Our values, note. Our greed. Not CJH's greed or Ray Burke's greed or George Redmond's greed or the greed sloshing around the Fianna Fail tent at Galway Races. Not a word about that.

Just the greed of people who until recently were in no position to be greedy.

I personally hope that you have lots of money in 2007. Money is the great facilitator. It opens the door to new experience. It buys services. It can't protect you against illness or death but it can make all the difference to how you endure the one and stay comfortable when the other begins to loom. Friends can't be bought but the opportunities for making them can. Attention can be bought. Education can be bought. You name some good that can't be approached by being bought and I'll be very much surprised.

Including being good. Money can help us to be good . . . or at least, the absence of money made us bad. We know for sure, as a matter of bitter experience, that when Ireland was poor it was a horrible, unjust, miserable, tight and mean place, exceptionally cruel to women, children and the poor. The only excuse for the condition this country was in by the 1950s was poverty. Only seeing children as rats who would eat the last of the grain can begin to explain why they were treated as they were. Not that poverty of itself makes children seem a burden. All over Africa, for example, in situations of deprivation and even hunger, children are loved and enjoyed. It took the churchmen we had then, as well as mass poverty, to create the Ireland where children were treated like animals who invited punishment and men and women were afraid of each other, afraid of their own sexuality, afraid of their minds and in despair at the destiny that shovelled them onto the emigrant boats. The 'orphanages' and industrial schools and mother-and-baby homes of that era were excrescences of a society rotten in multiple ways.

Still, the best defence against it was money.

A few months ago there was a horrendous car-crash in rural Ireland in which several young people died, and the priest at one of the funerals preached a sermon on the theme of how the past 20 years or so have ruined the values by which Irish people once lived. What this had to do with the tragic loss of those young people, I do not know. As far as I understand it, their last hours were spent having a few drinks in the local pub, where they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. I don't see how the rest of us are implicated at all. Still . . . the sermon was highly praised. There must be quite a hankering for the generalised guilt which was such an effective instrument of ideological control in the past. There must be a kind of hankering for the bad old days.

Archbishop Brady took up the theme recently. In his view, "more and more people are fearful of the future, isolated, and make no life commitments" . . . though if he'd ever drunk in Kilburn or Coventry or Springfield, Massachusetts with some of the elderly Irish people who were human exports from the old Ireland, he'd really know what fear, isolation and the incapacity to make life commitments are like. At least if you're in this state, when you have money in your pocket, you have some agency in it. Up to now, it was a state imposed by poverty.

The primate went on to link morality with manners. The nuns used to do the same, especially the more snobbish orders. To be genteel was to be holy. What is our senior churchman, in the face of the human condition, doing, linking the bad language used by Podge and Rodge in a puppet show with "where we are going morally and spiritually"? Ah, I see. He says he wants back "decency and respect". Well, decency is perfectly compatible with potty language. And respect? Respect for his or any authority is not at all the same when you've money in your pocket and you don't need a priest's reference to get a job. Deference, in modern Ireland, has to be earned.

This isn't to say that our nouveau materialism isn't going through a phase of gross ostentation, waking up gross envy in the people who aren't being ostentatious. Sure we've had no practice . . . most of us don't know how to have money and be nice or have money and be good. But at least now we are in a position to find out. At least now, if we don't cherish our infants, educate our children, give to the needy and pay our taxes it will be evident that those are our choices.

But it is perfectly possible that in time, we'll settle down into quite a decent little society.

The churchmen who berate us for our vulgar enjoyment of wealth have never themselves wanted for a meal, never tried to get a child a job, never watched a clever man or woman drink away their cleverness in the absence of an educational or any other opportunity. If they had . . . if they were inured to the lowest of expectations, the way we used to be . . . they'd pause now to thank God for the change that has come over Ireland, and to face the consequences for themselves of us not being sheep and this place not being a vale of tears.