not just what we buy, but what we are. It is a fascinating exercise to watch how the effects of prosperity are transforming every aspect of Irish life.

For example, I was interested to see that applications to University College Dublin went up dramatically recently, when many degree courses in other institutions showed no increase in demand. In new UCD-speak, there is now a 'fully modular, semesterised system' there, by which the students can put together a course of study that suits them. The idea that someone up there told you, without discussion, what you were going to be taught, and left it up to you to learn it or not, has had its day.

There is this to be said for the old way . . . the curriculums that used to be imposed forced young people to move outside their own narrow field of knowledge and break out of the prison of their own preferences. But classical canons in everything are disintegrating under the onslaught of the information revolution. And the balance of power in the educational relationship is shifting inexorably towards the student. The student is the consumer. Young people are empowered by the few shillings in their parents' pockets to see themselves as individuals, not as anonymous specimens of the species 'student'. And the institutions that will survive into the future are the institutions that know how to serve individualism.

But as for actually going to UCDf I'm sure if you work or study there it is a richly varied and interesting place. But it can certainly strike this occasional visitor as a collection of mostly bleak buildings in a meaningless, suburban setting that, on top of having no attractions in itself, is difficult to get to. The least I'd want in a college, if I were to go back again, is a town or a city outside the gates.

But just as the relationship of student to teacher is changing, so is the relationship of student to place of teaching. I haven't any statistics to hand, but I have a pile of anecdotal evidence.

Young people are picking colleges for career reasons, rather than lifestyle ones.

They're not dependent on the college ambience for the quality of this passage in their growing up.

There's a new breed of young person who prefers where they come from to where they go away to. They don't mind being students during the week, but it is as if being at college is a job. That was always the case for many of the Catholic students at Queen's University in Belfast. Now it's the case for lots of kids, who cheerfully criss-cross the country on Friday nights, making a new balance between home and away.

Partly this has to do with how the texture of life in hometown Ireland has changed. I was talking not long ago to people from a place that was once a byword for poverty and suffering and emigration. They have children who have jobs or are studying in Dublin or Galway but who, the parents proudly told me, come all the way home at the slightest opportunity. Which of us, in my generation, foresaw this? It seemed like a law of nature that you had to get away from home to make a life away from prying eyes, to meet interesting people and perhaps be an interesting person yourself, or at least a person who did interesting things, like drink, and have ideas, and make love.

College was a place then that was not just apart from the usual controls, but dedicated to scrutinising control itself. It was where you lost your faith and saw through the government. It was a place where opposition and scepticism were the means of selfdiscovery.

Now, of course, since the third-level sector consults the students about what they'd like to study and how they'd like to do it, they have little reason to sit in or march out and boycott this and picket that, the way students used to do. They're being co-opted when they're made partners.

And the same goes for home. Love and affection are a lot easier to express when there's money around than when scarce resources were savagely guarded. One of the reasons boys and girls go home now is that home is nice now. Or at least it wants to be.

It never used to be a goal for children and parents to make a point of demonstrating their love. Children were to obey their parents, certainly . . . respect them, pay them back for all they'd done for them, be loyal to them, look after them when they needed looking after.

But love was not necessarily on the table.

People didn't behave within the family in the caressing way they've picked up in the last 20 years or so . . . picked up from television, it must be, since there were few examples of it in real life in Ireland.

The students of the old Ireland were stalked by anxiety, knowing themselves to be a hair's breadth away from penury. If the soft landing guaranteed to today's blithe kids does away with that cutting edge . . . if they haven't the motivation to be as clever as their parents and grandparents were . . . surely they'll be nicer people.

Where, in fact, does the process stop?

Another few generations of this and even the most testing experiences there are . . . even leaving home to study for a degree . . . will be as sweetly unproblematic as life in a sitcom.