We enter the new century a bundle of paradoxes. Aspirations and reality were never more at odds. We yearn to "return" to a more family-centred life (nearly half of us, according to Amarach Consulting) while causing two-hour traffic jams around shopping centres on Sundays.

We lament the dearth of quiet time for family and friends while the leisure, Internet and self-esteem industries explode. We mourn the death of "real" cooking - no time - while sprawled before television chefs, making millionaires of them.

We garland our foreign aid activists with awards while the Vincent de Paul Society has to launch a major campaign to attract volunteers at home. We lash out on bigger, newer, faster cars while languishing in earlier, lengthier, more bad-tempered traffic jams.

We fret about an economic downturn while boasting a savings ratio only a quarter of what it was 20 years ago. We decry the age of the whiner and the victim while flooding every institution, from local authorities to the local sweetshop, with complaints and lawsuits. We place the environment before continued economic growth (more than half of us claim to, anyway, according to a Gallup poll)

And most of the country is up in arms about proposed dumps and incinerators, while ancient trees in the Glen of the Downs are hacked down by a local authority and mandatory recycling remains a fantasy.

We pride ourselves on our culture of craic and spontaneity while forcing Bord Failte's chief executive to admit that indifference to tourists is becoming "the new norm". We cringe at the American sit-com babble emanating from our sons and daughters ("Oh. My. Gawwwd") while we effectively kill off the Irish language.

And speaking of those sons and daughters . . . Although no less than 94 per cent of our 18- to 30-year-olds feel good, even very good, about living in Ireland right now (according to a survey for Wilson Hartnell PR), around a quarter of that same healthy, affluent sample nonetheless believes that suicide is sometimes or usually justified.

If American research - which shows that people in their 30s and 40s report the most stress and discontent - holds true for Ireland, then the upper end of that sample may expect to hit the rapids imminently.

The vast majority of them aspire to a family not unlike those they grew up in. Sixty per cent of those not already married expect to be; another 18 per cent anticipate setting up home with a partner; an astonishing 22 per cent favour families of four or more children. But in doing so they will be entering a world quite unlike the one their parents reared them in.

Testing times lie ahead for these children of entitlement and opportunity. In this context, the chilling acceptance of suicide as an option among a quarter of them should be raising antennae.

And where stand their elders? It seems they have troubles of their own. Nearly half of those surveyed for a recent Gallup poll chose the adjective "corrupt" to describe the Government. More than a third expressed a belief that the politicians were not listening to the people. A younger generation raised to expect equality of opportunity can hardly be reassured by the on-going "debate" portraying women-in-the-home as sacrificial lambs v the harpies who "park" their children at a creche, like a car.

But the new generation, it seems, will have the luck and vision to get beyond these tired, old cliches. The concept of the 40-hour week, over a century old now, is in for radical overhaul, says Gerard O'Neill of Amarach Consulting. That core demand of old-fashioned feminism - that the workplace adapt to the family rather than the other way round - is finally snapping the chairman's braces if for no better reason than the economy's thirst for labour. Flexibility is the key.

Flexibility as in one IT company's recruitment ad, trumpeting the fact that it operates without core hours, because "whatever time you get your best ideas is the right time for us" - alongside a picture of a young man luxuriating in a bath. Flexibility as in offices, call centres and supermarkets where increasing numbers of staff are women well into their middle years.

It is a phenomenon lost in the squabbling, this emergence into the visible workforce of women whose schoolchildren are gone from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; women who a few years ago cleaned other people's houses or faced the "empty nest" syndrome and who are now running shops and learning new skills.

Many are outrageously underpaid, but that will last only until they get a sense of their muscle.

And the day cannot be far off. With no indoctrination at all from Charlie McCreevy, 48.5 per cent of women are in the Irish workforce, according to NCB economist Eunan King, who says this is already well ahead of the EU average and will continue to rise.

Of these new entrants, among the largest increases are married women over 45 and single women aged 55 to 64. That age profile and the fact that fully a third of the female labour force works less than a 30-hour week suggests a prodigious female effort to satisfy all expectations. Society as we know it is probably safe for now.

As for the women in the home, they are no fools. Who can argue with their fight to remain there given one unchanging, uncomfortable truth; that according to the Henley Centre, working fathers in the UK average 48 hours of free time a week; working mothers get 14.

Men will point to vastly increased office demands, more stress, more "presenteeism" as the long-hours culture is dubbed, yet studies show that UK working hours have risen only slightly in the 1990s, and in the US they've actually fallen, even for those in professional and executive jobs.

If Irishwomen go into the new century more perplexed, more angry, more radical in their thinking than their menfolk, it is hardly surprising.

"Time famine" is the issue that consumes us now. Because of it, we will soon be spending more money eating out than at home, says Amarach's Gerard O'Neill. Because of it, even leisure time is something to be "maximised". It has to be the perfect film, the perfect restaurant, the perfect children's entertainment.

If it's not perfect, then something more precious than money has been lost: time, something you can never get back. We hunt for ways to buy it: caterers, gardeners, personal shoppers, decorators, cleaners. And yet statistics show we are not working the killer hours we imagined. Is it possible that the problem may not be so much a shortage of time as the number of things we try to cram into it? That it's not more time we need but fewer desires?

The relentless hunt for more, newer, faster, bigger things has left us with the final Irish paradox: we like this rampant materialism and yell for our cut but we feel a bit bad about it at the same time. A small, still voice says something isn't right.

Gerard O'Neill is not dismayed by the tide of mefeinism that engulfs one sector after another. We're comparative newcomers to all this prosperity, "still newfangled", in his words.

"My feeling is that we are only at the halfway stage of a process that began a decade ago and will continue to the end of the next. In terms of economic development, that is when we will settle down to a mature economy. I think in 10 years' time we will get down to thinking through our cultural ideals, to really looking at the environment and ways to raise our children, because by then we will have a lot under our belts in terms of economic well-being."

The problem, however, is that just now, that great day seems a long way off. A lot of damage can be done in 10 years.

Series concluded