From the 16th to the 18th century Ireland's relationship with Britain forced the embattled indigenous population of our island to look towards continental Europe - some going there as refugees, or as soldiers of fortune, or as plotters against English rule.
Moreover, because of religious persecution at that time it was to the Continent that the Catholic majority had to look for education at levels not then available at home, as well as for a supply of pastors. During those centuries the Irish people could reasonably be described as being Eurocentric.
But from the late 18th century on this changed radically.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain created far more employment opportunities there for Irish emigrants, while the United States and Canada, and a good deal later Australia, attracted many others to a new life that offered a prospect of employment. Ireland began to turn away from the Continent towards the English-speaking world.
Ireland rapidly became profoundly Anglo-centric, a phenomenon that lasted well beyond independence. During the 40 years after the Great Slump of 1929, which effectively halted emigration to the US, almost one million people from the Irish State moved to Britain. Throughout that period, and for 10 years after, our currency continued effectively to be sterling: our pound notes proclaimed that they could be changed for £1 sterling at the Bank of England.
For most Irish people continental Europe became psychologically remote, until the 1960s. Even in that decade, it was an almost universally view held that the closeness of our links with Britain precluded Irish membership of the European Union without Britain. Moreover, at no stage during the first 60 years of this decade was there any apparent recognition of the debilitating impact upon Ireland of its almost total economic dependence on a British economy which throughout this period was in relative decline vis-a-vis the rest of Europe. When after de Gaulle's resignation in 1969 France moved to lift its veto on British membership, Irish interest in EC membership grew rapidly. But it has to be admitted that this enthusiasm was narrowly based on the hope of budgetary transfers from the Community. There was still little recognition of the wider benefits of a trade diversification that would reduce our economic dependence on the neighbouring island.
In part at least, this reflected the widespread lack of economic sophistication a quarter of a century ago, but it went deeper than that. The sense of being not just an island close to Britain but a part of a wider Europe - a sense which, as our native poetry demonstrates, had been widespread in Ireland up to the end of the 18th century - had long since disappeared. Our failure in 1949 to join with most of the rest of western Europe in its defence against potential Soviet aggression had inhibited the emergence of the sense of sharing a common destiny which had come to bind together old enemies in the western part of the Continent.
This combination of concentration on the narrow issue of budgetary transfers, the value of which to our economy has in fact been far surpassed by the opportunity for rapid economic development provided by free and fair trade with our partners, together with the absence of any real sense of sharing with them a common culture or destiny, have been negative features of our EU membership.
In recent times these elements have begun visibly to irritate some of our partners, who are inclined in any event to attribute much more of our growth to transfers from their budgets than actually derives from that source, and who may resent the high economic growth rate which they feel we are achieving, at their expense, both metaphorically and literally.
There has been a marked reorientation towards the Continent quite recently, however, not alone of our trade but also, more generally, of our social contacts.
As to trade, even after discounting the repatriated profit element of our high-tech exports, it is clear more than 40 per cent of the value of our exports now go to the Continent as against 25 per cent to Britain. Not far short of half the revenue we receive from European visitors now comes from Continental countries rather than from Britain.
Moreover, despite the language barrier, 25-30 per cent of young people emigrating to other parts of Europe are now going to the Continent rather than Britain; prior to 1992 this proportion was only 10 per cent.
The 1996 Census data record that almost a quarter of those who a year earlier were living in a European country had then been on the Continent, rather than in Northern Ireland or Britain. Finally, while complete data on Irish visits to the Continent are not available, we know the number going there by direct sea and air services has doubled since the end of the 1980s.
To what extent have these changes in the pattern of our trade and social contacts begun to affect public attitudes? It is difficult to say, but I suspect that there has been a psychological "opening towards the Continent", and some diminution in traditional Anglo-centricity.
Certainly, with prosperity has come some diminution of the quite frantic preoccupation with budgetary transfers that marked much of our relationship with the Community up to and including the early 1990s. The prospect of a phasing-out of much of our structural-funds receipts in the first half of the next decade has been received with relative calm.
At the same time the agricultural sector has shown a capacity to face the prospect of a radical shift in the whole pattern of EU aid without the kind of over-reaction which in the past used to greet even quite small adjustments to the CAP arrangements.
There has, nevertheless, been some disposition to query whether positive Irish attitudes to the Community could survive a transition from large-scale dependence on net transfers through the Community budget to a situation where, as a State with living standards higher than the EU average, we could eventually become net contributors to that budget.
IT now seems likely, however, that the gradual diminution of these net transfers is likely to be accepted fairly calmly, as public opinion increasingly appreciates the extent to which we owe far more of our new prosperity to the opening of EU markets to goods and services produced with Irish labour, than to injections of EU funds.
The 190,000 additional jobs created in the past four years owe their origins, directly or indirectly, much more to the growth of Irish exports to the rest of the EU than to the flow of funds from the EU budget, which started to diminish in this period.
But if Irish attitudes to the European Community have been becoming more mature and realistic, we are still a long way from being able to share that underlying sense of a common culture and destiny which Continental peoples have derived from their interactive history, and more recently from their common experience of the Cold War; whether as western European peoples who for half a century felt threatened by Soviet power, or as eastern European peoples actually subjected to that power.
Because of our predominantly Roman Catholic heritage we do not share the sense of discomfort with the culture of the Continental land-mass that seems to be a feature of the almost exclusively Northern Protestant countries of Britain and Scandinavia.
But our insular situation, combined with the two recent centuries of cultural, social, and therefore psychological isolation from the Continent, have nevertheless left their mark. I cannot help wondering whether the teaching of European history in our schools compensates adequately for this deficiency in our intellectual formation.