On May 22nd the peoples of Ireland, North and South, will be asked to vote for constitutional devices which will, in the eyes of some, finally end "de Valera's dream".
By this is meant the idea of a united Ireland in which the will of the half-imaginary great, neo-Gaelic majority would be paramount over minorities, whether these minorities be Ulster unionists, Dublin 4 liberals, southern "west Britons" or others who were somehow held to be unfaithful to the historic task of the Irish nation: to reconstruct a nation which was continuous with an imagined Irish, Gaelic, Catholic and communal past.
The trouble with this stereotype is that the categories in it do not exist nowadays, and probably never did. The majority of people on the island are still pretty nationalist but were never neo-Gaelic and have consistently refused to change their native language from English to Irish. Most Irish people have steadfastly voted with their mouths - the Irish national language is English.
Similarly, most Irish people are Catholics, but are not political Catholics, and have certainly become more unpolitical in their Catholicism in the last 10 years, not least because of the perceived defects of some prominent priests, nuns and brothers. Dr John Charles McQuaid's idea of an essentially theocratic society lasted about 20 years, from 1940 to 1960.
Again, Dublin 4, that country of the mind, exists mainly in the minds of certain sentimental ideologues who have been over-stimulated by cocktail-party conversations in DART-land.
A very striking feature of Irish opinion polls over the years has been the cautious, pragmatic and usually undivided nature of public opinion; people have tended to change their opinions slowly and calmly and generally independently of the exaggerated propaganda of either the religious right or the secularist left, both of which are very small groups.
What is really happening, assuming the referendums in the Republic and the North go through, is the dismantling of something rather different: de Valera's attempt to undo symbolically the Treaty of 1921 while retaining its substance.
De Valera's Constitution of 1937, a brilliant document in some ways, tried to please certain groups of Irish society which were strong at that time and are now substantially weaker: the Catholic Church in its triumphalist phase, the Kinder, Kuche und Kirche anti-feminists, the die-hard, anti-Treaty IRA and the Northern nationalists.
This involved the assertion of a conservative familial and communal version of Irish identity. In its extreme versions, it projected a version of Ireland which, as Conor Cruise O'Brien once famously remarked, "was all west coast and no north-east corner". You could argue that it also excluded Dublin, the soccer-playing working class and even the rugby-playing new Catholic middle class, of which de Valera was a member.
Bunreacht na h-Eireann was designed to obscure rather than reverse the decisions made under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921: that Northern Ireland had the right to secede from the new Irish Free State; that Dublin or the IRA had no right to force the North into some all-Irish political entity; that Ireland had historical links with Britain which should have institutional expression, whether through the British Commonwealth or through some local inter-governmental links; and that the relationships between the two parts of Ireland had to be handled in non-violent, constitutional and co-operative ways.
As Collins realised in 1921, and the Provos, truly slow learners, have realised two generations later, violence in Ireland is bankrupt and has been for a very long time.
Dev's dream was of a rural and small-town country, dominated by the virtuous yeoman farmer and loyal to its past and to its religion. However, this society was imagined as being not antagonistic to small industry, seen as supplementing and supporting an essentially farm economy.
Certainly, industrial development was not envisaged as involving vast factories employing large numbers of "Fordist" workers fulfilling repetitive and mechanical tasks a la Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and a host of other images of the alienated world of the modern worker.
The dream died when it became evident that large numbers of Irish people either preferred such a life to the one offered to them in Ireland by voting with their feet, or were forced to choose such a life in England by economic necessity.
The Republic decided eventually to industrialise, just as classic industrialisation was becoming obsolescent, at least in the West. Instead of going through the classic phase of "smokestack industrialisation", the Republic "skipped a stage" as peripheral countries commonly do.
From being a food-producing, mono-crop country, it has become a producer of information technology, a vast range of high-technology products, education, skilled occupations and tourism.
The Republic went straight from a pastoral, rural society to suburbia in 50 years, never developing a classic industrial working class, a full-scale socialist/communist movement or a true fascist reaction. It is almost as though the country went straight from the 19th century to the 21st century without really participating in the 20th.
This abrupt shift has been culturally wrenching, and Irish people have had some difficulty coming to terms with it. However, they have succeeded. In the interim, they have perhaps forgotten Dev's dream; this I find rather a pity, as it was at least a dream of community and not a despicable one at that.
What is now Northern Ireland had a very different political development, going through classic industrialisation in the 19th century and never developing a dominant yeoman farmer class as in the South. However, the two parts of Ireland have in some ways converged in recent decades, with the South becoming relatively richer and the North suffering from the obsolescence of traditional industries.
Both parts of Ireland have tended to seek out similar solutions, in particular investment in post-industrial economic production and mechanised agriculture. North and South are now more alike than they have ever been in their suburbanisation, high education levels, relative secularisation and in their commitment to Europe. They have little to fight about.
These referendums threaten another dream more directly: the dream republic of all IRAs since the IRA mutiny against the Dail government on March 26th, 1922. On that date, the anti-Treaty IRA met in defiance of a prohibition issued by the Dail government. Since then, all IRAs have pretended to derive their authority to kill people from the "Second Dail", the Dail that ratified the Treaty. In the dream-world of the IRA, no Dail elected since then has had legitimate authority to govern.
The idea seems to be that the Irish people voted for independence as a unit in 1918, and their aspiration was frustrated by the British and by "Irish traitors". In fact, Irish people have reluctantly accepted the unpalatable fact that they are deeply divided on a profound constitutional issue: there has never been any widespread wish to unite Ireland by force, and most people have decided to agree to disagree.
If the referendums go through, the "1918 argument" will appear absurd even to fundamentalist republicans.
Tom Garvin is professor of politics in University College Dublin. His most recent book is 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy