Faith.
Tradition.
Self-discipline.
Stoicism.
Patriotism.
Family.
These values were sneered at as prosperity blossomed.
Ireland couldn't get rid of them quickly enough. Now that prosperity has turned out to be as transitory as shadows, the older values have emerged again. They were there the whole time, we'd just forgotten about them, that's all.
Faith ought to get the first mention because that's the way Katie Taylor would want it. Her mother, Bridget, became a born-again Christian; when she found God, the rest of the family followed suit.
Katie now credits her religious beliefs with inspiring her to victory, and in the process has forced secular liberal Ireland, generally suspicious of religious sentiment, especially anything that reminds them of the Catholic Church, to acknowledge the existence of feelings which they would rather were relegated entirely to the private sphere, shoved unceremoniously under a blanket like some ne'er-do-well being sneaked out of the back of a courtroom. Katie Taylor isn't hiding for anyone.
The reluctance to talk openly about God still continued last week.
The Irish Times editorial celebrating her Olympics win didn't mention Taylor's faith once, simply praising her "modesty and humility" without asking from where such qualities might have stemmed.
But at least the barrier of silence had been breached.
Even the Old Lady of D'Olier Street will have to concede eventually that it's impossible to talk about the lessons that Katie Taylor's triumph can teach a battered nation without acknowledging the God-sized elephant in the room.
What makes Katie's beliefs relevant to her success is that discipline forms such an integral part of Christian thought. Religion is tolerated by liberal-minded secularists as long as it stays firmly in the woolly sphere of "spirituality" -- itself to what you might call metaphysics rather than ethics -- but Christianity is rooted in the notion that spiritual values entail moral obligations.
You have to do certain things whether or not you really want to, and not do certain other things which you might desperately desire. That kind of self-discipline comes naturally to athletes, but has become anathema to society as a whole.
Deferred gratification came to seem like no gratification at all. Instant rewards were all that mattered, and, the more we had, the more we wanted.
Rather than gaining self-respect and security through hard work, we came to believe
that everything could be easily had, that we could borrow and invest and wheeler-deal our way to lasting prosperity.
Bankers thought money didn't really exist, it simply came into being out of nothing, ex nihilo.
Trade unions made their members think that the future would be one unstoppable path to bigger wages and bigger pensions for less work, with someone else always picking up the bill.
Politicians didn't have to make hard decisions because the money was rolling in and they simply had to roll with it.
While they were all rolling in the fat of the land, Katie Taylor was training hard, with little reward, in a gym in Bray with no toilet or running water.
She had every reason to stamp her foot and complain about it, as a multiple World and European champion already, but while others were helping themselves to the country's largesse and delivering precious little in return, she just got on with it.
The same stoicism meant that, when she did reach her goal, she didn't instantly use it to grab herself a place at the top table, instead she offered it up, to God, and to the country.
Last week Katie Taylor showed the true difference between patriotism and nationalism, and why the latter is so poisonous and the former so life-affirming.
Nationalism is the creed that says one man, purely by virtue of belonging to a country which is supposedly superior to others, has certain entitlements from which he expects to benefit enormously.
Patriotism is the creed that sublimates self-interest into gratitude for what the country gives a person and feeds the desire to give something back.
Patriotism of that stamp made the Irish fans at the Olympics boxing arena cheer to the rafters for Team GB's women's boxer Nicola Adams, who also won gold the same day as Katie.
Irish celebrations weren't belligerent or exclusionary, they were inclusive and confident. London saw the best of Ireland, not only from the new champion, but from the fans who cheered her all the way.
Family, though, is where it all comes together. For decades, left-wing ideologists have targeted the traditional family precisely because they knew it was the cornerstone of everything.
Those who consider themselves progressive twisted themselves into knots of illogic in order to pretend that mothers and fathers are interchangeable; that there is nothing special in the role of either parent that any well meaning, properly trained professional couldn't do just as well, or, more to the point, that the State couldn't do on their behalf.
The ideological assault on the family not only co-incided with, but paralleled, the attack on the church and the outmoded patriarchal values it was deemed to represent.
Fathers more than anyone bore the brunt of this cultural war.
When people like John Waters tried to talk about what was being done to men in the name of liberal progress, they were ridiculed -- and worse -- by feminists.
Fathers were not to be respected anymore, they were to be either recast as figures of fun, the better to be ignored, or else branded as figures of hate, whose role in the family, if left unchecked, could only lead to domestic tyranny.
Meanwhile, the absence of positive father figures ate away at certain sections of Irish society like a cancer, breeding new generations of feckless young men with no sense of responsibility, whose failures as fathers and partners could then be used in turn to 'prove' that men themselves could not be trusted, so the vicious circle went on.
If nothing else, the presence of Peter Taylor at his daughter's side in London, urging her on, guiding her onto the right path, putting Katie first, as he has done quietly behind the scenes for years before, has reaffirmed the indispensable role that fathers can, and must have, within the family.
His look of pride in his daughter, and her evident love and respect for him, is a living testament to the importance of men's place in the lives of their children, which has been too easily dismissed by enemies of the nuclear family.
It's easy in the flush of Olympics glory to overstate the lessons that Katie Taylor's story has for the country as a whole.
Yes, she ought to be held up as a role model for young girls, an example of what hard work and talent and single-mindedness can accomplish, and she will be.
But that will fade.
Young women have too many other distractions -- footballers' wives and glamour models and "famous for 15 minutes" pop stars -- to hope that the Katie Taylor effect will transform a culture overnight.
But, if in the immediacy of her victory, the Irish are inspired enough to see that it is possible to feel the fear and do it anyway, to stand on their own two feet and make a difference, and set about the job of reclaiming Ireland's place on the world stage rather than whingeing about what we've lost and looking for scapegoats to blame for our troubles, then the legacy of that will be worth more than a thousand gold medals.
We're punch drunk right now; we've had our Round Two, when it all went a bit wrong and we started to wonder if we were fooling ourselves to think that we could compete with the rest of the world on an equal footing.
What Katie Taylor showed is that you can turn it all around in Round Three, if you've got the right people in your corner and the right values and spirit to put what they're telling you into practice in the ring.
Basically, what we need to know right now is whether Enda Kenny, the man who bears the honorary title of Father of the Dail for being the longest serving politician in the current house, can be an equally effective and inspiring father to the nation as Peter Taylor is to Katie, because nothing less will do.
Taoiseach, it's over to you.