It was a sunny Sunday afternoon on the edge of the world. Two young men sat in a small boat, their drift net cast lazily on the ocean. One of the men, an American born, Cambridge educated farmer called John O'Leary, was telling the other, a Garnish born trawlerman named Michael 'Mitey' McNally, a story about a 6th century monk and the small twin peaked rock that interrupted their view of a seamless blue horizon.

The rock, a 700 foot high monument of nature, is called Skellig Michael - the largest of a group of rocks known as the Skelligs 18 miles off the coast of south-west Ireland. The story John told - how a Celtic monk who lived on the rock brought his life's work, the writings of Christian civilization, to Byzantium - was new to Michael, but it energized his sense of place and gave him hope. If a monk isolated on this lonely pinnacle of rock could, in the words of Thomas Cahill, "save civilization" by copying the stories of Christianity while the rest of Europe warred after the fall of Rome, there was surely hope for Ireland's rich Celtic heritage. Both men were not hopeful that clear day upon the ocean.

When John O'Leary and Mitey McNally speak of their homeland they see a Skellig monk, a past glory enriched by culture, a place of solace, communities of caring, co-operative people. Their Ireland is a rich one, of ballad and song and storytelling, a magic place of saints and scholars - 'a Celtic Homeland'. Sadly their Ireland, for who cares, is dying.

The Celtic spirit is imbued in Irish life by academics and romantics, idealists and intellectuals, ecologists and artists. And it is a major attraction for tourists who have been fed a diet of Celtic legend and mythology, who are easily tempted by the Irish Tourist Board's Céad Míle Fáilte (A Thousand Welcomes). For the majority, especially those who struggle to make ends meet, 'Celtic Ireland' is history, a mythological echo from a far distant past.

When Ireland's commentators, journalists, spin doctors, economists, politicians, bureaucrats and business people speak of their homeland they see a reality that to them represents economic growth, wealth and prosperity. Their Ireland is a rich one, of economy and technology and modernity and growth - a thing they began to call the 'Celtic Tiger' during the boom years of the 1990s. [footnote 1] It is epitomized by people like Michael O'Leary, chief executive of the low-fare airline Ryanair, who received £17 million for his shares after the company went public. This was his reward for his part in the success of the Celtic economy, so that he could spend the rest of his life "in Barbados with a load of babes". Others who have benefited from the success include Smurfit chief executive Ray Curran, who was awarded $2.48 million in 1999 and CIE [footnote 2] chief executive Michael McDonnell, whose salary was increased 80 percent from £100,000 to £181,952 in 2000 - even though the Partnership for Prosperity and Fairness agreed between the state and trade unions to control wages only allows workers a five percent increase.

According to Ray MacSharry, a politician who is credited with creating the policies that led to the economic boom when he was finance minister in the late 1980s, and Padraic White, managing director of the Industrial Development Authority of Ireland during the 1980s when the IDA was fending off criticism of its methods, the Celtic Tiger economy has transformed Ireland and benefited all its people. "Sustained high growth has produced virtual full employment with low inflation, a sharply declining debt burden and large budget surpluses, all helping to complete this virtuous circle."

This is spin doctoring of the finest kind but it gives a false impression. Oh yes capitalism is flourishing making landlords and speculators and developers and business executives and politicians rich beyond their dreams, and there is no shortage of jobs in Dublin and its hinterland. MacSharry and White see Ireland's economic regeneration as a consequence of the change from a predominately agricultural rural economy to an industrial urban society. "In 1922," - when partial independence was gained from Britain - they stated in 2000, "over half the labour force was engaged in agriculture and two-thirds of the population lived in rural areas. Today, just one in ten work on the land, while two-thirds live in towns. And there are encouraging signs that the Irish diaspora, which had left Ireland with perhaps the highest rate of emigration of any European country in the past two centuries, is finally being reversed. Labour shortages in Ireland oblige the state agency FAS to use employment roadshows in Germany and other EU member states to try and recruit workers for unfilled vacancies in financial-services and electronics firms at home. Just over a decade ago, that would have seemed an impossible dream, just like the Celtic Tiger economy."

But what of the people left on the land? For the rural majority - especially those who live on the margins, on the periphery, at the edge of the Western World like John O'Leary and Mitey McNally - the roar of the Celtic Tiger is indeed a distant refrain. Once more it seems Ireland has been partitioned, this time into prosperous Urban Ireland and decaying Rural Ireland, but what of the collective spirit, what of the Celtic soul, what of the Celtic heartlands?

There is a sensual magic about the mountains, valleys, woodlands, rivers and lakes in the west of Ireland. Tens of thousands travel each year to witness their splendor, most unaware they belong to mystical time. If they travel in winter, they are presented with life itself in all its rage and humility, the native people struggling to make a living under gray sodden skies, nature in fury - winds and rain and flooding. In summer they might see a full moon inviting the ghosts of the land to cast their black shadows over an emerald-green and turf-brown landscape that has been denuded by millions of sheep. The traveler, perhaps, might feel intimidated by these amorphous shadows. The native Irish, those whose genes still carry the dreams and hopes of the ancient Celtic tribes, instead take solace from these ghosts for they spark souls and fire spirits. They are the reason for going on. This place holds timeless memories, embedded deeply in the boggy fields and granite rocks. Memories that hold pain as well as joy.

For the people who live there it is very different. These days there isn't much joy in the west of Ireland, but a lot of selfish desire, repressed anger, anxious fear and leavetaking - in every village and townland.

Letterfrack, in north-west Connemara (the hinterland west to north-west of Galway city), is gradually becoming a place of ghosts. Leo Hallissey, headmaster of the National School, fears for the future of a community that has been atomized by debilitating poverty, perpetual disillusionment and the flight of the young - generation after generation. It is his job to make sure the children he teaches realize that they are as much a part of their environment as the flora, fauna and marine life. He encourages the children to celebrate this diversity. Their response, in the form of art, magic and knowledge, describes the reality but only a few of the children see the same vision as their head teacher. Many will leave the area and never return. Connemara boys and girls tend to leave school as soon as they can, at 15 or 16, sometimes before they do their 'Leaving' exams. Once, they would have seen third level education as a ticket out of the place. Now only a proud few go on to third level education. The need to earn money is paramount - even if the work is poorly paid. Then they take the road out, first to Galway or Dublin, then beyond.

Hallissey lives on a hill at the edge of a promontory that juts into a turbulent Atlantic. A few miles inland lies his school, in the village of Letterfrack, at the end of the road that leads from his home. This road stops at a crossroads. Travelers turning left will skirt the Connemara National Park enroute along the road that will take them past a deep fjord known locally as Killary (covered since the mid-1990s with mussel lines), into the village of Leenaun (the location of JB Keane's play The Field, which was filmed in the village and at nearby Ashley Falls) and on towards Maam Bridge and the great lake of the Corrib in which 365 islands mark the days of the year. If they turn right the road will take them to Clifden - the capital of Connemara - past the Twelve Bens mountain range, the magnificent architectural splendor of Kylemore Abbey, and (if they take the contour of the coast) along the Sky Road high above the Atlantic past the ruins of Clifden Castle into the seasonal town.

North-west Connemara is characterized by the seasonal flow that brings tourists, blow-ins (from other parts of Ireland) and non-natives into the area to admire its rugged beauty, to celebrate a culture that takes them away from their lives in the fast lanes of the materialist world. At the peak of this flow there is paid work in the pubs, hostels, B&Bs, restaurants, hotels and shops. Crafts are sold. Storytellers, balladeers and musicians revel in the celebration of their talents. Story, song, music and dance enliven the spirits of lost souls. Lives are shaped by a smile, a look, a word, a melody, a hug, a kiss. Hearts are warmed, minds are stimulated, friendships are formed. Then the darkness of winter descends, the tourists dwindle away, the blow-ins who own most of the properties in the area return to their east coast homes, leaving behind the likes of Hallissey and the families who send their children to his school. It is the same all over Connemara. In the months when the home-owners and tourists arrive buzzing. After they leave it becomes a ghost place.

But this is a superficial impression. Life in Connemara or anywhere along the western seaboard of Ireland is not so easily explained. There is culture, there is craic, there is empowerment. Sadly there is also the gradual erosion of community. "We're pushing people out of the coastal areas," says Hallissey. "We are pretending we are not. We are pushing people into urban areas. We are not looking at the consequences of planning. If you beef up large areas like Galway the implications are that it is going to suck people in from the outside. You'll have a group of satellite towns that will benefit from that but out further from that you're going to leave the countryside bare."

"If there isn't a dramatic intervention, we, like other coastal communities are going to be locked up. We are going to be part time places. We will become an urban based country, part of a big farming syndrome. We'll have a little bit of recreation and our community here will be wiped out. We'll be left with a group of people who can afford to live here and another group of people who will be caretakers. The rest will be gone. We'll have a migratory workforce.

"People have to live on these landscapes and they do feel threatened and have suffered. Not everyone with land is doing badly. Some are doing well but the smaller farmers still haven't got a voice. There's no place where they can articulate their voices. The Irish Farmers Association is driven by business farmers, big farmers, accountant-type farmers. I'm sure they are very efficient and good at what they do but when you see the kind of money that is given to the farming community, the amount of money that doesn't reach small farmers is incredible. We also need to look at our resources and carry out a proper resource analysis. If we have too much sheep why can't we turn them into mutton pies and pates and all sorts of smoked meats which the continentals want. Why aren't we producing high quality organic food out of areas if we want to be labour intensive, to create work for people. There's no reason why we shouldn't be growing a whole range of organic food. Most of the food that is consumed here comes from outside the area. Most of the crafts that are sold here are from outside. If you look at Connemara you must say there is something strange going on here in terms of marketing. We bring a couple of thousand people into the area all wanting to spend money and you have nothing local to sell them. There's something wrong. there. There's no organic units here. There was one Dutch person in the Maam Valley doing cheese. They're closed down."

Life in the rural west is a struggle. It is a life that has not changed much since the middle of the 19th century. Those with inherited jobs/businesses, property and land stay. Those who haven't emigrate. It is a depressing reality that the people of the west are hemorrhaging from unemployment and emigration, and a feeling that is close to alienation from 'modern' Ireland. The population decline since the famines of the 19th century when Ireland had over eight million people (the 32 counties had 5.2 million in 2000) has been devastating and the predictions for the 21st century are not good. A mid-1990s survey revealed that 800 townlands in the province of Connaught (counties Sligo, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway and Clare) were deserted. This desertion of townlands has continued (with the west's 1990 population of 550,000 expected to fall to around 450,000 by 2010) even though net emigration has slowed because of the lack of work in America and Britain and availability of work in the construction and building trades, and in foreign-owned factories. While these figures fall out of peoples' mouths they are based on the reality of life in the west - which is characterized by a demographic statistic that is obvious to everyone, particularly those who live there. The majority of the population is under 18 or over 50.

Tomas O Conaire, principle of the national school in the parish of Ros Muc, in the Connemara Gaeltacht (Irish speaking area) in the south west of county Galway, calculated that four out of five of all pupils who attended the school between 1930 and 1975 have since left the area. He estimated that three out of five emigrated. Inevitably this has led to the gradual erosion of the population. In 1960 O'Conaire's school accommodated 171 pupils and the successive decades have seen the roll decrease to 92 in 1970, 63 in 1980 and 42 in 1990. This is the consequence of the few young families in the area. One father, who lost his only daughter to emigration in 1990, worried that if those who have left don't return "there will be no one here" in 20 years time. "If there is a dance on or anything of that nature, even the youth club, one can clearly see the lack of young people."

The emigration figures county by county between 1986 and 1991 describe the reality and they make grim reading. The population of Leitrim decreased by 6.4%; Roscommon by 5%; Mayo by 3.9%; Sligo by 2.3%; Galway (excluding the county borough) by 1.5%; the overall decline for the province of Connaught was 2%. A study of emigration and unemployment showed that during the period 1956-71 Galway experienced heavier net emigration than the average for the state. Connemara in particular has been in decline for most of the 20th century. In the 60 years up to the 1986 census the population of Connemara halved and has been decreasing by about five% ever since.

Emigration from the west was a constant fact of life throughout the 20th century, apart from the 1971-79 period - when a combination of state investment, European Economic Community membership and economic stability boosted employment in fishing and farming. But this did not last. While membership of the European Union has benefited some sections of Irish society, others have been left impoverished, significantly the mid-western, north-western and border counties - which all share, in slight degrees, the statistics of Connemara. Before Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 unemployment ran at 5%, inflation was slightly less than 5%. Within ten years inflation was out of control, rising to 21% in 1982, then falling to 4% in1986. Throughout the 1980s unemployment rose, reaching a peak of 17% in 1986. The west bore the brunt of these recessions, as the young took to the road for the bus station, railway station or airport. In the 1990s the Celtic Tiger roar energized Ireland's economy - unemployment falling to an average of 8% in the later years of the decade and inflation averaging 3% - but the west of Ireland did not share the benefits. One in six of the workforce in the west of Ireland were unemployed during the 1990s, and while incomes for those with jobs increased (by a quarter of the European Union average) during 1991-97 they did not keep up with increases in the national average.

If you believe the historians, communities in the west of Ireland have suffered for a long, long time as much from their own hands as those of others. The west is now dying and becoming isolated, its seeds returning diseased to the earth or flying away in the hope of finding fertile soil in the east coast conurbation that is surrounding Dublin or in another land. No longer a green field of beautiful, colorful flowers radiating hope and joy, ugly misshapen plants rampage everywhere in the west. Some people, particularly anyone over 50, will tell you they are simply waiting to die. But the reality is different. This is about selfish survival, and those roots are very deep and widespread.

Despite a succession of invasions of tribes from all over Europe, it wasn't until the English, under Elizabeth I and then Cromwell, got hold of the country that Ireland's ancient Celtic fabric began to unravel. The original Celts in Ireland were pagan nomads who had traveled from the far reaches of Europe's mainland - from the Russian Steppes, India, Persia, Greece, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France and the Iberian peninsula - and were well capable of looking after themselves. They came, according to legend, like a river between 5,200 and 2,350 years ago, a trickle at first with the Greek princess Cesair (daughter of Bith, son of Noah), who brought with her 50 girls and three men - Bith, Ladhru and Fintan - forty days after the Flood; then Partholón (son of Sera) came 300 years later with his family and one thousand followers into the Inver river at Kenmare, County Kerry, travelling from the lands beyond the eastern Mediterranean; with Nemed (son of Agnoman of the Greeks of Scythia) came a flow but his peoples' conflicts with the Fomorians - the sea rovers - ended in a great battle that saw three bands of surviving Nemedians flee the island (one group traveling into the northern islands of Europe where they became known as the Tribe of the Goddess Danu - the Tuatha Dé Danaan - learning magic and knowledge, sorcery and cunning; a second into Greece where they were enslaved and were known as the bagmen - the Fir Bolg; and a third into northern England, where they became known as Britons - after their leader Britán Mael); the invasions became a flood with the pragmatic Fir Bolg who escaped their chains and returned to their homeland where they divided it among themselves into five provinces; then the dreamy Tuatha Dé Danaan - who came out of the mountains of modern Leitrim and Longford shrouded in dark clouds, demanding battle or kingship - took by force at the battles of Moytura in south Mayo the kingdoms of the Fir Bolg; and finally the warrior-poet Milesians (the Sons of Míl Espáine) came to fight a succession of battles which culminated with a victory at the Battle of Tailtiu (now Teltown, County Meath), that led to a peculiar agreement. Erui of the Tuatha Dé Danaan told Amairgen, the warrior-poet king of the Milesians: "Warriors," she announced, "this island will be yours forever." The agreement was the first partition of Ireland, Amairgen ruling that the Tuatha Dé Danaan would live underground (where they became the 'Little People' of Irish legend - forever part of the Irish Celtic landscape), leaving the rest to the Sons of Míl. The Milesians fought other Celtic tribes who sought to rule this small island but gradually the ways of all these similar peoples melted into a tradition which made Ireland a 'Celtic Nation'. [footnote 3]

When Christianity reached Ireland - ironically brought by a Anglo-Roman called Patricius who had been kidnapped by Irish raiders probably led by Niall of the Nine Hostages - the Celtic way of life was not suppressed. Instead it flourished with a great deal of "catholic" revisionism by Christian priests who saw themselves as part of a Celtic tradition. Raids and occupations by Saxons and Danes had little effect on Irish ways and Irish laws. Domestic wars simply transferred power. And even the all-conquering Normans could not subdue the Irish Celts. They simply allowed themselves to be assimilated. This all changed, after 450 years of Anglo-Norman rule, in 1654 with an order from the parliament of England. "Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman, or child, is to let himself, herself, itself be found east of the River Shannon." Three and a half centuries ago Celtic Ireland was scattered to the winds and left to die. The Celtic (Brehon) laws by which the people lived were abolished. Anti-Catholic laws were introduced. The Celtic chiefs were killed or exiled. Celtic poets were banished. Land was taken away from people unless they took the Oath of Abjuration - which was an act of apostasy. Many people fled, mostly to Connaught. It was hell east of the Shannon.

Despite colonial oppression, successive generations of Celtic Irish toiled and sweated on the rocky bogland and the barren soil of Connaught, and learned to master the capriciousness of the Atlantic - despite being told they were not allowed to go within a mile of the coastline or fish the rivers and lakes. These laws were contemptuously ignored as people settled near the coast and scattered themselves among the valleys and mountains, beside rivers and lakes. They prevailed, built homelands and established communities which survived on mutual aid, sharing and co-operation. But they were never far from danger. English colonial policy in Ireland dictated a regime of divide and rule, a tactic that will always reveal the weak from the strong, the coward from the hero. Then came the 19th century famines and the west was emptied of its pesky Celts, many dying, many escaping - leaving behind a haunted land. The Roman Catholic Church became a dominant force, riding successfully on the back of nationalism which it had once opposed, and - despite a resurgence in all things Celtic in the period between Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the Easter Revolution in 1916 - the churches (catholic and protestant) took hold of peoples' spiritual lives. The Celtic spirit began to weaken as it was pushed further westwards while the new Irish 'Free State', minus six north-eastern counties, struggled to survive in a fiercely competitive 20th century. Native Irish speakers, who fought for a national electronic media in the 1960s, saw their dreams come true but Irish speaking areas were shrinking and allowing English to be spoken. Only in west Belfast, where some of those escaping the famine had fled, has the Celtic culture and language thrived.

Writing in the period before Ireland broke free of the British Commonwealth in 1948, Sean O'Faolain considered the impact of the Celtic tradition on the Irish people, noting that the legal, moral and social laws and codes give an "old atavistic individualism which tends to make all Irishmen inclined to respect no laws and though this may be socially deplorable it is humanly admirable, and makes life more tolerable and charitable and easy-going and entertaining". It has, it seems, been this way for as long as the English have known the Irish and has now become a tried cliché, yet it goes a long way to explain why the people of the west have become selfish. Survival is and has for a long time been more important than anything - including kinship - just like it was in the days of the Celts.

The Irish are known the world over as erudite, friendly, vivacious and warm, and woe betide anyone who should say they are capricious and selfish, cynical and negative, and frequently violent, yet that is now a prevailing characteristic of the "new" Irish. Social background seems irrelevant because it is cynical, selfish desire that drives the individual in modern Ireland. The "individualism" inherent in the Celtic spirit was rooted in nature and community, and latterly in nationalism as successive generations of Irish sought to control their own destinies. The Celts saw themselves as people of a holistic ecological, physical and spiritual world. To them it was all one world - a world they were born to defend. The modern Irish, whose genes have more in common with Saxon, Angle, Norse, Norman, Anglo-Norman and Pict antecedents and latterly Europeans of many cultures than the 'Celts of the Invasions', exhibit their individualism in shows of apathy, competitiveness, cynicism, ignorance, racism and sectarianism.

We do not see these characteristics because they are hidden behind a sincere, smiling, Venetian-like mask. Kieran Allen summarized this change when he wrote, "the entrepreneur has replaced the rebel as the hero of modern society". In 1993 I was confronted with the cynical cutting edge of this new society by the environmental director of an industry confederation. "Do we want to be organic farmers and waitresses or do we want to get on with it?" By 2000 the edge had been sharpened. In Dublin I was told by a university educated twenty-something to "get back where you belong" - presumably meaning Belfast where I was born in 1956. (Belfast sits astride counties Antrim and Down in the north-east of Ireland, and like the rest of the six counties known as Northern Ireland is now regarded by many southern Irish people as a separate state.) Racism and sectarianism is now commonplace in Dublin - Ireland's cosmopolitan city. It had always existed in the west. Insularity does that to the soul.

But what about those who by their own nature are not cynical or selfish or fascist, who are altruistic and caring and sharing? They are the dispossessed but they are not weak. Tom Collins sees the nature of the society which is emerging amongst the dispossessed on the fringes of Irish society as "one which has a renewed interest in traditional Irish society, but has rejected its caricature; it equates personal growth with social commitment; it espouses spirituality but discards religiosity; it is committed to democracy but distrusts politicians; it has fundamental commitment to work but is likely to be unemployed; it is locally committed but globally oriented; it is coming from the outside in rather from the inside out". Yet it is hard to see this if you are not among the dispossessed, because few of us take the time to see what is happening around us. We are all too busy surviving.

Since the early 1990s Ireland has become a building site. A crane towers over every church and scaffolding seems to climb like ivy over every other building. Pubs do a roaring trade, especially at weekends even in places where people and money are not constant companions, cornershops are being refitted as small supermarkets and the buses and trains are always full. The place is truly booming, it appears to the casual traveler. It is possible to look at places like Kilkee on the west coast of Clare and believe that the economic boom euphemistically called the Celtic Tiger is actually improving the quality of peoples' lives. You have to scratch the surface to see the reality.

Behind the facade of the modern bungalow and the glamorous hotel is the stark reality that almost a quarter of the total population is functionally illiterate, that one in six are living, according to the United Nations, in "human poverty", and that Ireland has the highest rate of poverty in the western world after the USA. As Robbie Smyth put it: "The squalid reality of the Celtic Tiger is low paid workers, an underfunded health service, underfunded public transport, house prices out of the reach of ordinary citizens, a chronic shortage of local authority housing, a rampant heroin crisis, rural poverty and environmental deprivation in urban working-class areas."

Kilkee looks prosperous because it is one of the recipients of a IR£110 million state initiative called the Seaside Resort Renewal Scheme. Launched in 1995 it allowed speculators, usually Dublin-based, to write off their investment on new holiday homes, hotels, restaurants and leisure facilities in 15 designated seaside resorts. Although the building of holiday homes in these resorts brought badly needed work to the local tradespeople (skilled workers took home at least £300 a week, unskilled workers £200), the sudden flush of development pushed up the price of land. In May 1997 a site on the northern side of town sold for £50,000. A decade earlier a site in Kilkee would have cost £10,000. The cost of building these houses averaged around £45,000 but they were sold (long before construction began, usually to Dublin-based companies) for up to £100,000 - taking the big money out of the town, leaving a legacy of inflated values for prime development land. A young married couple in Kilkee hasn't a hope of buying or even renting a property because the jobs don't exist that would pay them the kind of money they would need to afford to stay in their home town.

It is the same in Galway city which has benefited from the building boom and successive yearly increases of foreign and native tourists. It is thriving with hotels and restaurants and B&Bs but wages for those not working in manufacturing or the public sector are low - between £2.50 and £4.00 an hour - and living in Galway is expensive. A rented three-bedroom house costs about £500 a month. The average cost of a new house in the state is approximately £115,000 yet the average cost in rural Connemara is £80,000. In Galway city you wouldn't get much change from £125,000 for a second hand house, in Dublin £160,000. Not surprising then, that house prices in Ireland are the second most expensive in Europe.

When the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Secretary Peter Cassells stated that many people "cannot afford to buy or rent a house anymore" he was also admitting that employment itself is not the answer, and that the trade unions (which have a 520,000 membership - among the highest per worker in Europe) have failed them because the partnership agreement with the government has not benefited workers. The ICTU, in a document about the partnership, recognize that "ownership of capital, especially large amounts of it, still gives individuals and families the most powerful advantage in reaching the top rung of the ladder and staying there," but that most people worked at the bottom rung of the economy and were "excluded from economic participation". Workers in this rung "rise early and queue for the first bus to get to work while most people are still asleep. They clean offices and cook breakfasts, make up hotel beds and prepare sandwiches ... work in clothes factories and launderettes and do a whole range of essential jobs without which the economy would grind to a halt".

Much of the low-paid work that exists all over Ireland is in agriculture, retail, catering and services, and in the seasonal service and tourist industries. There are also 290,900 public sector workers, made up of civil servants, nurses, police, teachers, etc, and their pay is not so hot either - as the nurses tried to plea when 96 percent voted to take to the streets in what was the first test of the government's fiscal policies in 1999. This was followed by 1,000 people marching through Dublin to promote the Share the Wealth campaign, organized by the National Anti-Poverty Networks. Since 1999 campaigns demanding a share of the Celtic Tiger wealth and strikes to demand fair wages have continued, as the myth of prosperity for all has been exposed by the government's failure to spend money on new housing, adequate childcare and healthcare, better public transport and empowering education while wage increases have been refused.

Yet, in the west, these are the only jobs on offer; that, or part-time work or unemployment or destitution. People only survive because they are able to do odd jobs for cash which is not declared for tax - the black economy. Incomes for the poorest sections of society, particularly in the west, are derived from social welfare payments, headage (sheep) payments, part-time wages and profits from casual trade activities.

Agriculture, which used to provide work for two out of five people in the 1950s, employed one in ten by the 1990s - a statistic MacSharry and White believe is a mark of progress. State figures show that an average of 5,000 left farming every year during the 1990s. Several studies showed that many farmers lived on incomes of less than £100 a week and that some farming families got £172 per month, leaving three out of four farmers dependent on social welfare for income support. There is a strong dependency on farming yet most work holdings of less than 30 acres, of largely poor quality land.

Mike Mahony drives the 7.45 Galway-Limerick national bus as far as Ennis in County Clare every night from Monday to Saturday. He changes over to the Galway bound bus from Limerick and is finished sometime between a quarter and half past ten. He starts work at three in the afternoon, taking a school run to Oranmore - just outside Galway city. During the summer - July 1 to September 1 - he does the run from Galway to the Cliffs of Moher in Clare and back. It's a job he does to make ends meet, taking home £190 a week - a rate of pay unchanged since the early 1980s. Negotiations are expected to see the pay rise to £230. Despite the pitiful pay it's a job he enjoys. The older drivers are not doing it for the money, he asserts. "It's the life, we like the life. It's much the same lifestyle as if you were putting bottoms in buckets, its gets into your system, into your blood, driving around everyday. I imagine I'd die if I had to stay in one place for too long. Summer time is okay, but it's hard in the winter with the rain and the dark." Like many of the drivers working out of the Galway depot he is a small holder, running 24 green acres and 34 acres of mountain commonage of the family farm a few miles outside Gort in south Galway. He keeps a few horses on the better land and gets a few grand from the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. An unmarried man in his mid-forties, the second of a family of seven, he has been a bus driver since 1980, after joining CIE as a conductor in 1978. "The Celtic Tiger would make you mad," he says. There's no soft money to be made if you are working class. "They must be laughing at us, those politicians up in Dublin. They must think we are awful fucking eejits. We elected these people and it says something about us, but it's over now."

When Eamon O'Cuiv, grandson of Eamon de Valera (founder of the Fianna Fail 'Soldiers of Destiny' party which dominated Irish politics from the 1930s until the 90s), was elected to Dail Eireann (Irish parliament) in 1992 as a Connemara (Galway West) Fianna Fail TD he said, "politicians are assessed on whether we can provide houses for people, jobs, schools, transport services, hospital beds and so on" yet seemed to feel this would be something beyond the scope of the present political system in Ireland. "When all the figures are put together at the end of the day, we're judged on how we provide the basic necessities to the community and that is something we must concentrate our minds on once again."

Ten years later, O'Cuiv is among a small band of TDs who still have public credibility after a decade which saw the state prevaricate over how it should punish politicians who had received payments from developers and industrialists, and profits grow almost two and a half times faster than wage increases. By the end of the decade, Ireland's "economic performance" was being applauded and envied in equal doses by western industrialists and politicians. Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Irish Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) were telling the Irish government to control public sector pay and keep the minimum wage low - the key to the success of the Celtic Tiger.

While the urbanized east coast expands, with Dublin at its centre, the rural west shrinks with Galway at its center. This is what we see when we observe Dublin and Galway. We see thriving centers. We do not see illiteracy or poverty unless we are attuned to it. We do not see the young leave, unless we are family, we only see them return in droves at Christmas or Easter, flooding airports, bus and railway stations and seaports. We do not see the difference between the rich and the poor unless we follow them home to their houses. We cannot tell the rich landowner from the poor farmer because dress is no longer a criteria of status. The dispossessed have become living ghosts in a land that is now characterized by apathy, selfishness and greed. Why has it become like this?

Trained as a teacher, Leo Hallissey joined Letterfrack school in 1980 after a period as a primary school consultant to the Dublin publishers Gill & Macmillan and a few years unemployed. In 1990 he was made headmaster. Like many in his profession he teaches large classes, a problem in itself. Hallissey however sees deeper problems with the educational system. "You can't build an education system on a bad foundation. We have a bad foundation. Our per capita spending is among the worst in Europe. The pupil-teacher ratio is the highest in Europe. Any major targeting of resources must go to the primary schools. I'm saying this not because I'm in it. It's the only truly democratic part of the system because everyone goes there. Also we are far too exam driven. We are not into creating healthy young people."

In the west of Ireland we are creating many young people who see no hope for the future. People are dying from not belonging to a land that should be able to sustain them but hasn't the infrastructure or the politics to bring about change. "You can't eat the scenery," has been a constant lament for generations. People have lost their sense of place and their connection with the earth. It is terminal alienation. Young male suicide has become a stigma in Irish society. 88% of suicides in Ireland are male and they are very common in the rural west, despite the lower population density. What sort of society allows its bright people to kill themselves? The young people who kill themselves are sensitive, caring, intelligent. People ask what was so wrong that the young person killed themselves, they never ask what is wrong with the area - with society. Psychiatry tells us that suicides kill themselves because they do not want to partake in modern society. However, the academic analysis is irrelevant. The stories are relevant. The causes are much more relevant. Hallissey blames the pressures society puts on young people, the methods and means of education. "We are not developing young people. We are not producing creative thinkers. We are not creating the kind of people who are going to have the ability to make the major changes. We're turning out units."

Hallissey is adamant that he has the credentials to make these criticisms, which do not come "from sitting on the fence". He is a director of FORUM (an enterprise group started by intellectuals at University College Galway), a member of the Heritage Council, a primary teacher and runs a rare entity - a successful, rural-based environmental group. "My criticisms are based on a hard reality. I'm looking at falling numbers in my school. I'm looking at dwindling numbers in my parish. I'm looking at excessive amounts of pressure being put on young people to leave this area. The excessive amounts of pressure are land prices, lack of accommodation and a lack of work and I mean worthwhile, long term work."

In a quarter of a century the school population of Letterfrack has fallen by one in five, from 250 pupils in 1975. In nearby Leenaun there are 12 pupils in school. The numbers are dropping because families are moving away but even those with an education are not going on to college. Hallissey questions the impact local employers are having on school children. "The season here is getting longer. The hotels are opening in March up til Xmas. So if you want to keep your summer job you have to service it at the weekends, so kids who should be concentrating on school are working. They are working for small money. When you are young small money appears to be big money. All the basics are paid so you have a disposable income of £40 to £50. When you are quite young that appears to be a fair amount of money. It gives them a false sense of security. It certainly doesn't allow them to fulfill their potential within the educational system."

When teenagers do go on to third level education, the majority realize fairly quickly that the pursuit of knowledge must be sacrificed to the cause of mammon. It now seems common to find young people lacking curiosity - an attitude Hallissey says must frustrate lecturers. "The attitude is we're here to get the facts, regurgitate them to you older people so that we can get a safe job. There's a lot of that driving the educational force. We need to look at the relationship between education and business. If we are looking at politicians and business we need to look at education and business, and the fact that we are locking the two together in a very unhealthy way."

Hallissey also sees technology as a disempowering force in education. "I don't see the technology as being as free and inspiring as people make out to be. It's a totally overrated experience. In education the technology needs to be run by educationalists not technocrats. At the moment the technocrats are intimidating the educationalists because the educationalists don't have the jargon in the subject area." The state's failure to recognize what Hallissey sees means that despite his optimism nothing will change. There is a fatalism in his voice when he tells the story of his village and its hinterland, and talks about the choices the children who attend his school must ultimately make.

Community doesn't matter when it becomes a place the young must abandon if they are to survive in the world. It wasn't always so. Today the young yearn to leave, to go to a university or to further education, or to find work in the big city - and there is not much difference between that desire and the emigration that was forced on the rural population. Once they were not so keen to leave their communities.

The Irish are known the world over Brought up in Garnish on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, during the 1950s and 1960s, Mitey McNally's story needs no embellishment. His is the same as many people who grew up with a sense of community, a sense of place - never wanted to leave but struggled to see how anything could be changed. If you've never been to the Beara Peninsula, to any west of Ireland coastal or rural community or even to a closely-knit urban community, it's hard to imagine what Mitey means when he talks about a sense of place, identity and belonging, why it means so much to be able to return or stay in the place were you were born, knowing that the quality of life is not a commodity to be bought off the shelf. As successive generations of native Irish are jettisoned into the urban sprawls of Dublin, London, New York, Boston and beyond into every corner of the planet, seeking employment and security, place and identity become nostalgic obsessions.

"There was a great sense of pride in the communities. We used to do the usual meitheal (mutual aid) stuff, cutting the turf, saving the hay. The old man was always away at work at the county council so we had no horse and this was a great disadvantage to us. All the neighbors would come in, mow the hay for us or they'd come out and plough the garden - and in return we as young lads would go away and do some other work for them. We were self sufficient, the usual - spuds, carrots, parsnips - because we had no other choice. The ironic thing about it at that time was that we had grub for the animals and grew very, very little for ourselves. Like people ages ago they set very little vegetables and used basically live on spuds, turnips, salt mackerel, and sometimes in April we'd kill an animal - and you'd get a fresh bit of meat. The most prolific sort of bartering at that time was for example if we were killing an animal - maybe a pig. We would give our neighbors all a bit of fresh pork. At that time practically every family had a pig and invariably would kill it at different times. So those people we gave a bit of fresh pork to would in turn give us a bit of pork back. I remember as a kid getting hay seed from people. If you were short of hay seed for setting down after the spuds you'd go to a neighbor, the same with oats and short corn. If you ran out of spuds you could go over to a neighbor that might have a surplus of a few bags. There was Kerr Pinks, and the Banners. The Banners were about 90% (percent) water but they set them solely for the animals. The Kerr Pinks were for the family. They'd set big gardens - about an acre. The only thing we would buy was big 12 stone bags of flour and we might get one of those every month. We always had the use of maybe 30 acres but then again at that time the land was poor. I suppose three or four acres were arable but they used to plough the fields with a horse so there were a lot of places accessible which wouldn't be accessible now with machinery. The amount of animals we could carry on the land was very, very limited. The only fertilizer they might put out in the sixties was a bag of guano on the meadow for a little bit of fodder for the wintertime. It was imported from South America. There were no fertilizers so people had to have low stocking levels. There was shag all money in farming then anyway."

A fisherman by nature and a trawlerman by profession, it was the diabetes that forced Mitey off the boats and trawlers and the thought of languishing on the dole that took him, after a spell traveling around France, to Paris during the summer of 1987. "This was the great turning point in my life. I went into a flat in Paris owned by a Muslim - a fella from Tunisia - and there I picked up and read Brian Friel's Translations. I put the question to myself having read it: what am I doing in Paris? Then I realized. I've always had a great love of place but I could never really cement it or gel it together. After having read Translations I think I found it." Reading Translations brought it back home to Mitey; his place in Garnish, his life as a subsistence farmer and fisherman. "It was that sense of identity - a confirmation of identity, that I really and truly belong in this place; it's the landscape, the history and the tradition that is written into it - there to be seen. We were never educated to stay here and love the place. Even if they'd put something like Translations into the 'Leaving' when I did it in 1973 that would have given us the power and a sense of place; we've never been educated to take root here or plant our feet in the landscape or in the ocean."

The indelible impression Translations left on Mitey not only made him realize that his sense of place and identity was being warped, it made him ask questions about the social and political policies being pursued by the bureaucrats and politicians in Dublin. Like the sudden flush of dawn's light and the emotional awakening that comes with the promise of a new day, Mitey - for the first time since his childhood - was experiencing the warmth a state of wonderment imbues in the senses. You only have to wake up early in any of the townlands and villages on the edge of the Beara Peninsula to understand why Michael McNally packed his bags, chirped au revoir to Paris, and headed home, the landscape of his birth burning an unforgettable image in his brain. He would never a gain allow himself to forget what a sense of community, identity and place means to the human spirit and why these seemingly innocuous emotions form the basis for existence and life. Mitey now keeps a small farm in Garnish, which looks out on Skellig Michael. He lives on the dole occasionally taking small jobs to make ends meet and doesn't think much of the Celtic Tiger.

It is possible today to look at the west of Ireland and not see what Mitey sees, or know how he feels, how Leo Hallissey feels, how the dispossessed feel. If - when you visit the Beara Peninsula, the Burren of Clare, Connemara's rugged coastline, the sweep of Sligo, or the Donegal highlands - you see nothing more than a turbulent Atlantic, a rain-shrouded mountain range, sparse rocky bogland, a barren land punctuated by patches of brown and green vegetation, the occasional tree and shrub, a dwelling dotted here and there and capricious weather patterns, you could be forgiven for believing that no one lives there, that this is a forgotten place - a place of ghosts - a place that is locked up until the blow-ins and tourists arrive. You would be right.

The Celtic spirit remains in the souls of people like Leo Hallissey and Mitey McNally but they fear for the future of a country still regarded by others as the world's remaining 'Celtic Nation'. Much of Ireland's Celtic history exists as mythology - written by Greeks, Romans and Christian monks, albeit based on oral legend and academic musings. The notion that modern Ireland is still a Celtic Nation is also a myth. It is a myth now being perpetuated by the same people who manufactured the myth of economic prosperity for all to sell an image of Ireland to people who believe in mythology. The reality is a shimmering mirror of fading ghosts. Celtic Ireland is now a desire that resides in the ambitions of those, like Hallissey and McNally, who want to see a return to the Celtic way of life. They want to go home.

- Robert Allen

This editorial is an extract from Ireland Unbound: A Celtic Odyssey - a book which examines modern Irish society in the context of its Celtic Atlantic culture and suggests a vision for an Ireland that is self-sufficient and not dependent on corporate and British capital and rule.