Ever feel like you were on a roller coaster and could not get off? No, worse still, ever dream you were in one of those continental bus accidents where the speed goes up and up and the driver seems demented and the whole thing veers off into a ravine with everyone screaming?
Ever feel like that when you turn on the news and Mary Harney wants to import 200,000 more people - even though there are no houses for them and the traffic has ground to a halt? Ever think of Charlie McCreevy as the driver who is looking back at you over his shoulder, yelling, "Who says we have to slow down on the bends?"
And if you bleat your anxieties from the back seat you are a pinko or a creeping Jesus. You are told the economy is growing and God knows we waited long enough for that, so no one must question and everyone had better go out to work, earn more, pay less tax - wives, the retired, children in school, children who should be in school but aren't. If we don't co-operate, the bus might stop and we'll be stranded here by the side of the road and - worst nightmare of all - we might even have to go back to where we came from.
A bit exaggerated? Perhaps, but it can seem these days as if we are in the grip of an absurdly outdated cultural manifestation - fatalism. When, problems notwithstanding, Ireland is one of the world's great success stories, when we are spoilt for choice about how to shape our society, we are behaving as though our success was a capricious deity to be placated - the product of some magical formula with which we dare not tamper - not our own consciously created construct which we can choose to reshape.
What have we achieved? Only a few figures are necessary to tell the story: there are a quarter of a million more people living here than there were in 1990, there are half a million more people at work here than there were in 1990. Our young people are staying at home and in work and 66,000 more people have come into the State than have left in the four years since the emigration tide turned.
When Mary Robinson lit her candle in the Aras window we saw this as a symbol of Ireland looking outwards but it transpires to have been a homing beacon, a signal for bags to be packed and CVs dusted off in Boston, Munich, London, Melbourne.
This truly is a Tir na nOg now. We have not as many elderly as we should have because theirs were generations of high emigration, we haven't as many small children as we might have because family size has dropped so dramatically. What we do have is lots - many more proportionately than in most of the rest of the developed world - of young, vibrant people, working and studying. No wonder Dublin is party capital of Europe.
The changes that have come in the last decade have been exhilarating to the point of complete disorientation. There are more construction workers in Ireland now than farmers and fishermen. One in six voters bought Telecom shares. A former Taoiseach has been in the dock. Little wonder that the bus seems in danger of going off the road when the passengers are so young, volatile and likely to dispense with the driver - and when the driver's maps are completely outdated.
Celebrating our successes is not incompatible with acknowledging our problems. Who is not sickened at the idea of little dark-skinned children being taken up a gangplank to sleep on a boat in a harbour? Who is not concerned about stationary traffic, unaffordable housing, one person in 100 on a hospital waiting list, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and growing evidence that young women at work are afraid to start families because there is so little support for child-rearing?
We should be confident in our success and wealth that we can solve our problems. After all, when we were poorer, less employed, shipping out our children like our cattle, we managed to redirect this society and we can do so again.
The Government seems terrified of any change in direction. In his address to the Irish Management Institute conference last month, the Taoiseach was touchy about criticism of the Government's management of the economy. He departed from his script to suggest that economic forecasters who get it wrong should lose their jobs. In his scripted comments he maintained: "we have the formula that has brought us sustained success over the past 14 years, we should continue to apply it".
What is the formula that he has in mind? "Continued consensus" was important, he said. So is his formula to ignore the advice of the National Economic and Social Council and the social partners, as Charlie McCreevy did when he concentrated tax relief on the higher-paid in the last Budget?
Does he mean tax-cutting for the rich when the economy is booming, pumping demand into the economy, precisely the opposite of what Ray MacSharry did as minister for finance in the tough Budgets of the late 1980s - the 14 years ago to which he harks back?
If there is a magic formula, has there been no difference over these 14 years between the policies of his Government and those of the FG/Labour/DL rainbow coalition? Does he see no differences between their targeting resources on child benefit and his Minister for Finance's individualisation package?
In truth, the portion of the formula of the last 14 years which Bertie Ahern appears particularly concerned to sustain, or is particularly eager to defend, is tax-cutting as the catalyst for growth. Perhaps in his heart of hearts the Taoiseach fears that some commentators are right and that his Government's Budgets have over-inflated the economy and that history may judge him harshly, as it did Jack Lynch for the unwise expansion of the late 1970s?
"We are not blowing up a bubble here in Ireland which will burst in our faces," he told the IMI.
While Ahern is politic enough to draw the mantle of the social partners and the last 14 years around his Government's policies (however inaccurately), his subordinates can be less judicious in tone. Charlie McCreevy, in particular, seems to consider himself, or perhaps this Government, as the sole author of our present good fortune.
Has it not struck the Government how much it too is the beneficiary of other people's work and perhaps, just perhaps, it should show a little humility and willingness to listen to its critics? After all, the government of 13 years ago was implementing the economic policies advocated by the opposition.
The path which brought us here is complex. It cannot be reduced to a simple formula - cut taxes and you get jobs. Studies of our success reveal that it has been consciously built and paid for by the hard work and sacrifices of generations of Irish people. If this is payback time - in that infamous phrase coined by the Irish Independent on the eve of voting in the last general election and repeated by McCreevy in his recent announcement of the new April tax regime, then in justice the payback needs to be shared among the whole community and in a way that ensures that future generations too will gain from what we have built.
Irish people have voted again and again in so many different ways for an outward-looking, internationally engaged society which would join in the prosperity and the great political experiment of post-war Europe. Paradoxically, much of that success has been built on American investment and many of the actors have transatlantic cultural allegiance. Is this the most westerly state of Europe or the most easterly state of the United States? What values do we espouse?
The question which confronts us now is growth for what? Our drivers should cease yelling "full speed ahead" and instead turn around and ask us, the passengers: "Where to now?"
Tomorrow: the secret of our success