The Constitution may soon be amended. The RUC may be reformed. But if you were looking for proof positive that change is sweeping Ireland, you would have found it this week in the decision of the Republic's two scouting organisations to seek a merger.

In fact, the decommissioning of what used to be the Catholic and (unofficially) Protestant Boy Scout organisations has been almost as long in preparation as the peace process. For one thing, the Scouting Association of Ireland has long gone the way of the many once-Protestant schools which became havens for liberal Catholics. Building on a cross-community recruiting initiative 20 years ago, the association is now about 80 per cent Catholic. Meanwhile, with some prompting from the Department of Education, the Catholic Boy Scouts followed the SAI's lead in the early 1980s, and the moves were crowned with political correctness two years ago when both organisations were rechristened Scouting Ireland, with their former identities, SAI and CSI, now quarantined in brackets. Wider ecumenical moves are already afoot. The similarly-divided Girl Guides are considering their own merger. And if a union with the Northern Irish equivalents is a long way off yet, the leaders are at least talking. Also this week, the South's four associations and the North's two held a meeting, appropriately at a Border venue.

Even if the process is well established, the timing of the merger decision is no coincidence. Mr John T. Murphy, the man heading the group which will prepare for the amalgamation, concedes it is not unrelated to political developments on the island. "There's no question about it. What has accelerated the move towards a merger is the Good Friday agreement."

Scouting's new ecumenism has even extended to sex. Arguably the most startling change of all in recent times is that the movement is now heavily infiltrated by women.

The decision by both organisations to drop the male-only rule during the 1960s was not entirely welcomed at the time by the Girl Guides. But since then, while the sisters are still doing it for themselves in the Guides movement, they have grown to account for more than a quarter of the membership of Scouting.

The feminisation of the movement was well and truly sealed recently when Ireland's Ms Teresa Bermingham became the first woman elected to the European Scouting Committee, the sixmember body that runs Scouting on the Continent.

Such developments might have bewildered Robert Baden Powell, the British general who started it all in 1908. But maybe not. The hero of Mafeking reads like a surprisingly well-balanced individual, at least for someone whose idea of a honeymoon was to take his bride camping in the Sahara desert.

Moreover, despite his military genius, he demonstrated his democratic credentials by starting his movement from the bottom up. By simply detailing in a magazine the outdoor survival techniques he knew so much about, he aimed to catch the imagination of young boys throughout the world. And the tactic succeeded brilliantly.

In Ireland, inevitably, it wasn't so simple. Traditional Irish scepticism about the healthiness of outdoor living might have worked against the movement, but so also did the politico-religious divide of the early 20th century.

"Catholics were never banned or anything like that," says Mr Murphy. "But it was a social observation that this was a Protestant thing. Apart from anything else, the Scout troops were often attached to places like military barracks, so a Catholic boy might have mixed feelings about going up to the gate."

The association with British military training was unavoidable (the Union Jack that had been raised over Mafeking was used in some of Baden Powell's early British camps), even if the movement's founder took the whole idea of Scouting from the tracking skills of the American Indians.

Indeed, from the start he had seen Scouting as a force for promoting world peace. But it is said that his horror at the trench warfare in Europe during the first World War did have a profound change on his attitude to Scout training.

Writing in The Scouter magazine in 1917, he stressed the spiritual benefits of the movement. He warned group leaders against "the idle, boring picnic [camping] can become when carried out on military lines". Instead, he stressed the inculcation of "character, service for others, skill and bodily health". But above all Scouting was "a golden chance to bring the boy to God through the direct appeal of nature and her store of wonders".

Such thinking was soon resonating in the attitude of the Irish Catholic Church. The founding of an exclusively Catholic Scout movement was hardly a surprise given the climate of the years immediately following independence.

In the fervour of the times there was talk of handing the GPO in Dublin over to the church for conversion into a cathedral, and the embryonic State had considered giving the Pope a guarantee of Vatican-proofed legislation in return for early recognition.

So when Father Tom Farrell founded the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland in 1927, it was a move very much of its time. The first group, in Dublin's Fairview, reflected its patronage in a nickname: "the Archbishop's Own".

Those who suspected you had to be Protestant to enjoy the outdoor life in Ireland were proved wrong. The CBSI thrived, under the careful eye of the church, one of its first major events being to provide ushering and first aid to the crowd during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. By the time he became Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid, was very much an admirer. Unveiling a monument to Father Farrell in 1944, be praised the priest for seeing in the Scout movement "a means of supernatural benefit to youth". And by the end of the 1950s the relationship between the church and the CBSI had reached a particular high point, according to John Cooney, whose biography of Dr McQuaid is due out in the autumn. In 1959 the archbishop opened the first national conference of Scout chaplains in Greystones. Seventy priests and the papal nuncio attended, and the flavour of the event can be guessed from talks which included "The psychology of the boy" and "The chaplain and his troop".

Throughout all the changes since, the basics of Scouting have remained the same.

Mr Donald Harvey, the SAI's Chief Scout, says the merger is a potentially "sensitive" issue. Not that there has been any real criticism of the proposed move. "But if we lost even one troop as a result, that would be one too many." Meanwhile, Mr Murphy does not foresee any major obstacles in a movement whose members are, by definition, the right stuff.

"Neil Armstrong is the world's most famous Scout," he says. "But did you know that every US astronaut has been an Eagle Scout, which is the highest award they have in American Scouting."

Ireland's best-known former Scout is probably Bob Geldof, he adds. The man who gave the world Live Aid never rose to the Irish equivalent of Eagle Scout, or anything like it. But people in the movement like to think his experience taught him something about organising outdoor events.