The last of the physical Dublin I knew is just now, finally, going under to money . . . the alleyways, the houses with lace curtains stiff with dirt that were warrens of bedsits off once-elegant hallways, the little grocery shops, the redbrick terraces of working class houses.

Down behind the Point Depot, coalyards and warehouses have been transformed into lifeless, glassy apartment blocks with unlet retail spaces on their ground floors.

They look incongruous opening onto old streets that are still cobbled. But they wait in confidence for the financial-service-worker subtribe of the New Irish tribe to arrive and form a settlement.

The city was in the grip of the commemoration of 1916 that felt much more like a new beginning than a looking backward. If I had met any nationalist acquaintances from Northern Ireland, I thought as I walked around, I would have felt something like embarrassment. It wasn't our fault, I would have said defensively, that our Rising did issue into independence from Britain, and that you were left behind, trapped.

It seemed to me, last Sunday, that there was a definite element of relief in the sudden pride in our own armed forces, and the relief was at getting the national question off our backs . . . not just getting the Provos off our backs. It was as if the last abstract question had been shelved. As if we could square up now, unburdened by even the vestiges of ideology, to the material, late-capitalist task of making money and holding onto it.

Well, I don't know why I say 'we.' I don't feel that I'm one of the New Irish. Not that I'm not interested in them, and not that I'm not wholeheartedly glad at the opportunities that have opened out before them and the ease of their lives compared to ours. It's more that I know that they're not interested in us, the sean-daoine.

There's very little continuity between Ireland-before-prosperity and their Ireland. They can hardly imagine it, and I don't want to sit around like a latter-day Peig, trying to make them imagine it.

And so a blank, that happens to cover most of my life, develops in Ireland's history. It seems that our island story is going to jump from the 1916-22 period . . . the one we're just now beginning to learn about, and be selectively proud of . . . to about 15 years ago. Say, to the Tallaght Agreement, when things got so bad that knee-jerk Civil War antagonisms were transcended.

Or, say, to the day Ben Dunne all but threw himself over the railings of an atrium in Florida and the Haughey mystique began its rapid dissolution. Or, say, to the moment when the American firms to whom we owe our present prosperity realised that, with Britain out of the EMS, Ireland had the only English-speaking workforce in the EU.

Sometime, anyway, in the fairly recent past, we peeked out from under our umbrellas and discovered that the sun had begun to shine.

The grey years are going to be airbrushed out. And I'd have this to say to anyone who felt excluded from our celebration last week . . .

most of the 20th century in the Republic of Ireland was iron-grey. Of course in private individuals never failed to find ways into joy and creativity, and there was love and fun and singing and tenderness. But public life was wretched with poverty and with the waste, the insult, the grief, of men and women who had never had a chance of flowering, their minds and spirits and bodies unfulfilled, taking the trains and the boats to emigrant lives.

For decade after decade the idealism of 1916 was mocked by reality. I heard the voice of a man who fought in Dublin that Easter on John Bowman's archive programme: ?For a week, " the man said, ?we felt that Ireland was as it ought to be."

Well, for most of my life it was as no country should be. It was a place of cold and damp and smells and class-consciousness and backbiting and hidden pregnancies and sexual frustration and violence, of rotting unemployment and the dead weight of clerics. It was a place where no one asked who made Ann Lovett pregnant or why the guards decided that Joanne Hayes in Kerry had had twins by two separate fathers. No one asked where Haughey got the money to live like a squire. And when the worst of the poverty passed . . . thanks to throwing half our people out . . . we had the referendums on personal behaviour, with highlights like the woman in Limerick who told RTE that anyone who wanted divorce could leave the country, and the liar Michael Cleary cavorting on television with people in wheelchairs who, he said, would have been murdered by their mothers if abortion were not criminal.

This is stuff that any normal person wants to forget. And last Sunday's reclaiming of a nice past and a nice, competent but somehow harmless army was an episode in the forgetting of it. And those of us who were there?

Well, we'll just have to keep the memory of how it was to ourselves, as if we are shamed by it . . . as if it was our fault.