Edited by Dr Peadar Kirby, lecturer in international relations, DCU, Luke Gibbons and Professor Michael Cronin, dean of the faculty of humanities, DCU Pluto Press. Reviewed by Paul Keenan

Thanks to Ireland's rich heritage in the Arts, there is no shortage of quotes for commentators when making pronouncements on the country's changed face since the first roar of the Celtic Tiger. One could sing "the times they are a-changing", or quip "the world is in a state of chassis", even "all changed, changed utterly."

This last is perhaps the best choice when considering Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. There is a duality in the statement that perfectly encapsulates what Peadar Kirby et al are striving for in this work.

Uttered by those who defend economic deregulation and Irish neo-liberalism while decrying "Old Ireland" prior to the heady nineties, "all changed, changed utterly" has a positive resonance; change being exactly what was needed to free us from the controls of age-old and draconian institutions of the state of our forefathers.

But to the contributors to Reinventing Ireland, the same quote, and indeed the change to Ireland itself, has a less wholesome quality. From a varied pool of academic talent, drawn from numerous third-level institutions and disciplines, the ten contributors are well placed to pore over the tracks of the Tiger to come up with a clearer picture of its passing than pr specialists would prefer us to see. Their findings are presented in four areas: economy and society, the public sphere, historical legacies, and media. And those findings of just how much we have changed are, at times, disturbing.

How, for example, while there is more money in the country, the proportion of the population on the lowest incomes has continued to grow. How the number of prison places grew throughout the boom years, and a Council of Europe report that points to the Irish prison population as one of the youngest and poorest of the continent. How social welfare recipients are twenty times more likely to face fraud checks than the greater drain on the economy, the tax evader, with the latter receiving no fewer than three amnesties in the thirteen years since 1988.

And how those who have benefited most from the country's changing fortunes, the business elite, continue to argue for more deregulation of Irish economic life while maintaining a solid front on the regulation of wages.

Depressing reading indeed. But Reinventing Ireland is not simply a book for nay-sayers and `nostalgics'. Taking the dark evidence it has gathered of a culture made subservient to an economy - with the social failures mentioned above being the unavoidable consequence of maintaining that economy - the essayists fashion an entirely possible future to commodified and market-driven Ireland.

"Rich and Happy" is how Newsweek summed up the new-millennium Irish based on its reading of the economic landscape in recent years. "Rich and Happy?" is how the caption might have looked after a reading of Reinventing Ireland.