AT the beginning of this century, an idea current among Irish intellectuals was that a vision and a life would issue from Ireland which would transform the world beneficially.

In their various ways, Catholic bishops, W.B. Yeats, George Russell (AE), and James Connolly shared this belief and hope.

It was an idea consonant with a period of national revolution. Times changed, and for the past 30 years a belief that Ireland can offer no beneficial vision, but must learn to see as the western world sees, has been paramount among Irish intellectuals.

As it happens, the western world, since the end of the second World War, has been learning to see differently than for a thousand years previously. The powers that rule the USA, aided by their west European proxies, shave been propagating a new vision. They have been teaching the peeks that the set of moral rules and core relationships which characterised western civilisation must be rejected and replaced.

Their teaching has been decisively effective. Throughout the west, including Ireland, a new set of post western, non Christian rules are supported by law, police and media, and accepted, uncritically, by a couple of hundred million people. But times could change again in Ireland. We have abundant intelligence and common sense, long experience, and a sufficiency of intellectuals whose critical faculty is not atrophied. On the evidence, we care about human distress, wherever it occurs.

It is possible, then, that we might become usefully concerned about the fragile state of its successor. We could feel moved to apply our minds to it, constructively, so that this new, pagan civilisation, in which we and our children are involved, will endure, and not founder. We could, in short, believe again that we might offer the west a beneficial vision - and domestic example to back the vision.

If the west's post Hiroshima civilisation is to endure, it must make sense. The Soviet attempt at a breakaway civilisation collapsed after 70 years because, to a critical degree, it ceased to make sense for many of this vital respect, the west's similar venture, at the end of its first half century, is fragile on two counts. Its chief sense giver and social glue is - money, abundant and increasing, together with the goods and physical health that money buys.

FROM Seattle to Stockholm, most people, most of the time, find that their life makes sense - a lot of sense or some - primarily because money is abundant and increasing and they share in the benefits.

That's a fragile state of affairs. But is made more fragile still by the fact that both the many who find meaning through money, and the many who (for one reason or another), can't, are being pressured continually by the senselessness of the system: its clashing values, its hastily - thrown together, chaotic rules of right and wrong, its flattering self descriptions which observation contradicts, its oppressive scaremongering, its patently unprincipled moralising.

What this can do to people not protected by sense found through money is evident in our own country, from the drugs epidemic and the soaring suicide rate, the reckless pregnancies of young women, the frustrated violence of men, the trek to the soul doctors and pharmacies. Imagine, then, what the senselessness would wreak, from Los Angeles to Berlin, if money ceased to be abundant and increasing.

However, and this is my point, because from Los Angeles to Berlin we are human and have the consequent resources, a pattern of good order and sense lies graspable, in our post Hiroshima civilisation. Fundamentally it is a matter of the values and rules, which must make coherent sense, land which can be made to make coherent sense despite their present chaos.

The fact that the civilization is pagan is no impediment. The great pagan civilisations were great because their rulers and ruled shared a demanding, coherent picture of values and non values, virtue and vice, and organised their societies accordingly. The time is propitious for a try. The euphoria of the sixties' "new evangel" has passed. The British and Americans are worried about where harkening to it has landed them, but determined not to reject it and find themselves in a dilemma which could lead, on the Soviet analogy, to a preterminal "period of stagnation".

Desmond Fennell is the author of Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the beginning of post western civilisation.