You were probably too busy working frantically hard to notice during this week a four-part series in this paper on the negative social effects of the recent growth in the Irish economy.
What you missed - and at the time of writing, I have not seen Thursday's final piece - was a provocative description of ways in which the Irish economy is rotting Irish society. They are familiar: the breakdown of family life, the struggle to pay mortgages or to find housing, drug addiction, the divisions between the haves and have nots, rising relative poverty, relationship problems, health problems, the distintegration of a sense of community and so on.
The growth in the economy is said to be having specific negative side effects - boiled down by some to a crisis of values - and we, society, the Government and corporate leaders ought to do something about it. That will involve the collective choice of a new set of values to make us, uniquely, a decent industrialised society.
My heart says yes, but my head tells me there is something amiss. The first question is whether a lot of the anecdotes and phenomena illustrate problems in Ireland which would have arisen anyway, even if GDP growth over the last five years had trundled along at 1 per cent or so. Would we not have faced the same selfish individualism? Was the process of declining family formation and less stable relationships not already well under way? The social kulturkampf and its defeat of the Catholic Church predates the boom by a long time. Increasing drug use and addiction go back further than the boomtime. Didn't St Teresa's Gardens and heroin, rural poverty and the isolation of the elderly all exist in depressed, emigrating Ireland of the late 1980s? We would not have had better values had we had a mediocre economic performance rather than a stellar one.
This is not to deny that hurtling economic growth causes evident social problems as well as economic "infrastructural bottlenecks" and the like. It is to question what are the real causes of the problems and the source of the remedy.
There is also the problem of who "we" is or are. Sociologists and cultural critics are as beholden to that word as Mrs Thatcher was determined to declare that society didn't exist at all. She was wrong in overcorrecting the error that too many of the descriptions of "the way we live today" are unrepresentative. People who work consistent 100-hour weeks and conduct relationships over the Internet probably exist, but they are outside the norm, and certainly not a unique product of Ireland's recent boom.
The quiet life of a rural postman is as much part of the way we live now as the party-going, stressed, aggressive and over-worked 20-something financial executive unable to maintain a relationship. The nine-to-five marrieds with children, who go home to their houses in suburban Dublin or in rural towns at a reasonable time, watch some telly, help the kids and never preoccupy themselves with the right parties or barbecues are as real as anyone else. Those who still practice their faith are as valid sociological data points as the lapsed who search for new meaning in consumerism and alternative lifestyles. The remarkable and the new is usually not typical.
To some extent Mrs Thatcher was right. When "society" is described in terms which do not take account of the full diversity of its citizens, or when the normal is underplayed, and when a mistakenly-drawn society is urged to make a collective choice of values, then that concept of society should be declared simply not to exist.
I cannot see how a society made up of individuals who demand, as we do, the freedom to make choices of their own, can be said or asked collectively to choose values.
I agree that many aspects of life in Ireland are unpleasant, even despicable; that there have been and continue to be unacceptable failures of public policy on housing, drugs and poverty; that many people are not choosing to be as generous or unselfish as they could be. But I see no collective resolution to choose values stemming from Government or corporate leaders as being either possible, probable or likely to improve matters.
In this, I am an individualist. I agree with Charles Handy and Father Harry Bohan, both quoted this week. Change will only happen by each person's choice of good over greed. Lots of people already make that choice. Individual responsibility is part of the deal of modern living. If you want improvement, you make it happen yourself, not wait for the leaders of society to do it all.
Oliver O'Connor is an investment-funds specialist
