At Sarah Flood's pub in Naas, Co Kildare, the regulars are starting to worry about who is going to take them to GAA matches next year. Sarah Flood's runs buses to all the matches and organises tickets. Recently, they've been celebrating the sensational success of Kildare - who have qualified for their first All-Ireland football final in 46 years.

But at the same time the pub's customers are still coming to terms with the news that their favourite "local" is soon to be demolished to make way for a multi-storey car-park. The old Ireland is being engulfed by the new.

Dubliner Frank Coughlan (32) and Jim Callinan (28) from Tipperary sold their homes and bought Sarah Flood's two years ago. The pub has stood, under various names, for more than 200 years at the spot where the Dublin road turns for Waterford. According to local lore, bullet holes in a window were blasted there by the Black and Tans. The regulars include people whose parents and grandparents drank there. Frank and Jim have built it into a thriving business and were committed to stay there long-term. But then they were told the pub stood in the way of a £20 million town centre development approved by the UDC. They faced a stark choice: sell to the developer or accept the UDC's offer. They sold to the developer.

The new road to go over the site of the pub will provide direct access from the Newbridge Road to the planned car-park needed to accommodate the cars, belonging to Naas's booming bedroom population, which clog the roads and bring traffic to a standstill in Naas on a daily basis. The new Naas commuters work in Dublin and sleep in houses on the huge, anonymous private estates on the fringes of the town. Many of them would probably rather have the car-park than the pub.

Jim and Frank rarely see the new commuters in their pub. "They're working so hard to pay the mortgage and the car loan that they cannot afford to spend an evening in the pub. If they go out, it's once a week at most," he says.

The quality of life of suburban workers has been transformed as radically as Naas town centre will be when the new development is completed as part of a changing Ireland.