Talking Property: After an overdose of property advertising, Kevin O'Connor is truly stunned. It's hard to get back to reality after a spell of blissful imaginings brought on by the ad man's expertise

Yes, doc, I'm suffering from APAS (advanced property advertising syndrome). Frankly, I'm feeling stunned from the amount of stunning apartments and stunning showhouses I've seen in the last week. Stu-u-nned in my mind as a result of reading too many stunning property supplements.

In spite of a double shot of (soluble) Solpedeine, I risk drowning in "light flooded halls". I reach for the life-belt of logic. Surely the copywriter meant "flood-lights" as in a football stadium - is the apartment next to Croke Park or Lansdowne Road? No, actually it's by the Dodder river in rural Bray. That's alright then, must be next to Bray Wanderers' pitch. A half-page on a yet-to-be-built housing scheme offers a "unique southern aspect". Has a Stormont briefing document drifted onto the property pages.

As for "ideal starter home" - it makes me wonder if I am "not yet born" and will wake up to find myself with a set of virtual reality parents who will in my memory bank supplant the natural pair by whom I was hatched.

"Real wooden floors" has me humming Wooden it be luverly as an antidote to what I suspect to be another layer of basic laminate bought as a job-lot by a lucky developer who retailed the remaining 200,000 sq m as a bargain lot on the Long Mile Road.

As for "minimalist modern decor" - aye, there's the rub of fashion. "Is this it?" asked a friend of the concrete shell, all of 400 sq ft, that she was being asked €200,000 for - to be told she could have a colour of her choice provided it was, and here I use the seller's description, "Mag-a-nolia".

"Spread your wings in leafy Co Meath" says a promotion for a clutch of new houses with not a tree in sight. In the same league - but back in the city - is an apartment development which is billed as "close to city amenities". Don't you love the way they use touristy pictures of Trinity College and Stephen's Green in high summer, as if its green swards were your new back garden. Does the OPW charge them royalties?

Further out in the sticks a bolted-on brick extension to the motorway commuter run promises "capital growth expected". Without specifying the immediate outcome to be "growth of the capital" - that is Dublin sprawl extending into rural Meath. Undoubtedly a rise in resale values will come before the ink is dry on the contract, around the time Clonee becomes an adjunct of the Blanchardstown multiplex.

For "modern duplex living", read a two-up, one-down, above another one-up, two-down: the lot a Lego-bloc that lures the unwary onto another cul-de-sac off the M50. Mind you, the minister for stilts has ensured that the term "fly-over" has a peculiar Irish meaning, as in "crawl-over".

By now thoroughly punch-drunk from superlatives, when I read "new homes in a Sylvan wooded setting" I expect to find a bambi pet deer gambolling among the trees. What I found was a clutch of recently planted spruce saplings, all of three foot high, with the dried concrete on their base from the mini-JCB that had been used to foist them into the earth.

Oddly, the loose gravel of a notional concrete path was already headed in their direction. As the shops are the other side of the saplings, I don't hold out much hope for their longevity.

Trees they may aspire to be, but it will be a triumph of nature over the lack of nurture if they survive being vandalised before their first birthday.

And so on, in a wealth of hallucinatory verbiage that leaves me . . . well, truly stunned. Because, you see, in our current mad property race, a helter-skelter of anxiety has taken the place of inherited angst over the North or poverty - or even further back to the race-memory of the Famine.

How else to explain how the worm of property deprivation still turns in the Irish brain? So keen is this generation of 20 and thirtysomethings to own any bit of square space with a roof over it, that they unconsciously cut through the hype to assess the reality for themselves.

Every weekend between now and next spring will see the building sites full of young trekkers, wending past the concrete mixers, to gaze at bare shells of breeze-block, topped with the exposed joists of the A-frame that will become the roof. In the continuing triumph of hope over reality, they imagine what the sales brochures have suggested. Who knows, but they are right to imagine.

Otherwise they may never gambol gaily along halls not merely flooding but cascading with light, amidst woodland settings from which they will tra-la-la smoothly in the morning along tram lines on stilts, to dally awhile among the ponds and flowers of Stephen's Green, there to soak up the pleasures of the copy-writers of Ireland. Ah, yes.