"In 1981, we were small, ignored, and discriminated against, but look at us now!" More roars. Then, shaking her hair off her shoulders with a flourish, she began lip-synching to the thump-thump-thump of an up-tempo version of "Feeling Good."

"Yeah, freedom is mine!…It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, and I'm feeling good!"

If the New Ireland had a new national anthem, none would be more apt—nor would the performer, in a country where Prime Minister Bertie Ahern's makeup bill is more than six hundred dollars a week. After centuries of grinding poverty, a devastating famine, oppression by both the English and the Catholic Church, Ireland's karmic debt has been paid. A confluence of factors including EU membership, attractive investment opportunities for foreign companies, the sudden irrelevance of the Church, and a highly educated workforce have brought convulsive social and economic change to Ireland and made it the darling of the EU. There is not only peace in the North but a new power-sharing government. Unemployment is effectively zero. Consumerism and workaholism have replaced alcoholism as the national stereotype. More than a million new cars (the Irish drive more Mercedeses per capita than do the Germans) have rolled onto Irish roads in the past five years. Ireland is young (thirty-five percent of the population is under twenty-five), awash in money, overflowing with optimism and vitality, and displaying an invulnerable confidence bordering on arrogance.

According to recent surveys, the Irish are richer and (surprise) happier than any other nationality in the European Union. Things are so good, in fact, that many of those who immigrated to England or North America years ago are now rushing home, and some sixty thousand foreign workers arrive each year to help keep the runaway economy running. Even the unborn can sense Ireland's outrageous good fortune: The number of new babies weighing in at ten pounds or more is up four hundred percent since 1990. Like the scrawny, sickly kid who was bullied and beaten on the playground for all of his youth, Ireland is showing up at the reunion rich and strong and is now the country everyone wants to know.

But there is a price: The past now collides in shocking ways with the present, and Ireland seems to be in the middle of a major identity crisis. The Angelus bells are rung on radio and television for a minute at noon and 6 p.m. each day to remind people to pray to the Virgin Mother, between stories on gangland murders and heroin and weapons seizures. On Lunchtime Choice, a national radio program, listeners from around the country phone in dedications to loved ones in faraway counties ("This one goes out to Theresa in Cork, from Uncle Tim in Donegal, on the occasion of your first Holy Communion"), and episodes of the FX hit Nip/Tuck are dubbed in Gaelic and run on the national Irish-language television station.

Yet for all of Ireland's mad materialism and neocapitalist swagger, elemental things—sea, lake, mountain, bog—are never far away, and it doesn't take long to sense the primal, ancient energy that suffuses this place and which must have fueled the powerful pagan foundations of the culture, now buried under the thinnest topsoil of modernity. In Connemara, for example.