Who was it? Martin Naughton, Lochlann Quinn, computer millionaire Shay Moran? Jack Nicholson? Ray Burke? Peter Sutherland? A big-buck builder? David Beckham? Speculation continues about Sorrento House and its new owner. Who could be that rich?

Some of Dublin's wealthiest punters are uneasy. The outlandish, in-your-face price means there is someone out there is who richer, far wealthier, than any of them - two people in fact - the underbidder went all the way to £5.8 million.

It is the talk of the town and people are adopting desperate measures to get a clue. Grown men were seen jotting down car number plates after the auction in a desperate attempt to turn up a name.

Meanwhile, Lisney, the auctioneers, are keeping mum, although its agents are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.

"You wouldn't even know the person," chortled David Bewley of the agency's Dun Laoghaire office, between interviews with the Mirror and the Daily Mail. "He's just an ordinary guy."

Well, there you are. It's heartening to know the very rich are just ordinary folk.

When the all the fuss subsides, the name will filter through, one way or another. Not that it will mean much to your born and bred Dalkey-dweller. To them it will just be another millionaire playing at living in Dalkey, this marvellous little fishing village with the quaint winding streets and wonderful restaurants and so much character.

But no matter how good a show they put on, no matter how many drinks they have in Finnegans or the Club, or how many times they are seen buying buns in the Country Store coffee shop, they won't be fooling everyone.

Dalkey people are an aloof and tight-lipped set; always have and always will be. Well, not always, in fact, because the Dalkeydweller is a dying breed. Most of the people who live in and around the village can't actually afford their own house anymore. Not now that Dalkey is the hottest chunk of real estate in the State. Foxrock meets Beverley Hills, gushed one estate agent after Tuesday's auction. The Gold Coast, smirked another.

The signs are everywhere, with the Dalkey Island Hotel to be turned into luxury apartments and every alley in the town sprouting men in hard hats and Niagaras of cement.

Fancy architects are putting up their boards on the gates of distressed cottages that have slumbered happily in their pocket-handkerchief gardens for almost 200 years. Now they are being ripped apart and turned into self-conscious glass-ridden things desperate to catch a glimpse of the sea.

The narrow main street is choked with ridiculously big cars, most of them sitting on yellow lines, with worried old ladies darting in and out between them trying to cross the road.

Auctioneer Corry McMahon considers himself a local. He was born in Dalkey, grew up there and lives there. But recently he was told that by no means was he a Dalkey man - his parents were not born there.

Where does Dalkey fit into the map of Dublin in the minds of Dubliners? There was a time, and not too long ago, when it was not such a desirable address at all; too cold, too windy and its houses always needing fixing.

It's an odd place, something to do with being at the end of a line. The road goes to Dalkey and ends there. It doesn't shoot through it as roads do in most of Dublin's other villages.

And it's a proper village, not like Killiney which, for all its big fancy houses, has no centre apart from the dowdy collection of buildings around the Druids Chair pub and the Killiney Stores shop. No, Dalkey has proper shops as well as fancy shops. You can buy a string of organic sausages at one end of the village and an exquisite piece of glass at the other, and in between there's a decent supermarket, a good bookshop and several chemists.

And is it so wonderful after all? Yes, it does have nice restaurants, and the nice secret with Dalkey is that it is a dead end. You drive in there and it's over. It is a little fishing village.

"It's become trendy," says one resident. "When we were growing up, there were two derelict houses beside us. That was 20 years ago. When we bought our first house, we built in the back garden. People said we were bonkers, but we live in a big designer house way above our station."

And that's the thing. Dalkey is full of people living above their station - and the mega-rich blowins merely serve to add to the phenomenon.