The Last Straw/Frank McNally: It's 60 years since De Valera made the famous speech outlining his vision of an ideal Ireland.
As you'll know, this featured a countryside "bright with cosy homesteads", "joyous with the sounds of industry", "with the romping of sturdy children", "the contests of athletic youth", and "the laughter of happy maidens". Above all, it was a land where people "valued material wealth only as the basis of a right living and devoted their leisure to things of the soul".
Now seems as good a time as any to review how we as a nation are doing on De Valera's key criteria. And overall, the picture is positive. Indeed, under the heading of brightness/cosiness of homesteads, for example, we currently score very highly indeed. On a recent visit to Clare - Dev's heartland - it struck me that the countryside was positively luminous with cosy homesteads, especially near the coast. I know An Taisce has other adjectives for these homesteads. Strictly speaking, many of them are only holiday homesteads. They might not be so bright on a Wednesday in November, and they might be cosy only in that most of them are built to modern insulation standards, but still. (By the way, another striking feature of the countryside is the range of colours people use to paint their homes. "Bright" doesn't begin to describe some of them. There are colours on houses in rural Ireland that you wouldn't see on an LSD trip.)
On the "fields joyous with the sounds of industry" score, there's mixed news. Driving back to Dublin, it was clear that large parts of the countryside are currently joyous with the hum of pig slurry - but that's a side issue. More generally we have been, if anything, too successful under this heading. The level of industry in our fields is such that the EU is still paying farmers to cut back on their joyousness, or at least share it with the birds.
As for the romping of sturdy children, I think it's fair to say that Irish kids have never been sturdier. Romping levels have not kept pace with improved nutrition, but in many ways this is a golden era for romp-type activity. In the old days, when kids were less sturdy, they had to make do with tarmac-covered playgrounds. Now, in our local city park - a state-of-the-art job with spongy floors - it's only the kids that are hard. The enthusiasm of the romping is such that the Corporation has posted a permanent security man to protect the facilities.
In the "contests of athletic youth", too, things have never been better. This week saw a hurling championship match played on Thursday because, with the expansion of the All-Ireland series, slots in the GAA's fixture programme are rarer than undeveloped coastal sites in Clare. The back door system has also given some counties their first experience of playing football past midsummer, creating the current, highly novel situation in Ulster where - simultaneously - the evenings and Fermanagh's odds on an All-Ireland title are getting shorter.
Finally, the laughter of happy maidens; you only have to walk through Dublin's Temple Bar at midnight to reflect that this has reached record levels in Ireland. OK, a lot of the maidens are English tourists on hen parties, and not many of them are "maidens" in the sense that it was understood in 1943. But they certainly laugh a lot.
So all in all, we're doing well under most of De Valera's headings. Where we fall down, sadly, is in our continued attachment to material wealth. In this regard there was a promising development mid-week when the Minister for Finance claimed the latest economic figures, damning as they were, hid the "real" growth that was taking place. Presumably Mr McCreevy was referring to spiritual development.
You hear of very few people relinquishing the pursuit of wealth, as De Valera urged. An exception that proves the rule is the caterer Patrick Campbell, who was the subject of Radio One's Money Makers series this week. Best known for rescuing Bewley's cafes from closure in the 1980s and turning them into a hugely profitable concern, he has now retired from the business to dedicate himself to painting. Still caught up in the rat race, I listened with envy. Here was a man who, in De Valera's words, had used material wealth "to devote more completely to cultivating the things of the mind". It was a small consolation to me that, having spent so much of my life in Bewley's, I'm one of his sponsors.