In fact, I don't know that there are many clubs in Ireland that organise evenings of serious talking. But I'm in America at the moment and professional clubs matter here, perhaps because, in such a huge country, networking is something people in the same line of business have to do because they can't rely on bumping into each other. The rather grand Overseas Press Club in midtown Manhattan is basically for and about foreign correspondents. Thanks to Ireland's present status in the world, it held a panel discussion recently that examined the question . . . how has Ireland managed to surge forward economically? I was one of the speakers . . . something of a wild card. The other speakers actually knew something about the subject.

But economics doesn't exist independently of the general culture. Being a poor country or a prosperous country is a matter of the detail of lived experience for the people in that country. The speakers the other night kept referring to the Irish labour force. But what is a labour force, or rather, who is it? How is it linked with the past and future? I brooded about that on the long subway ride home.

It was agreed by all concerned the other night that a major reason for our sudden economic wellbeing was that in the '90s, when profitable American companies were looking for an EU country to open up in, they chose Ireland because of its labour force. And what was so great about the labour force? Well, they said, it was and is large, well-educated and English-speaking. I amused myself by looking at each of those words.

Take 'English-speaking'. If we were not English-speaking, which we are thanks to our specific responses to colonial oppression by Britain . . . Wales, you notice, was also oppressed, but the Welsh did not lose their language . . . we would not be enjoying our present prosperity. Property is much cheaper in Italy or France or Germany and the roads and railways are indescribably better and the food is in a different and higher league, but if you were an American or Asian CEO setting up a business in an EU country all that wouldn't count against the problems presented by any other language than English.

So . . . thank you, England.

Then take 'well-educated'. What does it mean to say that the Irish labour force is well-educated? Against whom is it being compared? And what is the educational goal the workers have well achieved? Have they learnt to be independent thinkers? Have they found their way to identifying their own gifts and to releasing their own creativity? Perhaps welleducated means nothing more than that for the last 35 years or so most Irish students haven't left school till they're well into their teens and nowadays a high proportion have gone on to third-level study. But the same could be said for the young people of many other countries. What is it about Irish education that makes the Irish so suitable for employment? It doesn't just mean, does it, that they're good at obeying American bosses?

Now take the seemingly innocuous word, "large". Behind this word, I decided . . . as I raced across the platform to change trains . . .

a massive cultural shift is hiding. How did the Irish labour force become so large? Well, I'll tell you. It got large by Irish mothers having big families . . . very, very big families, followed over time by big families, followed by families declining in size towards the EU average.

And why did Irish women have so many children?

They had them because they had few options but to have them, until, in 1979, Charles Haughey defied the majority church and those who follow Papal teaching in this matter and brought in limited access to contraception for married couples as an Irish solution to an Irish problem. As soon as there was widespread access to contraception, family size fell dramatically.

So the economic miracle owes its existence to Mna na hEireann! Had you realised that? How often do specialist commentators make that point? We'd be nowhere today without all the workers our mothers and grandmothers provided us with.

What's more, as soon as the adult lives of the women of Ireland were not wholly spent in childrearing, the women sought paid work.

They came from a standing start to constitute the biggest addition to the Irish labour force in recent decades . . . in fact, for a time more or less all its growth was due to the entry of women.

And there are more women to come. Even now, there aren't as many women working outside as well as inside the home as there are in most other EU countries. The jobs women get at the moment are clustered at the bottom end of the pay scale, where they may be the foundation of personal power but they don't add up to social power.

But just you wait. Even as things are, women's entry into the labour force means changed childrearing, changed parent-toparent and parent-to-child relationships and in the end it will mean changed women.

Which is not unexpected, they just having given birth to the celtic tiger.

And with this little exercise in humanising the 'dismal science' of economics completed to my satisfaction, the train rattled into my station.