Downshifting is the new "in" phrase. No sooner is the population in employment than everyone, it seems, is talking about the need to work less and live more.

This extends not just to jaded forty-somethings facing midlife crises but also to fifty-somethings with a jealous eye on early retirement and even to some twenty- and thirty-somethings who abandon highly-paid jobs to see the world or find themselves.

Despite the headline-grabbing instant fortunes, the glossy new cars on the roads and the dynamism of today's Ireland, the pervading sense is not that we have never had it so good but that we have never worked for it so hard.

The official working week has fallen, down from 40 to 39 hours, but when you add overtime and commuting, the amount of time which people on average are spending away from their homes has grown. Then add that in many households both partners are going out to work so that children must be dropped off and collected and household tasks like shopping must be undertaken in the evenings and hours are very long indeed.

Bad planning and bad public transport have contributed to a massive increase in commuting times. More than 10 per cent of Dublin peak-time commuters, 26,000 people, were coming into the city from outside the greater Dublin area in 1997, the last year when this was surveyed.

"At a conservative estimate, a good percentage of these commuters spend at least three hours per day in their cars travelling to and from work," according to the Dublin Transportation Office's senior modeller, Frank McCabe. "These are people commuting from places like Carlow, Kildare, Drogheda, Navan and Greystones on a daily basis."

So to a theoretical 39-hour week at work, these people can add 15 hours in their cars - a 54-hour week in total. This is not even the extreme, some people are spending four hours a day, 20 hours a week, in their cars, according to McCabe.

In general, journey times in and out of Dublin increased by 55 per cent between 1991 and 1999. Even a relatively lucky commuter who used to drive 20 minutes to get into the city centre from Ballymun each week in 1991 would by 1999 have added more than 10 minutes to that journey each way, increasing their working week by two hours.

Someone living in Portmarnock or Lucan would have more than doubled their journey time to the city centre to an hour or more. That represents an extra five hours commuting each week. As a loss of personal time, it is the equivalent of being asked to come in and work every Saturday morning.

These are peak commuting times. Some commuters opt instead to beat the rush and get into town earlier. This saves on traffic aggravation but the net effect is the same - they are still absent from their homes for a much longer day than they would prefer. Remember when people used to go home for lunch or take some time off work to go to the dentist or see a child's school play or soccer game? Traffic congestion has turned these into impossible odysseys. In 1991, many more households had someone at home taking care of children and household tasks. Today, nearly 80 per cent of young women in their mid to late 20s are in paid employment, more than the EU average or indeed than in most other OECD countries.

These young women and the young men of their generation represent the future. Better educated as a group than their elders, more cosmopolitan, working and commuting long hours, how are they going to manage to raise families?

This generation is obsessed and terrorised by property prices. Many couples cannot imagine living on less than two full-time salaries. Already, according to property market expert Peter Bacon, the average industrial wage is insufficient to buy your own home - 40,000 families, 100,000 people, are on public housing waiting lists.

Better-paid young couples are rushing into house purchase in fear that the market will go beyond their reach. Armed with overgenerous bank loans, they are collectively feeding the upward surge in house prices and in the process putting themselves on a repayment treadmill which will limit their future life choices.

The average age at which young women have their first child has soared to over 27 years - close to the EU average - and is still rising. At the moment the fertility rate, the number of children per woman, stays high because many women still have two or three children. At 1.9 children per woman, the rate is still the highest in the EU where the average is 1.5 but below the US rate of 2.1.

Will today's 20-something wom en go on to have two or three children each? As in so many areas of life, society appears to be at a crux.

So far the birth rate has held up despite the massive jump in the number of young women working in an unsupportive leave and child care environment. How long will this last? Will Ireland go the way of Italy and Japan where birth rates are so low that there is serious concern about the economic and social consequences of long-term ageing and decrease in population?

We seem unlikely to go the way of the US where cheap labour makes private childcare affordable and where teen pregnancy is a major contributor to the birth rate.

Sociologist Tony Fahey, an expert in this field, says: "If I had to make a bet, my guess would be the Italian route."

Downshifting then becomes not just a personal but a national concern for, if we are so busy and so driven that we cannot find room in our lives for children, we are taking a collective decision to live for today and forget the future.

Should we not be seeking out a third route where parents can work less, spend less time in their cars, find affordable housing and continue to have children?

All over Europe, people would rather work less but are often afraid to seek reduced hours. A survey by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions found that the majority of Europeans working full-time would like to reduce their hours but fewer than one-third thought their employer would respond sympathetically.

A quarter of full-time workers would prefer a part-time job and of them, more than half felt they could make do on the reduced income.

While average hours at work in Ireland have been falling - from 38.2 hours at work each week for the average full-time employee in 1990 to 37.4 hours in 1997, Ireland still works relatively hard compared to other European countries.

Ireland came second only to Britain in the EU league table (see bar chart) for annual hours worked in 1993. Since this table shows annual hours, it reflects more generous leave entitlements in other countries as well as shorter working weeks. The Dutch now have a 36-hour working week, the French and the Italians are moving towards a 35-hour working week. In Britain, working hours have been going up; one in five men working full-time work more than 50 hours a week.

According to the European Trade Union Institute, long hours tend to be synonymous with low pay and high rates of overtime. While we can all think of high-flyers who embrace long hours, bus drivers and junior doctors would seem to fit the institute's description.

The US works hardest of all. There, two weeks' annual holidays are common. International Labour Organisation measures of the annual number of hours worked by each person show the US coming in 13 per cent higher than Britain.

The number of part-time workers in Ireland has been growing, to 16 per cent of people at work now compared to 8 per cent in 1990. Three-quarters of part-time workers are women. Despite this growth, perceptions of the degree of protection afforded to part-time workers are more negative than in most of the rest of the EU.

More than 60 per cent of Irish people surveyed by the European Foundation in 1998 considered part-timers less protected by employment law and social security than full-timers. With the exception of Britain and Greece, other European countries had a much more positive perception of part-time work. (see table)

Irish people not only work and commute long hours, they also work harder now. It is not so long ago that a manana culture prevailed; it has been replaced by a just-on-time approach in manufacturing which has permeated society.

In the late 1980s, the men and women who worked for GPA were considered exceptional with their perpetually packed suitcases and readiness to drop everything to fly to the other side of the globe to clinch a deal. Today such a lifestyle is unremarkable - part of what we are. With modems at home, mobile phones in every pocket, escaping work even for ostensibly free time is no longer possible for many people.

The question for us now is - do we intend to live to work like the Americans or to work to live like the Europeans?

How much of it is within our control?

The thrust of government policy and statements is to focus on getting more people into paid employment to feed the machine of our economic success, hence income tax individualisation to tempt married women back into the work force. Now that we are at virtual full employment, the goal appears to be to maximise national wealth or production by getting as many people as possible to work as hard as possible. Maybe we are in the process of discovering that this is not what we want.

Young people who started work in the 1990s have been fed on a diet of annual tax cuts and encouraged to regard increases in take-home pay as their route to an improved living standard, yet those same tax cuts are now feeding property price rises and inflation. Greed is not only not good, it can be self-defeating.

If people really want to work less, spend less time driving and more time with their children, then it is time for a change of government policy, if not a change of government. A government which put quality of life first would favour more flexible working arrangements and reduced working hours.

Necessarily this would exacerbate some labour shortages and consequently slow growth. Would this matter if quality of life improved? At least the childcare crisis would ease if parents could spend more time with their children. Such a government would also make a national priority of a programme to deal with traffic chaos and rising house prices by building new high-density urban areas with integrated public transport.

The ESRI has commented that if problems of land availability are tackled urgently, the cost of new building and, by implication, the price of houses should eventually be significantly lower than today, and in the short term, an end to tax cutting would help to take the steam out of the housing market.

We now have a once-off opportunity to influence the pattern of growth of our rapidly expanding cities. "If such investment is not undertaken immediately, the cities will continue to develop in their current chaotic fashion. By 2010 the pattern of Ireland's cities will have been cast in concrete and by then it will be too late to influence that pattern," the institute commented in its medium-term review last October.

So commuting times, working hours, house prices - some of the worst sources of stress in Irish life today - all can be improved by changes in public policy.

How about starting the next government's life with a national agreement which, instead of tax cuts, promises to return to people all those hours spent in traffic jams?

Tomorrow: economic success but an unequal society