We've been told we have one of the best health services in the world. Balderdash: we have an underfunded, poorly planned two-tier system well described as a form of apartheid.
We've been told we have one of the best systems of education, which enables everybody to make it to the top on merit, irrespective of background or ability to pay. And our illiteracy rate at 20 per cent is among the worst in the European Union.
We're deafened by the trumpeting of economic achievement - and would gladly join in the chorus if it weren't for the way it drowns out the cases of those on a fiver an hour.
But, then, there was a time when we were taught that this was - or once had been - an island of saints and scholars; when we half believed that some of the saintliness and scholarship had rubbed off on us.
It took a series of bare-faced scandals to make us realise that it had turned into an island of millionaires and conmen. Where a cead mile failte was not so much what somebody might be given when they got here as what they'd have to pay to get in. ("A millun for the passport, a few grand for the party and whatever you're havin' yourself, Boss.")
We were slow enough to realise that we'd been run for decades by people who had lousy memories and shady friends. People who might well have believed the stuff they peddled about health and education; since they had the loot, they'd no occasion to test the claims.
But some politicians were lulled into a false sense of security by the assumption that the providers of services would forever buy their guff about how all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Strikes in Aer Lingus, on the railways and in the health services; threatened strikes in schools, the news that almost 1,800 vacancies in the Civil Service remain unfilled, should have stopped them in their tracks.
Here were problems that Irish society had hidden or ignored. And for the middle classes there was the shock of seeing, hearing and recognising those on low pay. They could be friends, family, neighbours, trying to survive on a fiver an hour or less.
For this is a society which depends on the dedication of people who make do on low wages until they are no longer able to hold out. And when the break comes and public services are curtailed or cease - well, public reaction often depends on commentators.
And commentators, as we saw during the train drivers' strike, are notoriously unpredictable, seldom given to looking behind events for cause and effect. Commentators turn on teachers, train drivers, baggage handlers, air crews, catering staff, as if it was their responsibility to keep things going, whatever the cost to themselves.
During the nurses' strike, people who were shocked to see them outside their hospitals felt it was too bad that it had come to this. But no one paid attention to their warnings about the damage done by low pay and low morale to the health service. Now the damage is plain to be seen in Maev Ann Wren's series of articles in this newspaper, in this week's Prime Time programmes, in reports on radio and in anecdotal evidence.
Ironically, Thursday's Prime Time discussion demonstrated the folly of one of those optimistic claims about the state of the health services. The claim, made in an OECD report, of all places, suggested a happy consensus. The programme itself was more like the Tower of Babel.
Sean Healy of CORI has written here again this week of two proposals which he and his co-director, Brigid Reynolds, have for improvements in social conditions and in the scope of discussion.
A social contract against exclusion, they argue, should be developed by government and social partners and put into operation immediately. It would build on commitments made in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness and ensure "that resources currently available would be used in a concerted way to reverse present trends that are being worsened by inflation".
The other proposal is for a forum for dialogue on civil society, to debate, among other issues, the shape of the social model the State wishes to develop in the decades ahead - European, American or an alternative.
Now this is a question which is too important to be cornered by those who are most vocal on the subject at present - the economists who are usually described as independent but are usually nothing of the sort. The very people who believe that this is the best of all possible worlds - and the devil take the hindmost.
In Monday's Irish Times, Maev-Ann Wren responds to her critics.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie