Sadly Sunday's defeat of the magnificent Ulster champions Armagh brought my long run of triumph-filled weekends in Dublin to an abrupt halt for this year. Fortunately I have many other reasons to travel south, having lived there for seven years and done business there ever since.
Despite regarding Dublin as home from home, I never cease to be amazed at the extent of the economic change – most evident in the crane-filled skyline and the bright new buildings popping up in every part of the city.
And the boom continues – the tiger is still roaring. Regardless of all the predictions of bubbles bursting made 10, five and even two years ago, the southern economy is heading for yet another year of five to six per cent GDP growth.
That is over twice the UK growth rate. And it has been that way for over a decade now. And while many are surprised at the duration of the boom there is no denying that it is real.
There was a time when national debt was around 150% of GDP and total income-tax revenue was insufficient to pay even the interest on the debt. Now the exchequer has its coffers overflowing and money is available for almost anything the government wants to do.
Clearly the economic numbers say the boom is real. And in Northern Ireland our insular, even prejudiced, ways of dismissing it are no longer sustainable. The boom is not political spin or funny money from Europe.
Nor is it transfer pricing or dodgy statistics. The otherwise excellent UUP economist Esmond Birnie MLA must really wonder about some of the sceptical analysis he offered some years ago on the Republic's economy. The reality and substance of the boom is now visible everywhere on the ground.
Take the hotel sector. Not that long ago Dublin airport, like Aldergrove, had just one hotel. Now it has many.
Those who doubted the wisdom of Hilton locating yet another hotel there last year can now question the sanity of Bewleys, who very recently opened a 300-bedroom hotel right next door to the Hilton!
And heading north from the airport there are brand new four star hotels in Donabate, Dunboyne, Cavan, Drogheda, Dundalk and Carlingford.
Ireland is now home to tens of thousands of millionaires. This year Ireland passed-out the USA as the biggest external investor in UK property. Irish entrepreneurs are active in major investments all over the eastern European economies and further afield.
Officially Ireland has the highest GDP per capita in the world after Japan – 50% higher than that of Northern Ireland. A generation ago Northern Ireland accounted for about one third of all-island GDP. Now it accounts for little more than 15% and it is reducing all the time.
So we in Northern Ireland must accept that things have changed. That our nearest neighbour has made the economic 'step change' and this must have implications for the economic relationship between north and south.
Perhaps we in the north should now see our former poor relation as having become our rich uncle. So we should be asking ourselves two fundamental questions.
Firstly – why are we seeing so little RoI wealth coming our way? Some £5.5 billion was invested in UK real estate in the last 24 months but only a tiny proportion of that was in Northern Ireland. Why?
Surely activity in the overheated, capacity-constrained southern economy should naturally spill over into the north. We've got lots of trained English-speaking labour and generally lower costs right across the board.
It must make economic sense for an expanding business in Dublin, where everything is at full stretch and ridiculously costly, to consider operating 60 miles up the road in a now peaceful north?
The answer is that we are either a poor investment proposition or there is still a chill factor of the 'Troubles' impacting these decisions. It is probably the latter.
Dublin is full of wealthy people who are actually not doing much better than making ends meet because their wealth is tied up in their house. After their heavily taxed income pays private school fees there's not really that much left. But they cannot unlock any wealth unless they move to a lesser house.
Yet these people who constitute the managerial classes, would prefer to struggle on in Dublin ultimately leaving their children with a CGT headache, than offload their property, move north (to a far better house, say in Rostrevor, while releasing substantial equity) and enjoy a much higher disposable income for the same job.
The second question about low economic spillover from the south is what are we going to do about it? It surely makes sense to go seeking more of the action from the Celtic Tiger.
Invest NI, while chasing foreign direct investment worldwide, should think about beefing up its presence in the Republic. Why not prioritise investment from the south? Open a proper office in Dublin and in Cork and get some top notch people to work the economic and political front.
But the big job is hearts and minds. If the normal laws of economics applied here, the southern managerial classes would already be migrating north. But they are not. We therefore have to get out and sell the north to southerners! Corporately and individually.
And to paraphrase one of the north's greatest ever ambassadors south, the inspirational Kieran McGeeney: "If you are serious about success and you have belief, you go to Dublin and really let them know you mean business."
