Every day in kitchens, cafes, bars, restaurants and food processing plants across Ireland the descendants of the survivors pay homage to the victims of the famine by producing what is probably the worst food in Europe. The Italian farmer looks at a pig and works out how to dry and smoke the meat to produce ham. The Irish farmer calculates how much water, gelatin and fluorescent pink dye he can get pumped into it before it’s packaged. Give a French cook a bit of steak and he’ll hold it near a match for a couple of seconds. In Ireland you could use the meat to make puncture resistant bicycle tyres. You know a country’s cuisine is poor when one restaurant brags about have a Scottish chef in the local tourist guide and another reckons that its signature dish is the chuck wagon special. The booklet was highlighting the fine dining experiences for two counties and the chuck wagon special is considered noteworthy.

Exceptions exist but they are rare and usually expensive. They can be pretentious too. Paul Rankin, a man with a ponytail, is taking over much of Belfast and he has reinvented the bacon soda, a slice of bacon in soda bread, as the “soda bruschetta” with herb tomatoes, cheese and HP sauce drizzled over it in a fancy pattern. It would be funny if it didn’t cost a fiver.

The north is experiencing a retail based boom which is attributed to the “peace process”. In very recent memory anyone walking into a Belfast shop asking to buy a £1000 handbag would have found themselves in a psychiatric hospital within thirty minutes. No more. A depressing new development in the city centre specialises in parting the rich and stupid from their money and the £1000 handbags are exceeding sales predictions. The whole city centre, much of its periphery and several residential areas are transforming into slightly and very upmarket shopping centres servicing an affluent middle class and providing thousands of low paid retail industry jobs. All the major chains are either moving into the market for the first time or substantially expanding their operations. Along with big rises in property prices and land speculation this seems to be the basis of the relative new prosperity but the local media is willing to play along with the fantasy that it’s based on something more substantial and virtually every night some puff piece from a developer or supermarket is passed off as news.

Unlike their Victorian predecessors the new bourgeoisie is constructing nothing durable or graceful. Virtually every northern town has a number of well designed churches and public buildings dating from the 1880s through to the 1920s. By contrast almost everything that has been built in the last ten years looks flash and transient with the obsolescence built in and let’s not even mention the period before that.

Along with the consumerism has come a burgeoning drug and suicide culture, almost as if people are surveying a wasteland and looking for a quick way out. It’s probably no coincidence that all three things have arrived at the same time as the utter collapse of the traditional leaderships and, in the Republican case, the defeat of both its programme and strategy. Contempt is the most commonly expressed view about Adams and McGuinness and I’m too polite to repeat what a number of people say about Caitríona Ruane to whom they have entrusted the north’s education system. “Worse than a moron” was one of the kinder judgements.