Some years ago, Dr Jim Mac Laughlin, a political geographer at University College Cork, found himself dining in a Madrid restaurant. He was glancing through the property section of a local newspaper and was struck by the number of advertisements offering Irish properties for sale. There were houses, farms, building sites from Cork to Cavan. It proved, he thought, "that Ireland today is literally up for sale."
Dr Mac Laughlin, together with Ms Ethel Crowley, a Corkbased sociologist, has edited a new volume of essays - now in the bookstores - which examines a broad range of subjects under the headings, class, race, identity and culture, in the new, global Ireland. The volume is entitled Under the Belly of the Tiger.
And Dr Mac Laughlin believes, with some conviction, that the tiger does have an underbelly. In the foreword, he makes this observation: "Everything is now seen as a potential commodity as much as a national birthright, hard fought for and won through centuries of struggle and loss. Ireland Inc. has hit the world.
"Theme pubs; Riverdance and Co; poets galore; the novels everyone in Britain needs to read; and so Ireland itself is becoming a vast hotel and ethnic theme park - Eiredisney."
He suggests that we have become more preoccupied with imitating the success of the "tiger economies" in South East Asia than with reviving an authentic sense of Irishness.
In our headlong drive for success on the Euro/global scale, we are, says Dr Mac Laughlin, in danger of becoming "Europe's people without a history." And as such, he goes on to argue, "the Ireland of the future may become a restful but hardly a challenging place - a place whose geography is being forged less by nature than by image makers - a place that simply serves as a logo for promoting all things Irish abroad, including all things that are merely quasi-Irish, like the Irish pub and many of the Irish designer goods."
The worry, the author says, is that a whole section, an entire tradition, of Irish life is being subsumed by the new prosperity as we ride the back of the socalled tiger. "All over the country, places are becoming desegregated out from national space and integrated into a global matrix of capital accumulation. Irish cities, many of our county towns, and also some of the country's agricultural heartlands, often seem to belong more to this global matrix of capitalism than they do to the national territory," he says. In the more remote parts of this State the tiger that is supposed to be leading us all on a new path has not called to visit. There are unresolved local health- care issues; issues of roads that are a disgrace, even as the motorway ribbon continues apace, courtesy of the EU; issues like local GAA clubs that are hard- pressed to field a team because the young people are gone away. Some small communities are waiting for dole day to come alive. The small farmers - once the backbone of rural Ireland - are being squeezed out, and the small shopkeeper can't compete anymore with the big guns. "This truly is an Ireland of curious juxtapositions. It is a place where the drug culture can coexist with the clientilist culture of the GAA - where Garth Brooks can literally play Croke Park. Where the matchmaking festivals are held almost in the shadow of Japanese multinationals. It is also a place where New Age and Irish travellers can pass each other on the same street with scarcely any interaction. Like few other nations in western Europe, Ireland today is also being projected outwards into Europe at the very time when Europe itself is being reinvented and reconstructed," Dr Mac Laughlin says.
He warns, too, that the radical openness of the Irish economy and Irish society since the 1980s is in stark contrast to the increasingly closed nature of much of contemporary Irish society.
This is nowhere more noticeable than Irish attitudes towards refugees, foreign travellers and asylum-seekers. We are, Dr Mac Laughlin adds, developing a "fortress island" mentality, based on the argument - inherently racist - that ours is too small an island to share with anyone else.