The most striking thing about the decision of Leo Varadkar to wear a poppy in the Dáil last week was the fact that it aroused so little controversy.
There was a token protest by Sinn Féin and a few hostile letters to the newspapers from the usual suspects, but the general reaction was one of quiet approval or even indifference.
The muted reaction says a lot about the way modern Ireland defines itself. The country now has enough confidence in itself to accept different varieties of Irishness as adding to, rather than detracting from, its identity as a progressive European nation.
It is hard to believe that back in the late 1980s the then taoiseach Charles Haughey vetoed a decision by then president Patrick Hillery to accept an invitation to attend the annual remembrance day service in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Senior political figures like Pat Cooney and Barry Desmond had broken the unofficial ban on government figures attending the service but the State was not formally represented at the ceremony to remember the tens of thousands of Irish people killed in the two World Wars until the 1990s.
President Hillery’s successor, Mary Robinson, was the first president to go to the service and her successors, Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins, have attended as part of the wider process of reconciliation between all the traditions on the island of Ireland and improving relations between this country and the UK.
‘True European’
During the first official visit by an Irish head of state to the UK in 2014, President Higgins took the opportunity of paying tribute to the Irish politician and poet Tom Kettle who died at the Battle of the Somme, describing him as “an Irish patriot, a British soldier and a true European”.
This was entirely appropriate as a century after his death Ireland has become a place that is close to Kettle’s vision of a nation that is truly Irish and European as well.
The tragedy is that while Ireland has matured into an outward-looking nation proud to be part of the EU, our nearest neighbours have retreated into a narrow nationalism that defines itself by rejecting Europe.
That decision has the potential to do incalculable damage to the people of the UK while the knock-on impact on the island of Ireland is inevitably going to be negative. The only question is the extent of damage.
In a hard-hitting speech on Tuesday, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney pointed to the fundamental contradiction in the stated British aims of leaving the EU single market and customs union while avoiding a return to a hard Border on the island of Ireland. Achieving both is simply not possible.
From an Irish perspective, one of the encouraging developments since the Brexit referendum is that the UK decision has not led to any serious suggestions that we should follow our nearest neighbours out of the EU.
The most recent Eurobarometer poll has shown confidence in the EU has improved right across the union, with support in Ireland rising in tandem with the UK’s chaotic preparations to leave.
The poll points up how the Irish regard their national and European identities as being complementary
The poll shows that Irish people, like most other Europeans, have greater confidence in the institutions of the EU than they have in their own parliament or governments.
EU optimism
For instance, 41 per cent of Irish people tend to trust their own government but 52 per cent do not and the figure for the Dáil is almost identical. By contrast, 51 per cent trust the EU while 37 per cent do not. On the question of whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the EU, Irish people are the most positive of all, with 77 per cent being optimistic and just 18 per cent pessimistic.
The response of voters in the UK was different from that of most others but not as markedly so as might have been expected. Distrust in their own government and parliament was even greater than the Irish figure, but they distrusted EU institutions by roughly the same margin.
That appears to reflect a loss of confidence in all institutions, national and European, which says something about the state of British democracy and probably about the destructive role the popular media there has played in shaping the political debate.
An interesting feature of the poll is that the Portuguese and Spanish, who like the Irish were bailed out by the EU during the financial crisis, are almost as optimistic about the future of the union as we are. Far from “austerity” undermining public faith in the EU, as so many commentators forecast, it has actually reinforced the notion of cross-border solidarity.
Mind you, the attitude in Greece is markedly different, with deep distrust of the EU and its institutions as well as its own politicians. That is understandable given the trauma the country is still suffering.
Overall, though, the poll points up how the Irish, and a majority in most other EU countries, regard their national and European identities as being complementary rather than contradictory. In a volatile world, that gives some grounds for optimism about the future of the EU regardless of Brexit.