GIVE ME A BREAK:'COACH DEPARTS for Killary Fjord where guests participate in a low level walk along the old famine road. Lunch: during the walk, guests will enjoy a gourmet lunch including champagne, lobster and smoked salmon whilst viewing the spectacular scenery of the Killary." That's the promise of the Connemara Safari walking tour.

I visited that old famine road recently and I couldn’t have stomached champagne, lobster and smoked salmon. The ghosts of starving, drowning people were too real.

The story goes that people were struggling along the road – only a rough path then – because they’d heard a rumour that there were people giving out food further south. The fjord was frozen over. Someone thought they saw a bright light on the other side, so the refugees walked en masse across the ice until it broke and all were drowned.

You’d have thought we’d have learned by now. About illusions of light. About following the crowd. About planting only one crop and expecting it to feed a population.

But we haven’t, have we? The collective decision to invest everything in property in the Celtic Tiger era was our 21st century version of telling the populace to plant potatoes. We were the populace that accepted the advice that the building economy was our saviour, and we were given the means to participate by our betters, the banks, the property developers, the 21st-century version of the landlord class. We didn’t question.

We took the Cromwells of commerce at their word. Renting was “dead money” and mortgaging and remortgaging to build extensions and the ability to buy further properties to let – thereby benefiting from other people’s “dead money” – was not just a sign of success, it was practically mandatory. Following the bright light of increasing property values was the only way to go.

You had to get on “the ladder”, and the banks were more than willing to help you do it, offering 100 per cent mortgages and more. Now that the property crop has failed, hardly anyone can get a mortgage at all, no matter how much equity they have.

We listened to our betters – the banks, the property gurus – and put every last cent into property. We even did this at the risk of family life. Working parents left their children in creches 10 hours a day so that they could till that all important potato field – the mortgage – and now all that sacrifice has been wasted.

Now many of these same working parents are losing their jobs and they have the contemporary version of potato blight: negative equity. The banks that were so happy to hand out seed potatoes have shut down because the crop has failed and there is no replacement to offer.

Before you start e-mailing, of course there is no comparison in terms of human suffering between the Great Famine and the Great Property Famine. In the first, a million people starved to death and another million emigrated. But spare a thought for those in 2009 who have lost their pensions and are cutting back on their food bills, and whose children and grandchildren are emigrating to Australia, where the streets are not paved with gold. However, suffering is relative.

WHY CAN’T WE learn from our mistakes? The debacle of the recent Oasis concert at Slane, where there was insufficient crowd control and people had to wait hours for buses to take them home, was repeated on Sunday night at Punchestown. My 12-year-old son adored the gig – I got regular mobile phone transmissions about AC/DC during the evening – but the ending could have been disastrous.

His father, who was with him, tells me there were barriers set up for many of the 70,000-strong crowd to queue for buses when the concert ended at 11.40pm, but then people broke through the barriers and it was every man for himself. My son told his father, for the first time in his life, that he was afraid. They patiently queued. At 1am, a steward took mercy on my husband and son and commandeered a bus. They rang me from the bus. It was packed, they said, with my son sitting on the baggage rack, my husband sitting on the floor, people standing in the aisles and others sitting on the stairs. If there had been an accident, I hate to think what would have happened.

Those dreadful bus accidents of the past, where people were packed in and had no seatbelts, haven’t made a dent in our psyche. It’s a small inconvenience, you might say – just as being unemployed or on a hospital waiting list is an inconvenience.

Those sexually abused while in the “care” of religious orders are still waiting for redress.

I just can’t help asking: when will we learn? And what’s the next potato crop?