The Tesco revolution has arrived, and we shall not be the same again. Tesco is not lifting the shutters on its shops at eight in the morning because it believes in an early start to the day. It's not keeping them open until ten at night because, as a matter of principle, it thinks shops should keep convenient hours for the public. It is not opening all day on Sundays because it thinks it's handy for the rest of us on our way back from Mass or Morning Service to collect the rashers and eggs.
The world doesn't work like that. I write this not because I love you all and I want to fill your morning with my thoughts, but because I am paid to. It is a thing called money which drives this activity, as it drives Tesco's desire to fill our waking hours with the opportunity to shop in its supermarkets. And if it is going to be open all these hours, it means that there is money to be made at times when the old Quinnsworth used to be shut.
Verge of extinction
That money will not be conjured from the thin air and Tesco has probably not hit on a new way of enticing people to spend money they would not otherwise spend. No, it's money they would be spending all right, but spending in the open-all-hours corner grocery shops which have for so long been part of Irish life, and will tremble soon on the verge of extinction.
This will not mean, however, they will not still feature in the next generation of coffee-table books about Ireland. Being a celebrity in this country has meant for decades that you get a volume of glossy colour photographs about Ireland named after you. Peter O'Toole's Ireland. Lord Killanin's Ireland. Micheal MacLiammoir's Ireland. Charles Haughey's Ireland. Michelle Smith's Ireland.
The photographs are always brilliant, the scenery ravishing, but the Ireland portrayed is a strange, never-never land, a cross between a John Hinde Tir na nOg and Man of Aran. There is always an ancient, black, upright bike parked outside a tiny grocery/tobacconist/huckster shop, inside which a rosy-cheeked old lady sells apples, slices of ham, baby Powers, strings of sausages and, to judge from the metal hoardings outside, Sweet Afton and Gold Flake.
Never mind for a minute what we all know - that the bike would have been nicked within 15 seconds of being parked against the shop, which probably closed five years ago, not having made a single sale in the previous half-decade. The little old lady went to live in a bungalow with huge arches and windows the size of Clery's, all set in half-an-acre of tarmac and gnomes and surrounded by Neighbourhood Watch and Community Alert signs.
Neighbourhood Watch
There are no Neighbourhood Watch or Community Alert signs in the photographic essays about Ireland. There are, of course, plenty of pictures of elfin children on horses amid tower blocks, or in unkempt country lanes, but none at all of whatever children are actually doing these days, which is probably plotting to mug the little old lady as she totters down to Tesco to buy her bottle of Chilean wine.
The Ireland we are living in is changing so fast, and the images it is presenting are so fluid, so unpredictable, so extraordinary that maybe it makes sense for Mary Robinson's Ireland or Tony Cascarino's Ireland or Dervla Kirwan's Ireland to be exercises in the fantastical, with little old ladies in black bonnets smoking clay pipes against a backdrop of the Steepe Atlanticke and with flitches of smoked bacon hanging from the joists of tiny corner shops-cum-pubs, where neighbours gather over bottles of stout and talk about their ancestors.
Nobody's coffee-table version of Ireland shows McDonald's or Tesco supermarkets or the land which has the highest proportion of single mothers in Europe. The glossy albums about Ireland certainly never reflect the quite startling degree of teenage sexuality which is now so widespread. They do not show the young lady whose appearance on the evening of the Junior Cert results caused three buses, two lorries and 16 cars to collide on O'Connell Street, and which prompted me on my bike to wobble into the Liffey, from where I am writing this.
Predictable results
She was tall, about 5' 10["], and she was striding proudly past the GPO, trailing a V-cut skirt which opened at her knees, the V actually closing about three inches above her pubic bone. She was, it is true, wearing tiny gossamer-thin cotton pants. But it is also true that it was raining, with predictable results. She didn't give a damn as she strode past the open mouths, the cars careering out of control, the shrieking cyclists toppling over the Liffey parapets. Or maybe she did. At all events, I felt for her poor father as disbelievingly he watched the girl he had dangled on his lap in the 1980s heading out for her night's fun in 1997.
They didn't make 15-yearolds like that when he was 15. Nor me neither. And they certainly don't put them in books about Ireland.
The pace of change in Ireland is dizzying, beyond measurement or conception. The society many of us grew up in is now as foreign as North Korea and growing more foreign. We can predict virtually nothing, except this. With the Tescification of the retail trade in our major cities, the corner-shop is doomed. It will live on only in our memories, and in the glossy coffee-table fictions which pass as reflections of the true Ireland.