A friend of mine who dabbles in Jung is always telling me that people's true strength lies in their dark sides; the kinds of things we don't like about ourselves and the kinds of things we push down. Apparently, paradoxically, the thing we think that is the source of all our problems often contains the solution.

But apparently, instead of ignoring our dark side, which is the tempting thing, we must have the courage to delve into it. I hasten to add that I may not have picked this up exactly right so no Jungian scholars need write in to correct me. Just push your annoyance down into your unconscious and let it out in some other inappropriate way.

Anyway, our dark side right now is the Celtic Tiger years. Day-in, day-out, privately and publicly, we beat ourselves up about the boom. We range from mild embarrassment to violent self-hatred about it. And it doesn't help that everywhere you go there are reminders. Many people wake up to the legacy of the boom every morning, if indeed they have slept at all worrying about their negative equity. But all of us see it everywhere we go in the landscape of the country. Things that seemed to make perfect sense a few years ago now just look like monuments to our ridiculousness. Social occasions nowadays often involve people trying to outdo each other with tales of woe and foolishness. We luxuriate in how cocky and overoptimistic and egomaniacal we all were and we pleasure ourselves by feeling foolish and wretched.

But maybe, just maybe, we should learn a few lessons from the boom. Let me stress first that I am not in anyway trivialising the hardship that many people are going through now because of the economic downturn. But rather than just shove that decade down into a shameful black pit, perhaps we should try and be more measured about it. Because another boom, in some way, is what we all aspire to -- albeit this time, hopefully, managed more responsibly.

There was definitely a certain confidence about Ireland in the boom. For the first time, we believed we could be as good as other people -- as sophisticated as the French, as stylish as the Italians, as brash as the Yanks, as posh as the English. Maybe we actually weren't all those things, but we certainly didn't labour under the inferiority complex that blighted us before then, and that has come back with a vengeance since. We were also an intensely social people during the boom. Life moved outside the house. We congregated wherever we could in gaggles of energy. Women met up and had their dinner during the day and called it going for lunch. We even discovered a meal between breakfast roll and lunch that you could eat outside of the home, and you could drink with it too, at noon. Drinking during the day is one of Ireland's great guilty pleasures and now we had a cover for doing it when there wasn't a wedding or a bender going on. While women had previously given up socialising outside the home at a certain point in their lives, and started joining each other for cups of tea instead, they now began to meet each other for Cosmopolitans and gossip, whatever their age. The Irish had always loved a get together, and now we discovered you could get together in between funerals and Christmas and it could still be fun. We discovered you didn't have to be a posh person or for it to be someone's confirmation to go to a restaurant. It didn't even have to be the weekend (which ran from Thursday to Monday).

And as much as some people blame the boom for the death of communities, in many ways the unmentionable feline breathed life into our communities. Previously Mass, the supermarket, the GAA club and the pub had been our public gathering points. Now we had restaurants that weren't forbidding and cafes that weren't just filled with students, artists and the unemployed. We had meeting places like we'd never had before and many of them were very beautiful "spaces", as we called buildings and rooms back then.

This whole social mood of openness spilled out on to the streets too. There was a buzz around Irish towns. It even seemed as if the weather got better. We walked around more, and spent more time outdoors and bumped into each other and buzzed off each other.

I remember a temporarily returned emigrant once telling me what he felt the difference was between his life on west coast USA and life here. He came home for a few weeks and got off the plane in the light trousers and T-shirt and the first thing he had to do was put on a few more layers, hunch over and close up his body against the rain and cold, before -- wait for it -- going to a funeral.

For a while Ireland wasn't like that anymore. We weren't so covered up, we weren't physically closed, clutching ourselves, and we weren't always going to funerals. The boom rejuvenated Irish society. And while it may have seemed at times like something that was enjoyed by other people, it all trickled down too.

You'd wonder now if we couldn't reach into the dark place that the boom has become to tap some of that confidence and that social, public buzz again, that time, when everyone became, in their own way, a class of a boulevardier. They say we should take to the streets like the Greeks. But maybe we should just take to the streets like the Irish. Maybe it's time to get back out there. And maybe in rebuilding our society, we can rebuild our local economy.

Most communities in Ireland became nicer places to be during the boom years. The butcher mightn't have gone full blown artisan but he made a bit more of an effort. The local convenience store started doing nice coffee and freshly baked buns. Nice little Italian places sprung up in neighbourhoods, the local Indian became a bit classier and got rid of the flock wallpaper. Environments became lighter and airier and more open, and cleaner. And all that will be gone if we don't support it.

Already the shutdown is happening on main streets everywhere and even the places that are surviving aren't bothering with the lick of paint and are starting to stick coloured bits of paper with the lunch specials in the window, instead of the nice trendy blackboard they used to use. Things are becoming more run down, more garish, more drab and depressing.

And more than all that, people are losing their jobs too. The vast majority of people in this country don't work in your Googles or your Ebays, they work in Irish companies and local businesses, servicing the rest of us in our daily needs, and more than that, our daily wants. And if we stop wanting, if we stop that flow of energy that used to course through our communities, our streets and our shops and hairdressers and cafes, then slowly, things will continue to wither and more and more people will lose their jobs. And it's all circular, so the more people lose their jobs the less money goes into the eco-system of the community, and so the circle gets smaller and smaller.

Again, of course, there are lots of people now existing hand-to- mouth, who have no discretionary income to keep the circle going. But there are far, far more people who have a few quid. Lots of people are obsessively saving. They worry, understandably, for their futures. They worry about legacy debts that they feel they will never pay off and they worry that their pay cheque may stop anytime. In a way, having gone too far in one direction, we have reverted to pre-boom type, that Catholic notion of putting off any kind of enjoyment of life in favour of rewards later on. So you save and save and save and salt it all away and then you die and everybody raises an eyebrow when they read in the Sunday Independent that you were a farmer or a schoolteacher and you left behind €1.2m for your children to scatter after all your careful gathering.

There is an argument that having previously known too little about economics and its consequences, we now know too much, and it has paralysed the country. And now we wait, with bated breath, for things to change, so that we can start living again. Well, here's two bits of news. That could be a while, so you might be better off deciding to live a little now, today. The friend I mentioned above tells me today is all we have.

And secondly, life begets life, growth begets growth and recovery begets recovery. So the domestic economy of this country is not going to recover by everyone lying terrified under their beds repenting for their sins and clinging to their few quid. The only way out of this, it seems, is for us to delve into our dark side a little, for us to exercise a little bit of that recklessness we showed for 10 years.

So go on. Live a little. And, who knows, it might just keep your neighbour in a job and allow him to live a little.

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