But did you hear any rejoicing? No, you did not. Instead, there was a lot of whining about young people not being able to get into the housing market. Well, young people are not supposed to be able to get into the housing market at the same level as middle-aged people . . . they're supposed to put in a few years of renting and saving and so on. Not to mention that the same young people seem well able to pull together the price of a starter home in one of the huge new housing developments around, where not a single house goes unsold.

The whiners had to shift their ground. The property bubble is going to burst anyway, they kept saying; we'll end up in the workhouse eating bread and scrape. Yet it hasn't burst.

And no one is behaving as if it is going to. Then all of a sudden we stopped being afraid, and took to spending like ducks to water. The middle classes are out there on weekend trips to the Gehry museum in Bilbao and spa breaks in Budapest and overnights in Anglo-Irish bed and breakfasts and the working classes are buying flats in Bodrum and Nicosia and Gran Canaria and everyone under 25 drinks cocktails at 10 a pop. And soon there'll be even more treats, when the SSIAs start to be paid out.

But is there going to be a phase three? It doesn't seem to have dawned yet that there are other things you can do with a bit of personal wealth besides hoard it fearfully or splash it out . . . things that might in the end be more satisfying. I think we have not developed any secular way of thinking about giving some money away. If we're not giving to 'charity', preferably through church or semi-church organisations, we have no idea how to give at all.

We've no real concept of giving something to the community to which we happen to belong. It shows in the little amount of voluntarism there is in Ireland. You don't come across parents helping out in infant schools or running free night classes in say, the Irish language or the works of Dickens, or passing on skills, maybe gardening skills or mechanical skills or literacy skills. The idea of 'giving back' hasn't taken root here. Nor is there the tradition that there is, for instance in the US, of doing some work pro bono . . . that is, occasionally offering professional assistance, free of charge, to the disadvantaged. Some exceptional people do do this . . . I'm thinking of one Dublin eye surgeon in particular. But on the whole, doctors and lawyers here, if you were to ask them what they're giving back to the country which makes so many of them rich, would defend themselves with an angry witticism about the bills they send out that never get paid. They don't want to hear about civic virtue.

Our rich businessmen have, of course, made substantial contributions to Ireland, but mainly . . . apart from the Ireland Funds, which promote community development where it might alleviate sectarianism . . . in safe, respectable areas of patronage such as high culture and the arts and middle-class education. Whereas in any US city you'll see hospitals or clinics or schools or little parks or auditoriums or playgrounds or sports facilities proudly named after private benefactors.

Where is there a clinic or a kindergarten . . .

say, for Travellers . . . paid for by more fortunate Irish people? Where is there a scheme for helping kids from one of the postal areas whose young people populate our prisons to avoid that fate? Where are the scholarships . . . say, for young people who will be the first of their families to go to college . . . endowed by quite modestly prosperous people? Where are the swimming pools? The special libraries?

The small training centres?

It's not meanness that's our problem. On many a mantelpiece in Ireland today there's a box for the savings made during Lent, and that money will be given to the less fortunate with a heart-and-a-half, as money always has been to victims of famine and flood and other natural disasters. But we're post-colonial in our passivity towards our own potential power. We wait for the government to do things that might better be done by ourselves. And we hand over the alleviation of social injustice to clerics or the St Vincent de Paul Society. Whoever said that Ireland is now a first-world country but with third-world habits was right.

We've money in our pockets now, but we're still as irresponsible towards it as only the poor have a right to be.