A most acceptable union

A Vital National Interest - Ireland in Europe 1973-1998. Edited by Jim Dooge and Ruth Barrington. Institute of Public Administration/The European Movement. 358pp. £20.

Europe: The Irish Experience. Edited by Rory O'Donnell. Institute of European Affairs. 233pp. £15.

`Irish society has changed more over the past 25 years than at any time in its history". So says Liam Ryan in the second of these volumes devoted to Ireland's experience of European integration over the last generation. They are both important books, containing essays and analyses by many of the politicians, officials and academic commentators who have been most involved. The recurrent question they pose is how much the European experience has contributed to those changes in Irish society. Most conclude it has been profound, whether directly in sectors such as agriculture, indirectly in manufacturing industry, services and the regulatory environment or through the environment, women's rights and public administration.

The European Communities have been transformed over those years into a Union much deeper and broader in scope than the EEC Ireland joined in 1973. Rory O'Donnell identifies European influences on inward investment, development planning, monitoring and evaluation, consumer rights, environmental regulation and social rights, financial discipline, social partnership. Europe should be seen not causally but contextually in interpreting these changes. Understood as a new and stronger set of relationships rather than misconceived as an entity emerging to form a new superstate, the EU has enmeshed the member-states in an unprecedented web of collaboration and co-operation. For Ireland, O'Donnell writes, this has been a liberating experience, allowing it to leave the twentieth century "free of the two masters that dominated and constrained it - London and Rome".

The two books are complementary, indeed indispensable accounts of how that has been accomplished. The IEA volume is the more tightly structured, looking in detail at politics, society and culture, the economy and public administration. The volume edited by Jim Dooge and Ruth Barrington is more descriptive, personal and sectoral in its approach. Essays deal with the history of Ireland's involvement, accounts of EU institutions and policies and the views and recollections of successive Irish commissioners.

There are some gems and some narratives or analyses simply unavailable elsewhere. They include Paddy Hillery on how Ireland's entry was negotiated; David Neligan on how the Council of Ministers really works; Garret FitzGerald on how he defended small state interests when the European Council was set up in the mid-1970s; William Carroll and Thomas Byrne on how regional policy has bolstered central at the expense of local government; Tom Garvey on 25 years of environment policy; Seamus Sheehy incisive as always on agriculture; Richard Burke, Michael O' Kennedy, Peter Sutherland, Ray MacSharry and Padraig Flynn on their experiences as commissioners; John Hume on European transformations.

In his foreword to the IEA book Terry Stewart notes that although it is not treated as a separate subject, membership of the Union has changed Ireland's relations with the United Kingdom. The theme suffuses the volume (as does the parallel and related theme of new relations with North America). These are central to Tom Garvin's elegant and succinct political survey - "in these islands Europe symbolises the end of empire and therefore the obsolescence of the ancient English-Irish quarrel". Brendan Halligan recalls the accurate description of Ireland as a region of the UK economy in the 1960s.

DERMOT McAleese charts the collapse of much domestic industry under conditions of freer trade with Britain, and the unanticipated surge of US investment which decisively diversified Ireland's trade towards EU markets; he rebukes fellow-economists who argued against joining EMU without Britain - would such a decision "not go against the whole thrust of Irish political economy over the past 30 years, which has been to lessen our economic dependence on Britain and establish an independent role on a broader international stage?" Brigid Laffan, reporting original research on public administration and the EU, reminds us that "EU policymaking was a liberation from an over-concentration on Whitehall models".

Rory O'Donnell's concluding chapter is a tour de force in which he makes a powerful case that Ireland's greatest contribution "has been to have made a success of membership". He makes an important distinction between the largely self-inflicted crisis and despair of the 1980s, resulting from a failure to respond to growing internationalisation, and the period since 1987. The political class reached a consensus on deeper integration and social partnership then which became the basis for the current remarkable boom. It bears comparison with the Whitaker revolution in the late 1950s.

Given the depth of change over the last decade, O'Donnell sees no good reason why Irish support for integration should evaporate when CAP and structural funds are reduced and European security and foreign policy become more prominent. Such is the assumption made by sections of the academy and media who (by no coincidence) oppose both the deeper economic and monetary union and the social partnership that underlie Ireland's current successful policies. This is a lively polemic indeed, which deserves a wide audience.

Paul Gillespie is foreign editor of The Irish Times

Negotiator and commissioners: Dr Patrick Hillery, second left, with Michael O'Kennedy, and, from left, Richard Burke, Ray MacSharry, Peter Sutherland and Padraig Flynn