Lyle Lovett has a very funny song called If I Had a Boat: “If I had a boat/ I’d go out on the ocean/ And if I had a pony/ I’d ride him on my boat.” But Lovett’s dreamer has nothing on Ireland. Never mind riding a pony on a boat – has he ever tried riding two horses on a surfboard?

It was Irishman Oscar Wilde who wrote that “the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” Our path to hypermodernity has been the way of paradoxes and it has led us to the contradiction of a rich country in which ever more of the population is too poor to be properly housed.

The acrobatics of the Irish economic miracle are way beyond anything at Cirque du Soleil. On the one hand we’ve surfed the tidal wave of globalisation. Global GDP per capita increased almost fivefold between 1984 and 2024, driven by the digital and biotechnological revolutions, China’s turn to state capitalism and the fall of the Soviet empire.

Ireland rode that wave from the early 1990s onwards. It did not do so flawlessly. It got carried away, did stupid tricks and almost drowned in its great banking and property crisis of 2008-2012. But overall, Ireland is arguably the single biggest winner – certainly among small European nations – of this era.

But we have also ridden two horses at the same time, the American bronco and the European thoroughbred. There was a brief controversy 25 years ago when Mary Harney suggested that Ireland was spiritually closer to Boston to the Berlin. But the reality has been that we mastered the art of........

© The Irish Times