It’s like the air vent in a room. I had learnt a long time ago that a certain nasal spray (which works up to eight hours) is a boon for people like me, whose skull implodes when on a descending plane.

Flying for me used to be a misery – I would touchdown in deaf agony, with my head feeling as if it was stuck in a pointed vice. I would be in pain for hours, and deaf for days. No amount of yawning or sucking sweets or hitting my head against walls would affect it. Utter misery. And – invisible afflictions are the worst – no sympathy.

This Christmas in Dublin, having burnt the candles at both ends, night after night, as promised to myself, I ended up with a bit of a cold. So I was pumping myself up with the aforementioned menthol-laced spray on the day of my return to London. Unfortunately, it seemed to be making things worse. As the plane was lifting off, I looked at the label on the bottle, and noted with interest the words: Expires: April ’89. Out came the duty-free. And, no, it didn’t numb the pain.

The next day was New Year’s Eve, and I spent the day sneezing uncontrollably. I went to dinner at a friend’s house, and we went to see in the New Year at his local East End gay bar. Like so many other “gay” places in Britain now, it is decorated in a depressing industrial black, with subdued lighting, and a backroom somewhere on the premises. But the really sordid thing about such British establishments is that they are, not infrequently, raided by the police.

Only a few weeks previously, the lights went on in the pitch black room upstairs in this pub, and plain-clothes police officers placed firm hands on the shoulders of a couple of gentlemen there and arrested them. It is a mystery to me how they could tell there was anything going on.

Anyway, that night, my nose was like a leaking tap, my pockets were full of wet tissues, and every few minutes my entire body would convulse in an angry sneeze, punishing me for filling it up with noxious chemicals. Not the most alluring state to be in. But backrooms don’t appeal to me anyway, even in the best of health – not because of any prudery on my part, but because I do like to feast my eyes on a body. I don’t see the point otherwise.

And so, Big Ben dongs on the TV, and our (mostly Irish) lot exchange warm hugs, and watch what the rest of the pub does. Which is nothing much. A gang next to us cracks open the bubbly and sings ‘Auld Lang Syne’, linking arms and looking happy. But they are the only ones. Most of the crowd, shaved heads and bomber jackets, stand around and look indifferent.

It must be hard to achieve such a degree of nonchalance on New Year’s Eve, but habitués of gay bars need no lessons. We wondered about the boys in the backroom – how did they celebrate? How did they know? Did all the digital watches go beep in the dark?

LABOUR SURPLUS

And as this year clicked into place, I realised that I wasn’t as weepy as I normally am. I had got all that assimilation and aspiration out of my system the day before on the plane. This emigrant’s lament is no longer a lament.

I had had a very heartening time in Dublin, and leave with a new perspective on Ireland, and Irishness.

For all the awkwardness, the political upheavals in the last few months leave me optimistic about how we’re doing. Perhaps they were embarrassing, but they were certainly healthy. Proportional Representation works, not quite as you would expect it, but it works.

I saw a play that helped me a lot, in coming to terms with being an expatriate Irishman. TrueLines by Bickerstaffe Theatre Company, showed four Irish people living in various corners of the globe. It was heartening to see on stage an Irishness that was not constantly referring back to Mother Ireland; this was a play about my generation rather than my culture, about the sense of aimlessness and despair and rootlessness of modern life, seen through the eyes of people with Irish sensibilities. And what fine, fragile sensibilities they are.

I read in the papers forecasts of incredible growth on the jobs front, especially in computers; Garret FitzGerald wrote in the Irish Times that we had better prepare ourselves for an Ireland in which there will be a labour shortage, not a surplus.

This year there will be thousands of Irish people coming home to work in well-paid professional positions in world companies such as Microsoft and Apple and Intel.

It is the fact that so many people are going to be working with computers in Ireland over the next few years that offers us the greatest potential for us to utterly transform ourselves, and leave behind a (subsidised) agricultural self-image once and for all.

There is no doubt that once the multinationals’ tax honeymoon is over, and the weather changes, they’ll be gone just like the rest of them. But while they are still here, and while something like a half of the world’s output of computers will be built in Ireland or will have Irish components in them, the opportunity exists for us to start setting up our own indigenous companies. There is the potential for an Irish company to grow as huge as Sony or Microsoft. For we’re literate, with a flair for design; two of the basic requirements for successful software publishing. This year sees the introduction of entry-level computers having Internet and E-mail access built-in as standard. The world will soon be a tiny place. Our isolated geographical position will not matter a bit; if we start now, we could be at the forefront of a cyberspace economy in the next century. The business opportunities are extraordinary. And in cyberspace, Irishness is not dependent on being in Ireland. It is a state of mind.

Maybe I have overdosed on stale Sinex.

• TrueLines is at the Andrew’s Lane Theatre Studio until January 28th