On Tuesday in Ireland, four children were killed by their fathers. We don't know why, but it has terrified us. It seems somehow a part of the strange and ferocious trauma we are undergoing, an identity crisis so viral and all-engulfing that we don't know who we are any more. Far from the gloomy headlines and crushing statistics lies the full truth of what we face now. We tuck our children into bed not knowing if they have a future in our country. In every home in the land, there has been private anxiety and panic. Our government has no moral authority to remain in power. People feel frightened, alone and unled.

The narrator of Sebastian Barry's brilliant novel The Secret Scripture says adolescence is like finding yourself on a burning headland, uncertain as to how you got there. It's a definition that might apply to many of us in Ireland these days. We don't know the next chapter of our story. I've stopped buying the newspapers, because I can't bear my children to see them. I am afraid of the radio news.

Having spent the last decade in a fog of intoxicating self-congratulation for our economic success, we now face the reality that it was illusory. Inept politicians, greedy bankers and property speculators have wrecked the certainties on which our recent notions of ourselves were founded.

Psychiatrists tell us that grief comes in four distinct stages: denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before finally the goal of acceptance may be reached. In the last year, the country has staggered its way through that grim quartet of emotions. We made ourselves believe that the boom would last for ever, denying the facts when it became clear that it wouldn't. We then told ourselves the fallout wouldn't be as vicious as some predicted, even as the dole queues lengthened and businesses collapsed, and every single one of us had a family member or colleague who lost a job or couldn't pay the mortgage any more. Then followed the grotesque period of passivity and botched action, which the historians of 21st-century Ireland will ultimately remember as the doom of a country's self-image.

When we needed sane leadership, we got evasions and platitudes. The goodwill that people had for the taoiseach, Brian Cowen, a demonstrably decent man, was squandered. His administration came to be widely mistrusted and – I hate to use the word – loathed. We were told that we were all in it together, even as the millionaire speculators were subsidised by the taxpayer, their lavish pensions and remuneration packages guaranteed. About 300 people in Ireland continue to live like rock stars, while 4 million of us foot the bill. We have socialism for bankers, the ferocities of the market for everyone else. We are cheated and lied to, and every family is now paying. The poor pay more than most.

I was young in the 1980s. I know what a recession is. But I cannot remember the boiling anger that now exists here, the sense of betrayal and injustice. A teacher told me recently that he could think of no reason to stay living in Ireland. Many politicians of all parties are despised. The radio phone-in shows have stories that would break a stone's heart. People have been appearing in court pleading for their homes not to be repossessed. Businesses are closing. Thousands are emigrating.

And there is a wider, if sometimes unacknowledged, context for the anger. It is that we know the culpability belongs to so many, not to few: not only to the developers and their venal friends in the banks, not only to a succession of appallingly reckless Irish governments, but to our very society itself, and its every official element. This is what is making Ireland so deeply uneasy. We have been disastrously seduced by the lies of authority.

We sustained the mediocrities and buffoons who have led us into the swamp, assuring ourselves in the privacy of our deluded consciences that happiness is index-linked to the purported commercial value of the arrangements of bricks that make our houses. We face hard, brutal years, when the true cost will be paid. The only hope is that when we get to the other side of the morass, Ireland will be a fairer and a more just place, not a slum with a casino attached. We have important things now that we will still have then: a generation of tough entrepreneurs, the work of our artists and writers, a beautiful landscape, a supportive diaspora, a painfully acquired insight into what happens when an entire society gets hypnotised by its own wishful thinking. And we still have the immeasurably precious freedoms that brave people gave their lives to gain for us. We might yet dare to avail of them, to learn the lessons and grow up.

It's a real hope that an authentic adulthood can be won for Ireland, but some days it's hard to sustain. It isn't rhetoric to say that this can still be a wonderful and special country, a republic as unique for its successes as for its shames and ducked responsibilities – but this has been a dreadful and agonised awakening, and we have a thousand miles of hard road before us.

• Editor's note: the author posted a clarification in the thread. Read it here