Magnum, the international photo agency, has had photographers in this country since the postwar years. Introduced in an essay on contemporary Ireland by Anne Enright
In my local supermarket, a customer is talking to Wanwemol, behind the till, about her home, a village near Bangkok, on the sea. He knows it. He is looking to buy a house there. So is she. "Yes! They are so much cheaper than here," she says, brightly, and the bleep- bleep of his groceries across her flat glass window slows down, and then stops, as she realises that her poor savings will be set against his, half a world away, in her own home town. I look at him. He has a mobile clipped to his belt, and plaster dust on his boots. He is, at a guess, a builder.
The Irish are becoming a nation of small-time landlords, buying flats and houses in Budapest and Manchester, Orlando and Shanghai. If you cannot own in Dublin you can own in Paris for a while, and rent rent rent, while you wait for the foreign markets to rise.
Halfway into the decade and the home property market is 20 per cent overvalued. It has taken off, detached itself from the real economy like Laputa, Gulliver's flying island: a big glob of semi- detached houses and jerry-built apartments and high-rise hopes, all gummed together by traffic jams and property speculators' spit, and it hovers dangerously low over the country, leaving everything else in its shade.
So turn on the lights! The party goes on, because where there is money there can be no pain. Rich people, as we all know, are happy. At least they are happier than we are. So much money is swilling around the Irish economy. Still, it seems hard to say exactly who has it. It is never quite you, somehow. And everything is so expensive these days.
Irish people spend like Americans. They want a house - preferably some distance from the next house - and a car. The sofa can wait, and so can the limestone floor; what really sells in 2005 are outdoor Christmas lights.
And stuff for the kids, of course - there is nothing Irish parents won't buy their kids. They buy toys for them and they buy houses for them, shelling out for the second home in the bogs of Mayo against uncertain pensions and the time when junior will need a leg up into that floating island in the sky. It is important to get them up there - so many are left down below.
The generation that is now coming of age in Ireland is the first that was not reared for export. It is impossible to say how important this is, how fierce it makes us about doing well. We have the youngest population in Europe. We have coaxed them and educated them and held on to them, and now they have grown up and got jobs and . . . gone shopping. They buy retro stuff and techno stuff and stuff that we will never understand, and they are altogether delighted with themselves. But are they still us?
I asked one. He is 23. He likes being Irish. He complains that, these days, everybody is expected to work. From the age of about 15 onwards, everyone fills a gap "in some shitty part of the service sector", despite which, people are still living with their parents until their late 20s, "which puts us in common with most places east of Bratislava", and because times are so good, it's not really considered cool to moan about the state of the world. Party politics is dead, he says, though he is optimistic about the existence of a "neoliberal consensus" (oh, to be 23), at least on the east coast.
Once you are more than 25 miles from Dublin it's all still Hicksville. Nothing has changed, except for the fact that no one goes to the pub any more. And though girls are obliged to show large areas of skin when they go out on a Saturday night, he doesn't think "that Irish girls are any easier than they were 20 years ago".
So rural Ireland is as mysterious as it ever was - as are Irish women, thank God. The main difference between my student youth and his is that we had no money, most of which we spent in the pub, and he has some, most of which he spends topping up his iPod.
The Irish are still great talkers. We have the highest rate of mobile-phone use in the world. We like our information to come in streams and our technology in bundles. We used to believe in technology the way we believed in youth - something lucrative and incomprehensible - but even youth isn't all that fussed any more. It is all just "stuff": faster stuff, neater stuff, smoother stuff. It is a speed. You are buying into the flow. We like broadband and cable and texting and all kinds of spontaneous, unimportant words. As for culture, we want it global but with an Irish twist: Irish movies, Irish rock stars, perhaps even Irish novels. Still, in the past five years there has been no Riverdance, no big movie, no breakthrough by a writer or a band to international fame (Colin Farrell is just not enough), and the days are long past when we thought art, or even technology, might change the world.
Bright, happy Ireland does want change, however. The past few years have seen a ban on free plastic shopping bags and a ban on smoking in the workplace - two pieces of advertising (or was it legislation?) that made the country feel ahead of its time. They are enormously popular laws, because we are always looking for a way out of the mess; something simple and clean.
The mess is considerable. On the radio, a woman weeps as she tells how her father died on a trolley in a hospital corridor in Dublin. She says her mother had to steal a pillow from another patient when he went to the toilet, in order to make her father comfortable in his last hours. It is this small theft that makes her cry. Jammed roads and crowded casualty departments make people feel like refugees: there has been some calamity, and no one has told us what it is, and everyone around us has begun to flee.
Real refugees, meanwhile, are walking the streets, along with economic migrants, and the degree to which they are welcomed varies from town to town. Ireland's racism has not yet come into full flower. We are only just over the shock of having them here at all. Many of the newcomers are French, or Norwegian, and the Friday-night flights are full of British workers going home. It is all very confusing. The sight of a black person talking Irish has the power to throw half the population into a spasm. It doesn't seem possible, somehow, never mind the fact that they speak three African languages, and English too. The taxi drivers are over the first wave: they don't mind blacks, they say, they just don't like eastern Europeans, because you can't tell who they are. Meanwhile, the shop windows sport ads from women who will work for €8 an hour - this in Rip-Off Ireland, where a gin and tonic costs €6. Our children go to schools that celebrate Diwali and Ramadan, the teachers delighted beyond measure to be free of the Catholic yoke. Still, we are not used to exploiting people on this scale.
Already there are the beginnings of a new conservatism, calls to return to the Catholic Church and to the Ireland of poor but decent people - the kind who would die in pain rather than let their wife steal a pillow for them off another man's hospital trolley. There is a renewed keening - that ancient Irish lament - for all we have lost, though it is hard to say what it is, this time around. Which Ireland is gone? The Ireland of boreens and donkeys and freckles, perhaps - though it still exists, in pockets. Personally, I never liked Tourist Ireland. I thought it was all made up, and I was annoyed with us selling ourselves to the world in that way. I like what money does to the Irish: I like tall, young people with good skin - though I worry about the many who have been left behind. And even I fret about the empty pubs. Who would have thought that you could get a seat in a Dublin bar on a Saturday night? It must be a sign of something more than overcharging, though the smoking ban has also takenits toll. Ireland is buying a six-pack in the off-licence, texting a few pals and heading home.
What's a mortgage for, anyway? Eventually, even the young have children. Irish men play with their children more than the men of any other country in Europe, and 60 per cent of the mothers of young children stay at home. We are still a breeding nation. We like children. We like children because we can choose to have them, or not, and, when we have them, we cannot stop hoping that this will be another generation who will stay. The challenge now is not just to make money but to hold on to it, buy a couple of apartments in Brno and make the future secure.
Magnum Ireland is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95. A touring exhibition of the photographs will open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in the spring