Some eminent figures are behind the above statements.

RTE's highly regarded economics correspondent George Lee kickstarted the whole thing in an interview on The Tubridy Show in what was a compelling piece of radio. The enormously talented film director John Boorman (see Tribune Review, p4-5) and Fr Martin O'Reilly, youth director with the Diocese of Clogher, have since joined Lee in voicing their concerns about the new Ireland that is emerging from a boom that has transformed us from economic basket case to the envy of Europe.

There is no doubt something in what the three have said, and it's never a bad thing to engage in a little bit of self-analysis.

But, despite the many problems that exist, a cold-eyed, rational look of the situation would have to conclude that the Ireland of 20 years ago was a lot 'sicker' and a lot more 'woejous' than the admittedly flawed country that we live in today.

In the mid-1980s, Ireland was internationally regarded as the "sick man of Europe". What could be more 'unbalanced' than a nation with an unemployment rate of 20% which offered no future to its young people? What quicker way for a country to lose its identity than to force tens of thousands of its young citizens to leave every year, with many believing there were better prospects in living illegally in the US than staying at home?

And how better to fail its young than continuously tell those who opted to stay, and wanted to stay, that it was the "best and the brightest" that were leaving.

It really is easy to forget how bleak and desolate a place Ireland was in the 1980s.

There was no room for debate: the Irish state was a failure, a point accepted by a senior government minister who told Newsweekmagazine in 1987 that "we can't all live on a small island". Today, not only do we all comfortably live on this small island, but Ireland has the highest rate of per capita immigration in the world.

To be fair, neither Lee nor Boorman nor O'Reilly were pining for a return to the bad old days, but any problems that exist in the Ireland of today must be seen in that context. And it has to be said that while many are quick to point out the problems with modern Ireland, there are fewer voices offering coherent and sensible solutions to those problems.

There is no doubt that we have become more materialistic, but the drive for the bigger house, the bigger car, the five bathrooms is human nature . . . the only difference between now and two decades ago is that people now have the money to fulfil those aspirations. Collectively, we're a little like the ordinary Joe who for years has had to scrimp and save and then suddenly wins the pools and goes a little crazy with the money. The hope must be that, with time, we become comfortable with our newfound wealth and better able to discern what really are the important things in life.

The worry, of course, is that by then a whole generation will have grown up with a value system heavily influenced by this 'spend, spend, spend' culture. Fr Martin O'Reilly believes that we are failing our young people because we are too busy making money to spend time with our children, and we are throwing iPods and other expensive goods at them to compensate for this. The connection drawn by O'Reilly between this and young people dying on our roads looks tenuous, to say the least. In the 1970s, long before the Celtic Tiger was born, more than 600 people a year were dying on the country's roads . . .

over 50% higher than today's levels, despite a massive increase in the number of cars on the roads. But, O'Reilly's basic point can not be readily dismissed, however uncomfortable it makes us feel.

But, overall, we shouldn't forget that the strides that we as a country have made in the last 20 years have been enormous.

Politicians and commentators talk about the pressures that couples are under nowadays. Of course, there are pressures, but they are nothing like the pressures that existed in the 1980s. Then, survival was the priority. People were too busy holding onto their job (if they were lucky enough to have one) and having enough to pay all the bills to worry about "rebalancing our ethos" or "searching for an identity".

Irish society is certainly not without its problems, but our newfound wealth at least increases the choices we can make about what lifestyle we want for ourselves and our children. Whatever lies ahead, we can be reasonably confident that there is no going back to those dark days of massive unemployment and rampant emigration. That in itself is something to celebrate. Maybe it's time we started accentuating the positive.