When the Irish economy (after seventy years of mismanaged independence) finally kicked into high gear, a whole new world sprang into being. This was the world of Brookfield and UCD, of Americanized slang and easy credit, of two-car families and cheap cocaine. This was a world in which, on any given evening, you could watch while a pyjamaed teenage girl with back-combed hair and furry boots jogged across the bleak forecourt of an all-night petrol station to buy a packet of safety razors to cut herself with. For generations our ruling class had been made up of landed Protestants, a genteel pseudo-aristocracy whose melancholy, long, withdrawing roar sounded well into the staid and steadfast 1950s. Their passing left a vacuum, a period of hesitancy and stagnation. Then, in the late 1990s, everything changed, everything thunderously convulsed. Suddenly – overnight, as it were – there was a new ruling class, a vast Catholic bourgeoisie, resident in a six-mile triangle of south County Dublin, who peopled the universities and the courts and the chambers of the government with capable and confident women and men. Laura Haines and Richard Culhane and Conor Harris and all the others were scions of this class – a class that still exists, or seems to.

At least, people will tell you that it still exists. I wonder about this.

As late as the 1980s, certain sociologists were ready to classify Ireland as a Third World country – or, in the recent parlance, a Developing Nation. These days we’re a Developed Nation. We’re a First World country, now. With all the problems that entails.

As the twentieth century ended, we were doing something that no one else in Irish history had ever done. We were figuring out how to be rich.

And it hasn’t ended yet. Ask anyone. Ask me, on a good day. Even as I write this account – even as I labour over this attempt to impose a form on the ineffable, on the defiantly formless – things still seem cosy, smooth, unendangered. Girls still wear their Ugg boots and their Prada perfume. Boys still play rugby for schools in leafy suburbs. Families still have two cars, utility rooms, wine cellars, Latvian maids to clean the kitchen.

We do know it will end, of course, our golden age, our belle epoque. At the edge of everything we do is the knowledge that this cocooned and happy little world, with all its desires and certainties, all its serene ambition, can’t possibly last forever, that it will one day become something different, something that we’ll find, waking one day in prosperous middle age, subtly unrecognizable. There are people, I know, who are waiting for the end, who are ready with their elegies and their funeral rites. But they’re already too late. This world – rich south Dublin at the turn of the twenty-first century – is already over. It ended on the night of 31 August 2004. Even I see this only intermittently. But it’s the truth.