Is smugness going to do for us in the end?

Riverdance tap-tapped on to Broadway a few weeks ago and broke box office records for the strip's largest theatre. OK, you may take issue with Brian Kennedy's ringlets or the milky male lead, but can anyone argue with $10 million in advance bookings and revenue that amounts to two Lotto jackpots a week?

At the generous and detail-perfect party afterwards in Cipriani's (an old bank building, appropriately enough), a woman who had followed Riverdance over its five world-conquering years demurred sadly: "It's become slick, commercial, lost its innocence . . . " True enough, I ventured, recalling an eruption of lascivious hip-swivelling from the colleens. "Ah, not that. It's just that five years ago, the show was held together with sticking plaster to the extent that you could nearly see the joins. But you sat there, with a lump in your throat, praying nothing would go wrong, willing it to work with all your heart. That wouldn't cross your mind now."

I was in no position to judge, never having been before. But since then, people who have still not seen it have wondered aloud if it's out of time. How could they know? They reckon that just as timing was a huge factor in its initial success, timing is the factor that could equally see it off - here in its homeland at least.

The problem for Riverdance may be that it and New Ireland Inc are inextricably linked in the minds of many. If Riverdance is perceived to have grown slick, commercial and coyly knowing, it may be because the land that spawned it has grown likewise. Do we have a classic case of transference here?

Is it really only five years since we had pretensions to diversity, couldn't get enough of exploring our Irishness and could hardly credit our good fortune? Since Mary Robinson was anaesthetising politicians and scrambling footballers' brains with talk of the Diaspora?

This is where Riverdance and Ireland Inc began their journey to huge acclaim. And where they parted ways. Riverdance's deliberate melding of the Irish Diaspora with Russians, Spaniards, Africans and Americans - in particular, the witty, show-stopping Trading Taps sequence between streetwise black New Yorkers and Irish immigrants - has provided a huge feel-good factor in tours right across the US. On Broadway (with Ellis Island a 15-minute boat journey away), for those few minutes, you could believe that the Irish, at home or abroad, never had a racist thought in their heads.

Meanwhile, as we discovered later, Bertie Ahern was in Australia, getting quite excited about a policy towards refugees that includes detention centres.

Well, haven't we grown? It's a while now since we gave up all that old self-analysis in favour of dot.com share flourishes. In the time it's taken the homely colleens of the original Riverdance to go round the world twice and become lissome sophisticates, a new Ireland has swaggered on to the stage, confident that it can go it alone. Technology is king.

Computer nerds foster images of themselves as temperamental geniuses as opposed to ignorant, unsocialised prats; barely grown boys fret to be e-millionaires, mobile phones savage Mozart and pollute the air, and human voices have given way to robots (press five if you've lost the will to live).

In the real world, a Dublin restaurateur can charge £14 (per head) for a few slivers of cheese after lunch. His peers in the hotel and restaurant business grow steadily more contemptuous of their patrons as they charge Paris prices for uninspiring food served by untrained students and offensively casual (and probably underpaid) staff. A confident professional at this level is a rare sight.

The result is that as Riverdance prepares for its Homecoming in the summer, there is little chance of an Irish repeat of that Cipriani celebration. "You couldn't replicate that party in Dublin . . . You'd never get that level of service," was the opinion of one show associate. Cipriani's, remember, is in New York, where rudeness was once so endemic that it spawned the joke: "Welcome to New York - now get out." Yet, in New York these days, the service industry works, efficiently and with surprising goodwill.

So is hubris going to do for us, in the end? As we rear children to perceive university-based education as our success standard, and continue to confuse service with servility, where are the front-line workers capable of providing a Cipriani-type service going to come from? A hospitality industry that even in the most explosive boom expects the taxpayer to fund its marketing drives has - with a few honourable exceptions - yet to wake up fully to the notion of investing generously and wisely in people.

It may be that a certain smugness has been punctured in recent weeks with the announcement that at least one successful restaurant has had to close due to a lack of staff. But if the problem is really a lack of workers (as opposed to short-sighted, greedy employers), then why are we sending our potential saviours to bob about in flotels? Where is the feverish lobbying from the services sector?

Leave aside that old liberal stuff about compassion and human rights: the sums seem simple enough, despite the contemptuous and contemptible response from the Justice Department in yesterday's letters page to Medb Ruane's reflections. If asylum-seekers and/or economic migrants continue to enter the State at a rate of 1,000 a month for another five years, it will still not be enough, by all accounts, to feed the Tiger's ravenous maw.

Mary Harney's measures to attract immigrant nurses, IT specialists and construction professionals may well appeal to our own emigrants who want to return. But we still need people to man the checkouts, pack the groceries, answer the phones, serve in restaurants, paint our houses. Where are they to come from? Certainly not the indulged Celtic cubs; not in a State where there is no proud tradition of service.

So Riverdance will return in the summer, hopefully to an ecstatic welcome. It, at least, always had the insight and humility to recognise that it could not stand alone in the world. As for the rest of us, it seems the process of finding out what's good for us and how to nurture it, is going to take a while longer.