Romantic Ireland's dead and gone... but is that really so bad?

Back in 1913, the poet WB Yeats famously lamented: "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone/ It's with O'Leary in the grave."

Actually, it wasn't dead and gone at all: but the period before the First World War was one of quite bustling prosperity - a kind of mini-Celtic Tiger before the term was coined.

In times of rising prosperity, people get very interested in making money and poets don't like that. Because it doesn't seem very romantic. What seems romantic is starving in a garret for one's art and dying young of TB.

The actor John Hurt - a known Hibernophile - is rather in the same romantic mould as Yeats. He, too, laments that "romantic Ireland's dead and gone", in his fashion. He fell in love with Ireland, he said this week, because it was a simple, classless society, where everything was easy and open. But the Ireland he came to love is disappearing: the artistry is being replaced by prosperity and, if the Irish get any fonder of money, the place he once knew will be unrecognisable.

We can see where Mr Hurt is coming from, up to a point. There was a simple Bohemianism - almost a James Joycean flavour - about Dublin up to 20 or 30 years ago. You could follow in the footsteps of the great Dublin characters without feeling that you were on a Heritage Trail. I personally felt a wave of disgust when I first observed that there are now "Guided Literary Pub Crawls" around the Joycean pubs of Dublin.

God Almighty, I responded, what is the world coming to when people have to get the Tourist Board to organise their pub crawls for them? And I thought of all those lovely old pubs around Dublin - recorded minutely in Harry Kernoff's splendid painting, A Bird Never Flew on One Wing - whose most charming characteristic was that they were really rather down at heel, and the artists (and piss-artists) drinking there hardly had a penny to their name. These taverns now seem so flashy and shiny that all authenticity is lost, and one could be in any 'theme' pub in almost any city of the world.

It isn't just nostalgia, either, to say that people were, essentially, often nicer to one another in times gone by. A new study just out in Britain claims that in the 1930s, a period of mass unemployment and grinding depression, Britons were actually happier and more content than they are today. Because they really did have that Coronation Street sense of community which has largely disappeared in a much more movable society, where half the people spend half the time in France, Spain or the Canary Islands.

People today are not as pleasant to one another in everyday encounters because prosperity has made them more aggravated. In Dublin, most of the populace seems more absorbed with texting and talking on their mobile phones - include half the guards outside Government offices - than on interacting with those they meet face to face. (The French have done the civilised thing: they confiscate mobile phones at the entrance to restaurants.)

What I personally don't like about modern Ireland is the interminable reiteration of rules and regulation, whether on buses, in public places, in taxis, on motorways, in airports. Don't smoke. Fasten your seat belt. Watch your speed. Don't drink and drive. Don't speak to the driver. Don't leave unattended luggage. It's a crime to hit a woman. Practise safe sex. Racism is against the law. It's an endless stream of bossiness directed at the citizen - well-meaning enough but still creating a cumulative feeling of being harangued by some nagging scold in authority.

Social historians often say that the 1950s, in Ireland, were 'authoritarian' because De Valera's Ireland was ruled with such an iron hand by Church and State, but paradoxically, at an everyday level, life was easy-going. The most prevalent public crime in Dublin in the 1950s was bicycle-stealing. There were no general notices telling people to get in line and behave themselves. People were generally better behaved because (a) they couldn't afford not to be and (b) the cultural traditions did a good job of inhibiting bad behaviour in public.

So one can sympathise with Mr Hurt in some of his responses to modern Ireland, and share some of his regret for the passing of the auld sod, as it was. There was a sweetness about old Ireland - as well as the harshness chronicled by the school of Frank McCourt - that is indeed passing.

And yet, overall, it would be wrong - profoundly wrong - to regret the prosperity that Ireland has experienced in recent years. The most reprehensible aspect of Eamon de Valera's political stewardship is that, over the whole period in which he prevailed, the country bled people. It was an annual haemorrhage of emigrants, consisting, quite often, of the brightest and the best. (How different things might have been had Michael Collins lived, for Collins was passionately concerned with the prosperity of the country and the people.) But Dev was, in a way, the ultimate romantic: he sought political purity and the traditions of the Gael.

But no society can thrive and prosper where so many of its young people have to leave to make a living. Even the Catholic Church, which had a long tradition of respecting poverty - "Holy Poverty" was venerated as a virtue - was extremely alarmed, by the late 1950s, by the drop in population caused by emigration and the lack of economic activity.

In the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, emigration resumed, often with great bitterness among younger Irish people, who felt they had been educated to a high level, only to be left without job prospects in their own country.

The Celtic Tiger prosperity really did turn all that around, and stemmed the haemorrhage of people: and if that is all it ever did, we should, as they used to say in auld Ireland, be on our bended knees in gratitude.

But of course prosperity has its downside, one of which is to create a more class-conscious, or status-conscious society. As soon as you have wealth, some people will become richer than others, and some people will become much richer. Nostalgic old Communists from East Germany can often be heard grumbling away along the same lines: people were content with little in the days of the DDR, because they had equality. Yes, if you don't mind everyone (save Party officials, of course) living at a level of subsistence, with no choices whatsoever in purchasing power.

Inequality is an inevitable and necessary concomitant of a free and prosperous society. And the more prosperous Ireland becomes, the more those social divisions will grow.

But it is still better than the prospect of every small town worrying if it can muster a football team, or every locality wondering if the schools will close down - because all the bright young people are going away.

Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of the Ireland that John Hurt first loved, and that of today is in that wonderful lyric, On Raglan Road. When Patrick Kavanagh wrote that poem, Raglan Road was a charming old avenue in Dublin 4 which had seen better days, and where penniless artists had their bare bedsits.

But to be dwelling on Raglan Road today, you would need ?3.5 million to purchase a house there.

Something is lost, to be sure: but a heck of a lot is gained just the same.