Don't mention the R word, although maybe it mightn't be such a bad thing, writes Ailish Connelly.
The alarm sounds, the radio cranks in and woe betide us all. Stock market slides and property nosedives, European indices falling through the floor and, even with our mammoth shopping, Wall Street is in crisis; it's enough to send you scurrying back to the scratcher.
The dreaded R word is rearing its ugly head and those who are old enough to remember the 1980s and early 1990s are back in familiarly, chilly territory.
If we are told often enough, we might even get used to the idea. Soon we won't have the proverbial ass left in our trousers because of our profligate ways, because we got too greedy, because we wouldn't listen to our betters.
Indeed some of our betters were at the helm leading us to hell in a handcart so presumably they won't have an ass in their trousers either, which could be interesting or frightening, depending on which way you look at it.
But, as so much of the current wobbly global financial situation is beyond our control and the property slump was loudly signposted by the doom-mongers for, well, years now, we just have to put up and ride the storm.
Before we carry on carrying on regardless, singing loudly with our fingers stuffed in our ears 'cos you can talk to the hand but the head ain't listening, let's take a moment to check out some reasons to continue being one of the happier populations on the planet.
There is always an upside, even with an R in the month.
Soon, we can safely go to the pub or to a dinner party and not have to listen to premier windbag types warbling about their property portfolios. My brother lives in the States. While home here a few months ago, he met his mates for a couple of scoops. He came back to my house aghast.
" I felt thick," he said, "thick as a plank. There they were banging on about their leaseback this and their interest-only mortgage that and their several properties abroad and their investment portfolios here in Ireland. Investment portfolios?"
Nobody in America talked like that, he said (they certainly won't now anyway). He wanted to natter about X box 360 games, show off about his skiing prowess and heartily discuss whether the Dubs would ever again win an All Ireland. You know, important meaning-of-life stuff. Wake up and smell the credit crunch, bro.
While the going was good, the little people of Ireland got in on the act and why shouldn't they have. Now everyone can bore the socks off a saint, knows the ins and outs of the subprime lending debacle and can skilfully navigate the finer points of global economic policy.
Huge snoring bore; see, weren't you better off all along, not having the spare 50K to invest in that rising market, because your 50K might not be around any longer. Perhaps now developers will leave our pubs and petrol stations alone.
I live in a village in Co Dublin, a very socially mixed area, a sylvan, leafy suburb for everyone. Kids from various backgrounds go to the same schools and the community in general rub along fantastically with one another.
Until recently we had a shopping centre - until a property developer decided it had prime development potential stamped all over it. It was closed down, thus a supermarket, a hairdresser, a butcher, a children's clothes shop, a pub, a dry cleaner and a number of other outlets that had served our village well, were removed from convenient walking distance for most people.
Everything gone to make way for yet more apartments, the blow softened by the promise of a new, smaller, shinier "express" supermarket, a more expensive, less well stocked shop which will necessitate more car journeys for the population. And this development, at the earliest, will take four years to complete.
Across the road is a retirement home and most of the residents lament the boarded-up wasteland our old shopping centre has become. It was a place for socialising, their pension collection was on their doorstep, their shopping needs catered for, two minutes from their homes.
"It's the complete disregard," one of them told me wearily - the lack of care for the community, especially the elderly, where one construction company's profits are most certainly put before any other consideration, that's what's getting them down.
If there was any reason to allow the investigations into planning corruption to continue, astonishingly meandering and catastrophically expensive as it is, it's small stories like this, where bad planning grossly affects the lives of thousands of ordinary people.
It takes many generations to create a village where layer upon layer of history makes up a neighbourhood and a few short months and a few cack-handed decisions to crack its heart.
My father grew up 10 minutes from St Stephen's Green. When he got married, he moved four miles and thought he might as well have moved to the Republic of Cork, so far was he from his old stomping ground. He couldn't afford where he had spent his teens.
I couldn't afford even a gatepost where I grew up and I fail to see, because of the obscene price growth in the last decade or so, how my children will have much hope of settling where they are being brought up.
We can't keep moving our families farther and farther out while villages in and around our cities stagnate, because, while we may have added a few zeros to the value of our properties, we may also have condemned our offspring to a life of harried commuting.
If the relentless upward march of prices has been stalled for first- time buyers, it is most certainly a good thing.
Still, I reckon the champagne corks may be popping for some time to come. Porsche showrooms say they expect 2008 to be their best year yet and other car retailers report brisk business, so obviously it's not quite back to baked beans.
It wouldn't do our expanding waistlines any harm though to return to simpler fare because, with tighter pockets, we will be forced, shock horror, to actually cook our own food.
Even with an R in the month, there is always a silver lining. Sometimes you just have to look for it.