The turn in Ireland's fortunes is summed up for me by the Border itself. I mean the actual, physical Border where it is at its most formal, on the main road from Belfast to Dublin.
I remember my father furtively turning away his face, while the car waited at the Border there, because he didn't want anyone to see the distress it caused him to cross on to British territory.
And wait is what cars used to do, because there was a piece of paper called a triptych that drivers had to have and there were slow bureaucratic manoeuvres to do with customs and excise. This was even before the Troubles.
When they came, the customs situation was simplified be cause the customs hut was blown up or burnt down. But the road crossing became increasingly difficult, what with military and paramilitary exactions.
You never knew how long you might have to wait in a queue before bumping over the ramp and through the army post where your number was scrutinised, at best, and where you might well be detained for hours, at worst. Well, that wasn't the worst.
People were killed or were wounded on that stretch of road between Ravensdale forest on the Dundalk side and Newry in the North. It was one of the most stained places.
You should see it now. No man's land used to be the epitome of the difficult, unlovely landscape of Ireland. It was a stretch of small, marshy fields, haphazardly marked out by gorse and briars and meandering ditches.
History had left crumbling two-room cottages dotted all over it, hardly seeming to belong to the same era as the dun steel of the British army surveillance posts up on the lumpy hills. Now, that old land, that somebody must once have hopelessly tried to farm, is being infilled at speed. New ramps lead to a fuel farm where the huge lorries that keep this First World island in luxuries gather to exchange behemoth signals.
The hotel at the Border gets bigger and bigger. There's a health and leisure centre there. The petrol stations incorporate shops, coffee bars, information centres, telephones. It is true that the road itself is still narrow, but work has begun on widening and straightening it. The furze bushes topple before the JCBs.
And new houses with PVC gables and patio extensions and dormer windows are rising over the ruins of the old cottages. This Border is on the move into suburbia. Soon it will be one giant motorway service station.
The British army is still there, but not so that a passing motorist would notice. The memory of its looming presence has faded. There used to be a big corrugated-iron encampment through which traffic going north and south was funnelled. Then the encampment went, but the road was still diverted through its ghost. Now they've straightened out the road.
Up on the bank there are two little stone memorials, with flowers in front of them, to British soldiers who died here. Above those again there's a watching-post. But soon you will be passing by too quickly to notice. Last Thursday, in the tense hours leading up to polling day, soldiers had set up roadblocks along the routes to Belfast and were checking licences. But that's abnormal, now. All this will soon be a highway.
Cars will whizz from Dublin to Belfast, and the sight and the feel and the memories awoken by particular places like Balbriggan and Drogheda and Dundalk will be forgotten. The variations in the texture of Ireland will disappear. Belfast to Dublin will be like Antwerp to Lille or Stuttgart to Nancy. You'll speed along on top of the history. Lidice. Huesca. Poyntzpass. They'll all equally be names on signposts.
This is what is going to happen. No matter how long it takes. The money-changers on the Border will abandon the old farmhouses and cottages they so incongruously use as their offices, and redbrick villas with conservatories will rise on their sites. In five years' time - if Britain enters EMU - there will just be euros, north and south. It will be more and more difficult for the smugglers along the half-forgotten Border to make a living, much less enough to supply their families with the statutory 20-room haciendas with gold-plated bathrooms.
In any case, their sons and daughters will all be studying fine art in Florence or aerospace design in Dresden on Euroschemes. They will not be interested in the ancestral skills of filling in the tag-holes in cows' ears with paste, or injecting badly-made growth hormones into young pigs.
Maybe there'll be casino ships or floating liquor supermarkets moored in Carlingford Lough, staffed by Kurds and Moldovans. But probably there'll be nothing to tell that two sovereign jurisdictions abut along this line. It will be like going from Holland into Belgium. There is nothing to mark a border there. It takes a while to know you have left a country with such-and-such a name and arrived at a place with a different one. Eventually, of course, the cultural differences show up. In Ireland there will be much better bread and cakes in the bakeries in the north of the country, and the breads will have different names than in the southern part. Humour will be blacker in the north. Cars will be more washed. The south will be more sociable and much more ready to have fun. Little things.
Before, when I was growing up, Ireland was at peace, but it was the peace, north and south, of perfectly achieved repression. This new peace - the coming of which is now inevitable, let who will stand in its way - will be more life-giving. There will be space to move in it, because the big contentions that filled all the space between us will dissolve with each passing year back into the blur called the past.
The walking wounded from the Troubles will move among us. They won't even have each other to talk to: there are going to be different rates of recovery from the last 30 years in different parts of the island. On the loyalist estates in Portadown or in the alienated villages of South Armagh, or in east Fermanagh where one community felt itself the object of a planned campaign of extinction, the inner life of the people will be very slow to change.
Change it will, however. The alder and willow scrub in the low fields in the pass between Dundalk and Newry will be covered over with the sheds and loading-bays of an entrepot.
Where now Spanish broom has escaped from old gardens, satellite dishes will be planted in concrete yards behind security railings. The emotion that filled my father and so many others will wither in the neon glare. Whatever the passions of the new Ireland will be, they won't be the ones that once rose from the land itself. "What Border?" visitors will say, glancing out from their speeding cars at nothing much.