ON Friday, the greatest party in the world begins in South Africa. Sadly, we as a nation will not be present. And after the two years we've had, by God, did we need to be there.

We weren't in Germany for the 2006 World Cup finals. And while that was disappointing, it didn't seem too big a deal at the time.

The Celtic Tiger was still roaring – or so it seemed. People had money in their pockets. Unemployment was non-existent. We were a great little nation.

Back in those good times, I can recall listening, with a lump in my throat, to Morning Ireland as it played a package featuring the 'new Irish' swearing their allegiance to our tiny republic. The nation that had for over 150 years exiled millions of its children was now a haven for hundreds of thousands of economic refugees. Ireland, to use Robert Emmet's immortal line, had taken her place among the nations of the earth. We didn't need to qualify for the World Cup finals to feel good about ourselves.

It hadn't always being the case. The Celtic Tiger wasn't caused by Italia '90, but it would be wrong to underestimate the psychological boost that epic journey gave to the nation.

The 1980s were a wasteland in Ireland. The country was broke. The unemployment crisis seemed to be insurmountable. The "best and the brightest" were leaving. (Something of an insult to those who stayed, but never mind.) Dublin city centre was pockmarked with derelict sites. The message consistently relayed in private conversation and public debate was Ireland was a basket case. We were the sick man of Europe. National morale was on the floor.

Jack Charlton's team didn't solve all those problems, but they allowed us to feel good about ourselves. As well as giving us back the tricolour – which for my whole childhood was about as rarely seen as an All Ireland football final without Kerry – the Irish team gave us a sense of national pride that we had seriously (and understandably) lacked. For once, Ireland the brand wasn't associated with failure.

The joke among those who travelled to Italy in 1990 to watch the games was that they missed the World Cup, such was the sense of carnival that existed back in Ireland. The feelgood factor was to last for the best part of the next two decades.

Until, of course, the financial and economic crisis hit in 2008. Eighteen years of success was probably never enough to overcome 800 years of failure, but it was still surprising how fragile our collective self-confidence was. Virtually overnight, we went from a nation with a ridiculously inflated sense of self-worth ('Irish people are the best craic', 'Irish comedians are the funniest', 'we're buying up the whole of Britain/New York/Bulgaria, 'everybody loves us', 'the world can't get enough Irish culture') to a state of almost self-loathing. Balance has never been a particularly Irish characteristic, but neither of these extremes is desirable.

Reading and listening to the comments of many young people – most of whom had known only good times – it is shocking how many of them see no future in Ireland. To some degree, this attitude is understandable. The whole country seems to be falling apart. The level of unemployment among young men in particular is dreadful. But one wonders did the Swedes or the Finns think the same thing during their crisis in the early 1990s? Do the Greeks think that about their country now?

That sense of fatalism was more grounded in reality back in the 1980s. We had never been successful. There was a genuine feeling – and a complete lack of evidence to the contrary – that unemployment would always be hovering around the 20% mark; that the majority of college graduates would forever make their careers in London or New York.

But the period from around 1995 to 2002 – at which point solid economic fundamentals were replaced by a bubble economy that government/regulators failed to notice – showed that our economic fate did not have to be hopeless. The gains made were a genuine miracle. The country was transformed. People who argue that there is nothing to show from the Celtic Tiger should take a walk around our capital city – places such as the Grand Canal docks – and remember what it was like two decades ago.

It would be stupid to underestimate the challenges that currently exist and extremely insulting to the many currently out of work to do so. But as this column has argued before, the overwhelming negativity of the past 18 months, if allowed to continue indefinitely, runs the risk of exacerbating our problems.

There are currently thousands upon thousands of people, struggling to make ends meet, who have an awful lot more to worry about than a World Cup. That is obvious. But that was also the case in 1990. And one can't help feeling that the country could have done with the distraction and the tonic that would have been provided by the sight of green jerseys walking out onto the pitch of Ellis Park or Nelson Mandela Stadium over the next few weeks. It would be hubris, of the type so common during the boom years, to say that the World Cup is poorer for Ireland's absence. But Ireland is certainly poorer for its absence from the World Cup.

scoleman@tribune.ie