Imagine it is 1972, just before Ireland joined what was then the European Economic Community. An objective observer is looking at two small countries on the north-western periphery of Europe: the Republic of Ireland and Scotland.

They had, up to a mere 50 years ago, been fellow members of the UK. They had then taken divergent paths; one opting for independence, the other not. In the mind of the detached viewer, there would have been little doubt about which made the best decision. Scotland had retained its cultural distinctiveness yet it was also richer, more socially just, and had far higher spending on education, health and welfare.

From this observation, an awkward question would have arisen: what was Irish independence for?

Move forward 25 years and listen to any political debate in Scotland. Time and again, the point will be made: look at Ireland. They're smaller than us and they used to be a lot poorer. But they got something we missed out on. They got a seat at the European table.

They got to be up there with the great nations of the western half of the Continent. Not only have they done well economically but they've established themselves as a political presence in the world. They may not be very important but they have to be taken account of.

And that is one way of measuring the enormous impact of EU membership on our society. Nobody would dream of asking what our independence is for any more. It is for being a full member of the EU.

Indeed, the strange paradox of the first 25 years of our participation in the EU is that in the act of pooling our sovereignty we have discovered why we wanted it in the first place.

Perhaps one of the reasons we have taken so extraordinarily well to the EU is that it has spoken simultaneously to both our traditional and our modern sides. While speeding up our often painful transition into a modern society, it has also, oddly, vindicated one of our stronger traditions: nationalism.

If we had never moved away from London we could never have moved towards Brussels. And, through the EU, we have finally moved out of Britain's shadow.

Whatever its political or economic merits, our decision to join the single European currency without Britain is psychologically momentous. The EU has, for the Republic at least, opened out the old claustrophobic relationship with Britain and created the conditions for a new, less obsessive set of links.

The easiest way to misunderstand the impact of the EU on Ireland is to suggest that we somehow "became" Europeans 25 years ago on January 1st, 1973. Ireland has been a part of European culture for as long as it has had a meaningful history. Everything that we think of as most traditionally Irish - folk music, bardic poetry, monastic iconography, heroic sagas - was created out a constant interconnection with the Continent. We fought in European wars, danced to European tunes, told European stories.

Even in the early years of this century, when Ireland was perhaps at its most British, Europe was still a vibrant idea. Yeats and Synge met for the first time not on the Aran Islands but in Paris.

Irish nationalists like Terence MacSwiney were talking about a United States of Europe long before Jean Monnet got a hearing. For many of the founders of the State, independence was a necessary precondition for Ireland taking its proper place in Europe.

So being a member of the EU did not make Ireland more "European". In some respects, the process of modernisation, of which the EU has been such an essential part, has actually weakened some of our deeper cultural ties to the Continent.

Some 25 years ago the majority of Irish people had a sense of belonging to a certain kind of Europe; a Catholic heartland in which Ireland was at one with France, Spain and Italy. Older Catholics had grown up at a time when that sense of a common culture was reinforced by the use of a common language, Latin, for what were critical moments in the lives of many ordinary people: the sacraments, the liturgy, the rituals.

The educated middle class had a strong awareness, through Latin and sometimes Greek, of the classical roots of European culture. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that what has happened in the last 25 years is not so much that we have joined Europe as that the capital of our imagined Continent has simply shifted from Rome to Brussels, exchanging the government of the Curia for that of the Commission.

Now, both of these religious and linguistic links have been broken. Catholicism has relaxed its grip on Irish society, though it remains a powerful force. But it is also a less European Catholicism. On the one hand, because of the vernacular Mass, it is much more local. On the other, because of the influence of returning missionaries and of liberation theology, it is much more global.

And who now learns Latin or Greek? Who can imagine that Irish poetry and plays in 2020 will be laced with classical allusions in the way they are now?

And nothing much has taken their place. Because it has been driven by economics and geopolitics, the EU has remained culturally stunted. It has never generated a cultural force that could be as potent as the links of religion or classical learning that have been broken.

At a day-to-day level, we still tend to approach Europe via England. More of us may have been to Stuttgart or Palermo, but that's largely thanks to Jack Charlton. We may eat Brie and drink Barolo, but we usually get them from some English-owned supermarket.

There may be European icons on our bedroom walls, but they are most likely to be a Cantona, a Gullit or a Zola, players or coaches of English football teams.

We may take more holidays in Italy, Spain or France, but it's a good bet that the brochures we pick them from are those of English travel agents.

We do not live our daily lives in a Europeanised culture. Our points of reference are still within the Englishspeaking world, the US and Britain. It is not for nothing that, when emigration levels were very high in the mid and late-1980s, it was still to these more familiar territories that our emigrants went.

Relatively few settled where they might, in a union that was cultural as well as economic, be expected to go, the industrial heartlands of Germany or the Netherlands. The combination of historic habits and of the continuing dominance of AngloAmerican popular culture has meant that our neighbours remain in many respects much stranger to us than the faraway US does.

It's not for nothing that we have been so scared of the prospect of becoming a typically European society, which is to say, multi-racial and multi-cultural. Our Europeanism is still skin-deep.

The real cultural effects of EU membership have been on the broader sense of what a culture is: the underlying assumptions and values that shape the way a society defines its choices. And these effects have been ambiguous.

There is no doubt that the EU has radically altered the nature of Irish political life. Initially, many of those changes were negative. The availability of huge subsidies for farming and food products reshaped rural society and all but destroyed the remnants of the small farming class that had been at the heart of the old nationalist ideal of self-sufficiency.

It also had a corrupting influence on politics. The massive growth of food companies created immensely powerful private interests in need of political friends.

Indirectly, the great success of Irish politicians in getting goodies from Brussels in the form of structural and regional funding gave a whole new life to a clientelism which might otherwise have died.

The idea of the politician as a necessarily cute hoor, a cajoler, sweettalker and deal-maker was resurrected by the need to send out petty chieftains to pow-wow with the big chiefs in Europe and bring home the wampum.

At a deeper level, it may be that the good social effects of EU membership - the legislation on the rights of women, for example - were also double-edged. Instead of working through profound changes in our collective attitudes, we were presented often with a fait accompli. Some mysterious process in Brussels or in Strasbourg had produced some directive and we would accept it rather than rock the boat.

Usually, the directives were sensible and progressive. But often we didn't, as a society, quite feel that we owned them. They happened to us; we didn't make them happen. This is why so many of the changes in Irish values seem to have such shallow roots. We didn't have to fight them out and take responsibility for the consequences of our decisions.

But if it created hypocrisy and corruption, the EU also served to expose them. For a while in the 1970s and 1980s, our leaders often seemed to believe that when they spoke in EU meetings it was in a language incomprehensible to us back home.

In Brussels they were all radical social democrats, arguing the responsibilities of the rich to the poor, and insisting on the creation of an egalitarian community of nations. In Ireland, the same leaders were often to be heard preaching the virtues of the market and the evils of State interference.

The two languages were mutually exclusive, and in the end the political system had to develop a new one. The language of consensus and partnership, derived directly from the EU, became a new political vernacular.

And the EU billions also began to create another sort of politics. They encouraged people to look both below and beyond the State. Community and voluntary groups, once they had mastered the tortuous art of getting hold of the money, acquired a certain authority from the fact that some of their funding came from the EU. They were not easy to push around.

And they began to look further than the State to try to develop direct relationships with similar bodies in other EU states, and with the Commission. These attempts may be at an early stage, and they may be vulnerable to the decline in Ireland's share of EU funds, but there is a reasonable chance that they will persist.

And, if they do, they will sum up what 25 years of EU membership has meant to Irish society. Not new solutions, but a new and clearer context in which to define old problems.

Series concluded

Tomorrow: the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, assesses 25 years of EC/EU membership in the "World View" column