I have to say, though, that it’s wonderful to have returned here after all this time, to have come back once more to the place of one’s birth, one’s own hometown, where, effectively, one was formed. Not that you’d recognise it — not in a million years. At least not at first. For, considering the speed of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades, it makes that of the sixties seem little more than a sluggish crawl. It really all began with the advent of the prosperous nineties. Why, it might even be said that it’s inaccurate to describe the place as a town any more, for what it is, more than anything now, is a satellite suburb of the city of Dublin. With people who, in my time, years ago, would have gone and had themselves a brain haemorrhage if you had dared to suggest that they travel more than twenty miles beyond their home to work now thinking nothing of a four-hour round trip daily. To toil in the many new basilicas of the future, the numerous financial hubs, call centres and silicon-chip compounds which have sprung up in the last decade or so — the brash fortresses of the prosperous new century.
