Forget your shopping, your SUVs, your boring developers posing as latter-day nation builders. Last week's figures go to the heart of what New Ireland is today.

We no longer have to leave. The long, painful decades of emigration are now emphatically at an end. Not since 1861, when the post-famine emigration was settling down for the long haul, have there been so many people on the island.

The recorded population now stands at 4.2 million, which is a 50% increase from the 2.8 million in 1961, when the nation wallowed in a trough of depression, following the flight of the 1950s.

Apart from a lonely peak in the 1970s . . . the population increased by 1.5% between 1971 and 1979 . . . most of the decades up until the early '90s were punctuated by large scale emigration.

It happened quietly. Those who left were uneducated, and largely unrepresented in the state, either before or after their departure. Most were from the lower reaches of society. Others were just unlucky.

A farmer's daughter or second-born son could curse fate as the lights of Dun Laoghaire, Wexford or Cobh receded.

By the 1980s, the seeds of the boom to come were evident in the calibre of emigrants. Many left with a first-class education which would ensure a good life abroad. The state's colleges fed graduates onto Ryanair flights to the UK, and from there further afield. Longterm education policies were bearing fruit, the only problem remaining was how to put these educated heads to work.

That has now been largely resolved.

Today, when youths or young adults finish their education, their concerns are of a different hue altogether. It used to be the prospects of London, New York and Boston that were to the fore in pub conversation. Now the obsession is to get on the "property ladder". Where once the pressure was to collect enough money for a deposit on a rented flat in Cricklewood or the Bronx, where freedom in all its messy discomfort awaited, now it seems to be they can't wait to get tied down by claiming purchase on the lower rungs of the fabled property ladder. Never let them tell you that young people have it easy today.

If the politicians are claiming credit for delivering the good times . . . and their claims are dubious when compared to the effects of globalisation . . . then they must also bear responsibility for the disaster that is the property market.

In this regard, planning is a disaster. The census figures show an urban sprawl around the greater Dublin area, panning out onto the steppes of Leinster. Why was none of this planned for?

The future was accurately foretold by the ESRI in 1994.

Even five years ago, it was obvious what was unfolding.

But planning has always moved to the sound of its own drum in this state. These days, it is a byword for corruption.

Down in Dublin Castle, the Mahon tribunal unearths daily new facts about how the country was planned, set up and run as recently as the mid1990s. Peanuts were all it took to entice county councillors to vote for developments that were solely in the interests of the developer. Whether those peanuts were handed over as so-called legitimate political donations or bribes is a mere detail in the bigger picture.

These days, corruption is carried out in a more subtle manner. One of the instruments designed to attempt to balance development regionally was the National Spatial Strategy. To this end, it was proposed to decentralise government in conjunction with the strategy, a move that would be vital to ensuring the strategy's success.

And what did the government do? Rather than pick and choose among the towns and cities earmarked by the strategy, it decided to scatter decentralisation to 53 locations, thus maximising political advantage, and thrusting the national interest further onto the scrapheap of the future. With a political culture entirely focused on the next election whatever the cost, we can expect no more. Some things change, others remain the same.