The most emerald of isles was in sparkling form.

As with Scotland last weekend, someone had dropped the script and the waters in County Kerry’s coastal coves and inlets shone and danced in the unfamiliar sunshine.

Buses, impossibly wide and menacing for the narrow, winding rural roads, parked up on promontories, disgorging their precious cargoes of free-spending tourists. The Celtic tiger, tamed and shamed, needs all the euros it can get its hands on.

The RTE newsreaders advised us every hour on the hour that the latest audit of house prices showed drops of between 40 and 47% on 2007 levels, most especially in Dublin, epicentre of Irish big spending whilst the good times rolled. But even in the rural hinterlands pockets of unsold of upmarket housing estates sprawl forlornly over sites once marketed as the perfect, scenic, escape from the commercial badlands. The hoardings advertising their attractions sport the peeling born of too-lengthy neglect, and some, it was being reported, would now be demolished before a single occupant had sampled their domestic pleasures.

Even the greatly depressed asking prices had failed to lure newly risk-averse consumers, whose post-traumatic stress syndrome included unfamiliar symptoms like a recaptured enthusiasm for savings accounts. Savings levels have tripled in three years. Yet savings are not an option for the still-burgeoning army of unemployed, nudging a 17-year high at just under 15%.

The previous government may have carried the electoral can for Ireland’s burst bubble, its unsustainable property boom, and the banks who funded it in a manner to make a cavalier blush with the impetuosity of it all. But the incoming administration continues to get a kicking just the same from a population catapulted from overweening ambition to restrictive austerity.

Undoubtedly, Ireland is still fearful with no shortage of reasons to be so. Yet the national psyche has found an unexpected source of pride, and its name is Greece.

The Irish may grumble into their Guinness about the unfairness of it all, and mourn a new exodus of their brightest and best offspring. But they watch as the streets of Athens play host to serial rioting, and the Greeks display little enthusiasm for abandoning the national pastime of serial tax dodging. Ireland used to be no slouch in the same department, they tell you, but we’re taking our medicine; we’re buckling down.

Once embarrassed by premier basket-case status, they look at statistics which tell you that Irish debt levels, calculated to peak at 120% of GDP in 2013, are amateur night compared with the rampant indebtedness of Greece, already 30% ahead of them.

Unlike Greece, they remind you, they’ve complied with the stark conditions attached to their own bank bailout, and entertain hopes of getting a cut in the interest rates they’re paying by this time next year. The green shoots of recovery are small and, they’ll acknowledge, too dependent on exports to offer comfort. But growth of any kind has to look more optimistic than the years of reverse gear.

The optimism is not heady. They know there can be no rejoicing if Greece goes to the Eurozone wall, given the other faltering economies waiting their turn for the begging bowl. They know that some of their best export customers are in that queue. And they know they may have need of another visit to that bowl themselves, in the shape of the new stability fund.But what remains in plentiful supply is a fierce pride at local and national level which the travails of the last few years have demonstrably failed to dent.

This beautiful country was not perhaps the ideal venue for Wimbledon junkies like myself. On Sunday, the day of the men’s singles finals, there was the small matter of the Munster Gaelic football final between Kerry and Cork.

The county flags adorned every building. Tiny children were turned out in the colours. You could watch it on every screen anywhere. When it finished, you could watch a hurling match. Novak Djokovic? He might have been the Greek Finance Minister for all the Kerry folk cared.