THE real surprise about the revelations about lavish spending on foreign trips at Fás is that anybody is surprised by them.

This nation in the past 10 years has acted like a collective Viv Nicholson, the woman who, on winning a fortune on the football pools in 1961, vowed to "spend, spend, spend", in the process going from rags to riches and back again.

It was far from private schools, shopping trips to New York, landscaped gardens, designer kitchens, SUVs, holidays homes in Tuscany, spray-on tans and Hermès handbags that 99.9% of us were reared, which is maybe the reason we so relentlessly pursued these things during the Celtic Tiger boom.

We spent like there was no tomorrow. We accumulated like there was no tomorrow. We borrowed like there was no tomorrow. We talked about what we had bought like there was no tomorrow.

The government was no different. Public spending regularly rose by double-digit percentages a year. In a time when retail therapy replaced traditional religion, the government also used money to soothe every ailment. Annoyed about individualisation? Here's a new tax credit for stay-at-home parents. Public servants feeling left behind by the dotcom millionaires? Have a massive pay hike dressed up as 'benchmarking'. Health service not up to scratch? Throw an extra billion at it and hope for the best.

It's not surprising in this climate that the director general of Fás thought he was 'entitled' to travel first-class. The L'Oréal slogan, 'Because I'm worth it', has virtually become our national motto. Why should we expect public servants to be any different? We all felt we were 'entitled' to the rewards of the boom. How many of us, put in the same situation as Rody Molloy, would have opted to fly steerage rather than first-class, when we didn't have to foot the bill?

Of course, that doesn't justify what went on in Fás. But before we start casting stones, perhaps we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our values. At times, the sheer excesses of the final years of the Celtic Tiger have almost resembled the last days of the Roman empire.

Barely a month goes by without somebody somewhere in the media lazily scoffing at de Valera's famous (infamous?) 1943 St Patrick's Day broadcast in which he dreamed of an Ireland that was home of a people "who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort... whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths, the laughter of happy maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age."

Certainly, de Valera's speech was pretty naive. But which is worse – Dev's idealistic rural nirvana or the Ireland of today that is seemingly obsessed with material things?

We are where we are and there is no going back to the Ireland of the past. That is no bad thing as that Ireland, while not the backward, repressed cliché so often presented in film and literature, certainly was far from ideal. A friend of mine home from the US recently, after reading something I had written in this newspaper about the "grim" 1980s, reminded me that I seemed pretty chipper most of the time he knew me back then and that we weren't all miserable all the time. This is undoubtedly true, but with hundreds of thousands of people forced to emigrate or long-term unemployed, Ireland was not a particularly good place to live.

The improvements since then have been enormous but – perhaps understandably given the wealth that was showered upon us – we all got a little bit greedy along the way.

Nobody in their right mind would seriously welcome the current recession but, now that it's here, we might as well use it as an opportunity to take stock.

For the government and the wider state sector that means the days of free wheeling spending are over. In an ideal world, An Bord Snip Nua – the expenditure review body announced by the government to audit public sector numbers and spending – would have been set up five years ago when things were getting out of control. Perhaps it could have started with the large and mainly unvouched for expenses that TDs are entitled to claim.

But such an aspiration is even more naive than Dev's 1943 vision. Many of the people railing against the outrageous excesses at Fás last week would have been the first to man the barricades protesting against any tough decisions being made at a time when we had budget surpluses of billions of euro. So instead the public sector was allowed to become bloated and extravagant.

Unfortunately, it has taken the worst recession in a generation to end the excess and return some sanity to Fás and the rest of the state sector. Let's just hope it has the same impact on society as a whole.