Dun Laoghaire (Dunleary), a booming seaside suburb of Dublin (it's easy to miss the fact that the capital has a maritime setting), is a long way from Connemara. Its marina is Ireland's largest, and though it can't hold a navy, until just a decade ago this was where tens of thousands set off on mammoth ferries to find work in the United Kingdom. The ferries still run, but today the port is better known for the eight hundred berths that have recently been added to give the country's new millionaires a place to moor their pleasure craft.

"When I think of Ireland in the 1980s, I think of it in black-and-white and always raining," Marian Keyes told me at dinner in a new restaurant with a wall of glass overlooking the harbor. "It was a one-horse town, and the horse was unemployed. There were no shops, no nightlife, no money—it was so bleak it's unimaginable." Keyes has a way with words. Such a way, in fact, that her books have sold more than ten million copies in the past decade and been translated into thirty-two languages.

Even as recently as the 1970s, Ireland was dirt poor, and like nearly all of her contemporaries, Keyes, now forty-four, left, landing in London in 1986, where she waited tables. "I went there to escape. I couldn't bear the claustrophobia of theocratic Ireland. Twenty years ago we still had poor self-esteem. We'd been free from British rule for nearly seventy years but still constantly compared ourselves with Britain and always felt lacking." She returned in 1997 to a country in its first flush of prosperity, where divorce and condoms were finally legal and readers were hungry for her brand of fiction, which doesn't shy away from previously taboo issues like drug use, premarital sex, and addiction. "People say it's terrible—that the old Ireland is lost, that we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. I say we're still Ireland, but with a twist—we're multiethnic and vibrant. I used to think we were only suited to melancholy, but we're also very exuberant. Our economic prosperity has been harnessed to that exuberance."

But not everyone shares her enthusiasm. "The notion of the New Ireland is nonsense. It's a no-longer-old Ireland," an outspoken historian told me at a Dublin dinner party. "It's a vulgar and money-driven place run by people who regard any form of spirituality as superstition. The suicide rate of our youth is up fifty percent in the past ten years."

Visitors aren't entirely happy with the transformation either: Recent surveys by Ireland's tourist board show that travelers' impressions of both the country's warmth of welcome and its natural scenery are declining, and an American woman I met in a pub told me, "Yeats wrote, 'Romantic Ireland is dead and gone' almost a hundred years ago. I think it's finally true."

Nonetheless, most of the Irish I met view the country's new prosperity with equanimity, neither decrying its corrupting influence on the culture and the land nor growing giddy at the thought of its newfound riches.