Usually, in times of change and confusion, it makes sense to seek a sense of identity in the comforts of a shared history. But history in Ireland has been neither shared nor comfortable. It is itself a field of conflict in which the meaning of almost every significant moment is open to dispute, not just between the old nationalist and unionist traditions but between both of them and the new, sceptical historiography that insists on blurring emotive myths with complications and contradictions.
As it happens, 1999 did see the beginning of a new attempt to mythologise modern Irish history, with Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry, the first of a sequence of novels that will take its hero through the century. But Doyle's myth-making was surreal, contrary and unsettling, and the novel itself provoked an extraordinarily wide range of opinions about its own merits. Whatever historical story the current generation in the Republic is telling itself, it is not a source of cultural stability.
And, in any case, the past, too, is unpredictable in contemporary Ireland. Any tendency towards nostalgia for a more innocent Ireland that supposedly existed in the early decades of independence was brutally undermined by the year's most powerful piece of historical story-telling, Mary Raftery's stark and terrible documentary series on industrial schools, States of Fear, and the book which filled in the awful details, Suffer the Little Children. And these were not just images of the past, either.
For week in, week out, the court reports were full of cases of abuse in which previously respected members of the clergy and religious orders pleaded guilty to horrible crimes. The lyrical image of Irish childhood in a simpler era was shattered once and for all. Words that no one had ever used about the Irish State - child slavery, torture, concentration camp - entered the historical vocabulary. Wherever comfort and certainty are to be found, it is not in retrospect.
Many of us may be glad to see the back of holy Ireland, martyred Ireland and peasant Ireland. Most of us may have wanted nothing so much as to be normal, prosperous Europeans. But what, now that we have arrived, is left to us? What, if anything, is distinctively ours?
Is Irishness just Lord of the Dance, Boyzone, Ballykissangel, and abusing the referee after the All-Ireland Ladies GAA football final? What's left of a culture when the best it can do to mark the millennium is Messiah XXI, a candle from Seamus Brennan, and a set of postage stamps in which Grace Kelly is honoured as a historical figure of the same significance as Nelson Mandela?
Yet, beneath all the shopping and money-making, it is not hard to detect, in the ebb and flow of conversation, a vague sense of disquiet and dislocation. The notion of Ireland as a separate, special and even sacred place has been created and sustained at such a cost that its power is bound to outlast the circumstances that gave it life.
And it is not mere abstract speculation to suggest that the desire for a distinctive Ireland will persist when the familiar place itself is absent. As it happens, our own history has conducted a controlled experiment in just such an eventuality - mass exile. We know precisely what happens to a sense of Irishness when it is displaced into a new, confusing, foreign world. It persists. It lingers. Its glow becomes, if anything, all the stronger.
The new, confusing, foreign world in which Irishness finds itself now is no longer Cricklewood or the Bronx, Sydney or Ontario. It is Dublin, Cork, Galway, Sligo, Navan, Drogheda, and every other village, town and city on the island. Everyone in Ireland is now exiled from the familiar place of childhood. The chances are that we will do what Irish exiles have always done - invent a place that is compounded of memories and yearnings, of sharp realities and hazy dreams and call it "Ireland". For that remains as good a name as any for something that all human beings need, an imagined community in which to be at home.
However much the circumstances have changed, that task of invention is really the same as the one undertaken by our parents, grandparents and distant ancestors. For in the midst of the current mood of unease, it is worth remembering both sides of the old truism. Things ain't what they used to be. And they never were.
Yes, Ireland has changed beyond recognition. Yes, it has become more complex and slippery. But it was never all that easy to recognise or all that simple in the first place. There might have been some timeless moment before the Flood, when Ireland was a haven of unchanging truths and unquestioned certainties. But it wasn't today or yesterday or any other time within the compass of history. Outside of such fantasies, this island was always a contested space, formed, dissolved and formed again by fusions and invasions, actions and reactions, disturbances and settlements.
It is worth remembering, too, that nobody, anywhere, has ever been able to define a nation clearly except by a process of exclusion and, in extreme cases, of elimination. The Irishness which was invented in the early years of this century wasn't the work of God or nature, it was a political project. As such, it achieved a certain kind of simplicity only by excluding large categories of Irish people, including, in its purest versions, anyone who wasn't Catholic, nationalist, rural, living in Ireland, and, preferably, heterosexual male.
One of the reasons we are losing a clear sense of Irishness, in other words, is because we have stopped telling these comforting lies about ourselves. Whole varieties of Irish people who always existed have merely become visible.
What matters for the future is whether, as a society, we have the creativity and the compassion to invent a notion of Irishness that doesn't depend for its distinctiveness on painting out the bits that don't fit the picture. That, in the broadest sense, is a political project - one no less epic in its scale, though hopefully more humane in its methods, than the one with which the 20th century began.
At the moment, punch-drunk from the effects of continually having pieces of the old Ireland falling on our heads, we're happier re-furnishing our homes than refurbishing our notion of a homeland. But, if only because the one ineradicable aspect of Irishness is a perverse desire to go against the grain, that, too, will change.