The nouveau riche , rather like the poor, we always have with us and much of their behaviour falls into well-worn grooves - the predilection for champagne over every other form of drink, the unremitting urge to drop brand names and the yearning for skin the colour of old wood.
Earlier this month, the Kilkenny store in Dublin announced plans for what it described as a gala celebration of Irish design and craft to be held next May. Given the theme, it seems a little strange that the celebration's venue should be not an Irish but an American hotel - the coming-shortly-to-a-suburb-near-you Four Seasons in Ballsbridge. Stranger still, the guest of honour on this occasion will be someone who, until now, has had no public association whatsoever with Ireland: Ivana Trump.
If proof were ever needed that this country might belatedly be experiencing the 1980s, this is it. Nobody embodied that decade quite like Ms Trump, the Czech-born former wife of a New York property developer renowned not just for helping to ruin the skyline of his native city but also for his shameless self-promotion. Prior to their separation in late 1989, the Trumps became Manhattan's shiniest couple as they clawed their way through a society both envious of and appalled by their behaviour.
When Ivana Trump last (briefly) visited Dublin in May 1992 it was to appear on RTE promoting her truly dreadful novel, For Love Alone, a work of fiction the only equivalent of which was that produced shortly afterwards by model Naomi Campbell.
That Ms Trump - who dumped her husband but not his well-known surname - should decide to grace Ireland once more with her presence is entirely appropriate, since unlike eight years ago the country now contains plenty of Ivana look-alikes, all of them easily identifiable by their very short skirts, very blonde hair and very keen interest in shopping.
To deal with the skirt issue first, lengths traditionally rise as economies improve. That skirts in Ireland have therefore not transmogrified into little more than thin belts should be a matter of some surprise. But even the relative brevity of the average Irish skirt has yet to be considered by our economists or anyone else (building site workers excluded, of course).
Similarly, until now this country's blonde phenomenon has gone almost unnoticed. Ten years ago, aside from an occasional photogenic redhead, most Irish women were brunettes. The only alternative hair colour was grey but since the fashion world had not yet proclaimed grey as the new black, it was hardly a stylish option.
As Ireland has grown steadily richer, its women have grown proportionately blonder; since the economy is set on an upward curve for the next few years, brunettes are likely to become an endangered species. The old John Hinde postcards showing freckle-faced children with auburn mops ought to be pulped; we are a nation of blondes.
A 1980s emigree who returned home some months ago remarked how nice it was to see so many of her compatriots returning to the Viking roots, although in this instance the roots require touching up on a monthly basis.
Whatever about blonde hair, another manifestation of Ireland's Trump-like tendencies during the 1990s certainly caught everyone's attention. Who could ignore the emergence here of shopping as a form of (expensive) public entertainment? But the focus has always been on quantity not quality. It is the sheer amount of money being spent which undergoes scrutiny rather than the consumers' choices.
Last April, for example, 15 houses in Carrickmines were sold within four hours for £1 million each. Commentators were so mesmerised by the speed at which these places found purchasers that they totally overlooked a couple of important details: this was simply a housing estate with pretensions to grandeur but not to beauty since the buildings' design was at best banal.
The nouveau riche, rather like the poor, we always have with us and much of their behaviour falls into well-worn grooves - the predilection for champagne over every other form of drink, the unremitting urge to drop brand names (Prada, Gucci, Versace, any Italian word ending in a vowel), and the yearning for skin the colour of old wood.
But rarely does almost the entire population of a state wake up to discover it has become unexpectedly wealthy. This is a unique occurrence in Ireland and, even more remarkable, it has taken place without any hint of dissent or dissatisfaction. No backlash, no wave of hostility, no virulent denunciations have been spawned by the economically buoyant Ireland.
There have, of course, been a few voices wailing in a critical wilderness about the widening gap between the rich and poor; that these voices receive so little attention is probably due to their poor grasp of Irish history - have they no idea how much grimmer conditions were for the majority of the population even 50 years ago?
In any case, this is not the kind of comment likely to excite much notice from anyone else; its entertainment quotient is too low. Whereas Ivana Trump and her ilk in New York during the 1980s had to live with the constant threat of ridicule and satire, no such fate would appear to await their Irish equivalents today.
At the height of the last decade's spending boom in 1987, American author Tom Wolfe produced his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities which cast an acerbic eye on consumerism and coined terms such as "social x-ray" to describe its most ardent advocates. To date, no such novel has been produced in Ireland despite an abundance of subject matter.
Nor have playwrights given much consideration to this country's changed status. Most plays being written today dwell in the old Ireland of rural poverty in Connemara, not the new Ireland of holiday homes in the same part of the country.
But the biggest absence has been of any satire aside from RTE's risible - for the wrong reasons - Upwardly Mobile. Thatcherism in 1980s Britain produced an entire generation of comedians who, by casting an acerbic eye on the behaviour of their fellow citizens, became very famous. They also became even richer than the objects of their derision but that was an incidental bonus, at least from the beneficiaries' point of view.
Ireland's boom era has thrown up no such talent; this country's most anarchic comic of recent years, Graham Norton, lives and works in Britain. Where are the social comedians of Ireland? The material is here but not the people to exploit it. So far, the boom has been characterised by an almost unquestioning acceptance of its consequences as they emerge.
Now is the time for the backlash to begin.