The Ireland of Éamon de Valera's has all but gone, I don't think will ever return. "Dev" combined a sentimental totalitarian outlook with a canny survivor's political instinct and his Ireland was one of heavy censorship, catholic orthodoxy, brutal education and bans on divorce and contraception. Prosperity was sacrificed to economic independence. This was an age when many governments aimed at autarky including the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. But the Irish Free State? Dev wanted Ireland to be content with its "frugality" and "asceticism" and his vision speech on St. Patrick's Day 1943 is now regarded as definitively risible:

 "The Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who . . . were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit . . . whose fields and villages would be joyous with the . . . the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens . . ."

Political theorists call it "Rousseauesque" and his vision is not without a certain appeal to me, but most people prefer BMWs. A Dublin taxi driver put it more brutally: "This country used to be ruled by the f**king Taliban." Half the population voted with their feet and left, one of them was my father-in-law.

Dev's Ireland has been replaced by that of Garret Fitzgerald, who had the enviable achievement of writing a book about what ought to be done and then getting to do it. (Lenin and Hitler did similarly but they weren't democrats.) The book was Towards a New Ireland (1972) and Fitzgerald was Taoiseach for most of the 1980s. I met Fitzgerald and he was more Anglophile in private than he could ever be in public, given the Troubles. The new Ireland is more prosperous, more permissive, more secular and more internationalist than the old, and less obsessed with historical oppression. In the 21st century it morphed into the Celtic Tiger and for a short time had a GDP per capita well above that of the United States. But the pieces of the broken tiger are now being picked up: a 46 per cent fall in house prices and bankruptcies everywhere. Tony O'Reilly, rugby hero, mega businessman and believed to be as rich as Croesus, brought down, it would seem, by devotion to all things Irish - including an independent press and Waterford Crystal. Mostly, people take it as it comes: "I spent all me money on whiskey and beer", as The Pogues' song goes. It has been interesting to see how much better Ireland has handled austerity than has, say, Greece.

Booms come and go, but the permanent and negative legacy of the Celtic Tiger can be seen in its littered landscape. There was rash of building unaffected by any notion of planning or of a proper demarcation between town and country. In England we had the 1935 Restriction of Ribbon Development Act to stop farmers selling the country land next to the road to developers. In Ireland there are "Modernised vernacular dwellings" everywhere: naff bungalows, in other words. Right opposite Yeats Lake Isle of Innisfree: bungalows. On the slopes of Carrauntoohil, Ireland's highest mountain (which I climbed - a tough one): bungalows. At the end of the Dingle Peninsula where the Atlantic breakers meet the land, which should be a wild place: bungalows. Bungalows from which nobody could possibly commute, or shop, or do anything much except at extreme cost to the planet's resources. Bungalows with no pattern to them, like gigantic litter.