First Monday, third millennium. Business as usual. Or is it? As the old century goes the way of the turkey, and the strains of Auld Lang Syne give way to chirpier tunes, you could look out the window and marvel at how little has changed - so far. Same skies, more or less, same weather. Where do we deposit our millennial angst?
Folk a hundred years ago wondered about the shape of the future. New-fangled aircraft stuttering in the skies occupied the place where the godhead had formerly been thought to exist. Nation-states flexed their muscles and so rehearsed the goose-steps that marched the world straight into a century of conflict.
In Ireland, the chip on the shoulder was rising to the status of an art form. Streets and back alleys glistened with the zeal of fresh purpose as the place began to take itself in hand. People were both optimistic and uneasy, without quite knowing why. Plans for the visit of Queen Victoria that April had already attracted more opposition than the kites now being floated for a visit by her descendant Queen Elizabeth II. Change was in the air, except that no one could predict which way the wind would blow.
Writing after Queen Victoria's visit in 1900, the barrister and commentator Michael McCarthy penned an elegy for the new era. He urged Dublin Castle, the centre of government then, to hasten "the day when it will be a harbour of refuge and of sympathy for the oppressed; when honesty and manliness will characterise the policy practised within its portals; when devious ways will be abandoned, and when . . . the Irish people will be taken into the confidence of their governors".
"Let us hope," he continued, "that `Heaven will direct it' and that its pure sunshine may soon penetrate into the hearts and brains of our poor, beloved brothers and sisters, whose lives are now so gloomy, whose minds are a prey to conflicting doubts and fears."
McCarthy's words were expressed in the spirit of a new century's resolution for the Irish people, who should meet the future within the spirit of Empire he admired so much. Like most resolutions, it missed the point - oppression and poverty inspire rhetoric usually in the people they least affect. As for the Empire? History put an end to all that.
THE belief that Ireland was a perfectible place which could, with enough effort, become the most perfect place in the world was shared by many emerging leaders, from James Connolly to Eamon de Valera. Whatever differences in strategy, every "ism" of the time proposed that anything less would be tantamount to failure - and to betrayal of Ireland itself.
Even after their deaths, the credo that only a utopian Ireland would be good enough to honour our noble heroes continued to strap the place into the kind of moral and emotional straitjacket that James Joyce had earlier described as "a nightmare".
The more time went by, the wider was the gap between what Ireland was supposed to be and what it actually was. With such impossible ideals, small sins began to flourish. White lies became potential public scandals, but sounded so far from the Irish ideal that few would accept them as fact.
Only public etiquette counted, so private shortcomings could be kept under wraps.
That chip on the shoulder which once was someone else's fault grew heavier every day. If by the 1950s a tee-shirt had been made which embodied the inner emblem of contemporary Ireland, the only appropriate legend it could have carried would have been the words "Failure at all costs". Most folk didn't need to wear the tee-shirt: by some magical sleight of hand, its words were already branded into many people's hearts.
Ireland changed, as it would have anyway. But what changes came happened outside the scope of anyone's imagining. That heavy chip on the shoulder which sank thousands of people for much of the century suddenly went digital. That no-can-do culture, fed by sentimental, self-excusing blarney, turned into a can-do culture where many things became possible as if for the first time.
First Monday, third millennium: a good-enough Ireland is in sight. This sleeker, less perfectionist model inherits a snag-list all its own, one that will test the can-do ethic to its limit. Good-enough Ireland can't be ideal, can't attempt the self-deceptions that utopia always encourages.
That much it knows it opposes. But what will it settle for? What can this can-do Ireland achieve?
THE tee-shirt shouting the legend "Under-achiever and proud of it" isn't accepted uniform at present. Fail to meet the emerging civic criteria of having a good job, a good house or a plethora of blood ties within this society and you'll risk falling outside the consensual definition of what makes a good citizen as fast as you would have if you claimed to be Irish and Jewish 60 years ago. Miss out on the neighbourhood pursuits of television and shopping and you may find yourself deaf to the nuances of some contemporary discourse.
The 20th-century snag-list still has outstanding items. Accustomed to judging the new in terms of how it fits the past, we're still some way off from imagining a future on its own terms. Old ghosts trumpeting old ideas of sovereignty are almost put in their final resting place, but new ones emerge so fast we can hardly name their faces.
Poverty, homelessness, racism; a Christmas bracketed by the double-helix lights of Newgrange and the millennium fireworks, but also by the twin deaths of a man killed by exposure in one of the richest suburbs in the State and a new-born child dead for the perceived want of some understanding. Wealth, too, with all its delights and entanglements: being warm when it's cold outside, smelling fresh flowers when there is no growth, knowing that the better off we become, the more we'll huddle together to shield ourselves from the cruelties outside.
Wearing "can-do" tee-shirts and humming to the melody of Auld Lang Syne, we may only know that "we're here because we're here because we're here . . ."
For once, that uncertainty may be a good-enough anthem with which to begin.