inventing a modern nation, had wanted for it: a sense of justice, a feeling of belonging, a capacity to be proud of ourselves, a notion, however vague, that there was an "ourselves" to be proud of.
The precise content of that notion was hard to pin down, but it was made tangible by its obvious absence. For what became ever more apparent as the year went on and the revelations from the tribunals unfolded was that the Ireland that contained these desires hadn't just slipped way in a process of economic and social change or been stolen by perfidious Albion. It had been deliberately and cynically betrayed from within.
Some people at the very top of the heap had owed more loyalty to the Cayman Islands than to Ireland. Some citizens blessed with resources had turned themselves into "bogus non-residents", here but not here, part of Ireland when the goodies were being given out but mysteriously vanishing into a virtual exile when the obligations of citizenship were to be met.
And while everyone was equal before the law some people had turned out to be more equal than others. Unfortunately for him and the Government, Hugh O'Flaherty happened to give a name and a face to a previously incoherent sense of injustice and impunity.
In an odd way, all of the revelations, by pointing up the absence of a public community of which Irish people could be proud, served to remind them that they still wanted one.
The joys of shopping, however enthusiastically embraced, didn't quite fill the hole where a society called "Ireland" should be. Retail therapy didn't quite assuage the anguish of finding ourselves at the start of a new century, right back where we had started the old one, in an unsettled, fluid place that needed to be reinvented as a republic.
This essay was published originally as an introduction to the Irish Times Book of the Year, an anthology of some of the best writing in the newspaper between September 1999 and September 2000, edited by Peter Murtagh and published by Gill and Macmillan, price £14.99