Galway Races defines the Irish summer, a seven-day loolapalooza of racing, craic and entertainment held in western Ireland's most beautiful city.

This year however, people are holding the marching bands, stopping the flow of Guinness and holding their breath in hope that things will not get even worse.

If Galway is a harbinger, things might well get worse.

In the champagne tent on Wednesday, where $200 bottles of champagne were flying out the door last year, there were onlya few stragglers and the champagne was being replaced by distilled water.

Hard times have come.

Many of the horse trainers who used the champagne tent as their big recruiting trek every year, to court the hundreds of big property developers were instead lined up against the wall like wallflowers.

"No f--ing clients here," said one who was notorious for schmoozing the business classes and selling them whatever four-legged creature they wanted.

Just as disappointed were the fillies of the two-legged kind, dressed in their finery and looking for that drunken millionaire to fall into their arms.

Matches of any sort were hard to find in Galway this year.

The ladies instead seemed to be the only ones consuming the champagne; lacking any likely prospects they drowned their sorrows and wiped away their fake tan as the rain fell in bucketfuls.

Outside however, the ordinary classes were going about their annaul Galway pilgrimage, gambling on everything that ran, cathcing up with old friends and having their usual good times.

Only in the champagne tent was the gloom so evident.

Even Taoiseach Brian Cowen was forced to admit that the stay-away money classes had caused the drop in numbers and that Galway was ' going back to its roots'

There was still plenty of price gouging.

A writer from The New York Times noted that attendance at Belmont Park was $2 whereas it's $40 at Galway. I paid $60 for a very ordinary dinner at my hotel.

Everywhere there was still a sense of disbelief that the good times had fled taking the money with them.

However, on the evidence at Galway this week, the Celtic Tiger is well and truly headed for the glue factory.