HISTORICALLY it can be hard to put a date on the birth of our republic. Mystics might point back into antiquity and history professors make varying cases for 1916, 1922 or even 1949. The characters dining in a Dublin restaurant in this, Anne Haverty's third novel, are equally unsure of exactly when to date the birth of Ireland as they know it. It is either 1994 or 1996, but as Seoda Fitzgibbon explains to Tom . . . the novel's bewildered American hero . . ."you can forget about the last [20th] century and the one before that."

Tom's problem is that he is on a mission to save Ireland from the misery of its past. The visions that have called him to these shores are the recurring dreams of a wailing nation pleading for succour that have begun to haunt his multi-millionaire great uncle Pender Gast. Gast began life in the standard poverty of an Irish childhood. His only memory of Ireland is being urged to kiss the hag-like features of his dead grandmother before an emigrant ship dispatched him to a new life in America. He made sure that it was a new life by fully embracing the American dream, severing all ties to Ireland and resolving never to have any dealings with the cursed place. However, following a health scare, he finds the mythical starving soul of the nation beseeching his dreams. His good-intentioned but dopey, would-be novelist great-nephew is here to find out what the mythical nation wants and to pay them off with a large cheque so that Gast can get a night's sleep.

Haverty is one of our most interesting novelists, with an admirable chameleon quality evident in her books, which include One Day As A Tiger (combining McGahernesque rural realism with the surreal story of a bachelor farmer's relationship with a cloned sheep) and Far Side Of A Kiss.

Her new novel is equally original. If the response of many novelists to 1980s' Ireland was anger, the chosen vehicle to respond to and analyse contemporary opulent Ireland has been satire, and Haverty has an acutely observant eye in her chronicle of Tom's attempts to be a benevolent bestower of alms to the nation that already has everything.

Or at least the golden circle that he encounters in the Shelbourne Hotel appear to live a gilded existence, apart from the hovering black cloud of tiresome tribunals that keep investigating the troublesome pre-history of the other Ireland which existed before 1996.

Haverty brilliantly satirises a world of business and art, of millionaire lawyers and mystic visionaries on the make in a society where all the staff are Latvian.

Tom's preconceptions make him unable to see the motives of those who befriend him. He's too caught up in trying to unravel the secret history of his mother, and coping with a society where the drink never stops flowing, to be able to separate the Ireland that he arrives in from the illusions planted by his great uncle.

In this, nobody is exactly likeable, but Haverty's prose is stylish and possessed of a wicked humour as the hapless Tom finds himself manoeuvred into a different role for the beseeching voices that he could never have foreseen.