By any standards, Irish membership of what is now the European Union has been a success. That it has been a success in material terms no one doubts, and some of the relevant facts about the benefits we have received are recorded below. But it has also had other important positive effects which are often overlooked.

First of all, membership has provided an outlet for energies and skills hitherto under-utilised.

The success of Irish officials, politicians, business people and bankers in this new and demanding environment has banished the inferiority complex which was such a debilitating feature of much of the post-independence period.

In particular, the contrast between the Irish sense of comfort with this new European role has contrasted sharply with British inability to come to terms with membership.

And this has helped greatly to improve the traditionally delicate bilateral relationship between our neighbouring islands at a time when tensions over the Northern Ireland problem might otherwise have been difficult to contain.

The fact that Irish and British ministers and officials have throughout this period been meeting regularly in the EU context has also been immensely helpful to our two countries' relationship - enabling each to get the measure of the other and to develop personal relationships in the collegial atmosphere of the Council of Ministers.

At another level, the opening up a much wider range of contacts between Ireland and the Continent has modified to some degree the impact of Anglo-American culture.

It has enlarged the horizons of hundreds of thousands of young people whose experience of the outside world had previously been largely confined to Britain and the United States.

Many tens of thousands of Irish people are now gaining experience working on the Continent - experience which most of them will bring back to their homeland.

A reluctance to share our relatively recently acquired sovereignty with our EU partners might have limited the benefits we could secure from membership - and could have led to Ireland being seen, damagingly, by our new partners, as a clone of Britain.

In fact, there was a clear recognition from the outset that we had more to gain than most by a sharing of sovereignty that would prevent larger countries from abusing their strength to exploit us.

Ireland has been a consistently strong supporter of the Community institutional structure, and above all of the European Commission's exclusive power of initiative.

When the Republic joined the European Community 25 years ago it was expected that the principal benefits would come from the Common Agricultural Policy. Today I suspect many people think we have benefited most from the Structural Funds. In fact, by far the biggest boost to our economy has come from the aspect of Community membership that 25 years ago was most feared - the freeing of trade.

At the time of our accession, one-quarter of our employment was in agriculture, which was then responsible for almost 18 per cent of national output. It was a depressed economic sector, its exports being effectively confined to the unremunerative British market, where prices were depressed by the inflow of dumped international farm produce.

The CAP quickly transformed this.

Between 1971 and 1975 the volume of output rose by almost one-quarter and by 1978 farmers' incomes had more than quadrupled - which, even after allowing for the inflation caused by the first oil crisis, more than doubled the purchasing power of farm incomes.

The farming community subsequently experienced many ups and downs, and the years ahead could be difficult ones for farmers facing further CAP reform. But the average purchasing-power of farmers still remains well over twice as great as in the pre-EU period - an improvement yet to be matched in the industrial sector.

In today's money terms the cumulative net inflow of resources since 1973 through the Community Budget approaches £30 billion and for much of this period has been adding annually some 5 per cent to the resources we have produced with our own efforts. For much of this period the inflow of EU Structural Funds has enhanced our annual growth rate by up to one percentage point a year - although this figure is now a good deal lower.

Of the 8 per cent annual growth achieved in recent years, it has been estimated that no more than about 0.5 per cent has derived from this flow of EU funds.

But by far the greatest material benefit derived from EU membership has come from the freeing of trade with Continental EU countries. In 1995 (the latest year for which details are available) some 130,000 Irish industrial workers, three-fifths of the total, were engaged in the export trade, and some 60,000 of these were making products destined for continental EU countries, to which, before we joined the Community, we exported very little.

Another 70,000 were producing goods for other export markets, and a high proportion of these jobs would not have come into existence had the firms making them not been attracted here by the opening of the EU market to products made in Ireland.

Now it is true that some of these industries might have come here even if, like Norway for example, we had not acceded to the Community but had a free trade arrangement with it. But nothing like the scale of industrial investment we have experienced would have occurred if we had not been full Community members.

Thus, EU membership is responsible for a substantial proportion of the 130,000 export jobs, together with the jobs that these export firms have created in sub-contracting, materials supply and business services, and also of course for the employment created by the consumption of goods and services by all these additional workers.

Yet at the time we joined the Community the almost universal expectation was that the freeing of industrial trade would lead to a fall in manufacturing employment. Of course jobs in some of our heavily protected domestic industries were lost - some 50,000 in all. But this has been enormously outweighed by the expansion of employment in new export industries, and in sectors of our domestic industry that have also flourished in free trade conditions, e.g. the meat-slaughtering and dairy industries, and those making wood products, machinery and building materials.

For the first 13 years of membership, we did not seem to be making much headway in terms of catching up with our partners. Our material living standards remained 4045 per cent below the Community average. This was not because of slow economic growth. Except for a few years in the early 1980s when a massive budget deficit was being brought under control, the new opportunities provided by membership were in fact helping us to achieve a much faster rate of economic growth than our partners.

But our population was also growing rapidly - with higher marriage and birth rates, and, in consequence, more wives at home looking after more children. Also, during this initial period of adjustment, our workforce was growing only slowly, and unemployment was increasing. Thus the ratio of dependants to workers was temporarily rising - absorbing much of the increased output.

But since 1986 this process has been reversed - fewer women have been marrying, and many of those married have returned to work after a period of child-care; fewer children have been born and, except for a brief period in the early 1990s, unemployment has been falling.

As a result of all this, the ratio of dependants to workers has dropped by well over one-quarter, and since 1986 Gross National Output per head has risen from 55 per cent of the EU average to 89 per cent - with every likelihood that by 2000 we will have caught up on the rest of the Community that we joined 25 years ago.