There is something strangely neat about the fact that the vote on the Amsterdam Treaty falls during the 25th anniversary of Ireland's membership of the European Union. When the treaty comes into effect, it will effectively mark the end of a quarter century during which Ireland has had a special place in the EU. The Amsterdam agreement signed last October is essentially the first step in the enlargement of the Union. It prepares the ground for small, relatively underdeveloped countries like Slovenia and Estonia along with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, to join. When they do, Ireland's long honeymoon as Europe's little pet will be definitively over.
This is, then, a good time to take stock. Are we the same people we were in 1973? What has the EU meant to us? How has it changed us? Would we be fundamentally different without it?
The answers to those questions are complicated by three things. One is that it is impossible to disentangle the changes wrought in Irish society by EU membership from those that that would have happened anyway. Social experiments are not like drug trials - there is no way to check the results of the course of treatment we embarked on in 1973 against an Ireland dosed with social placebos.
What we do know for sure is that profound change would have come in any event. In a sense, the decision to join what was then the EEC was less a cause than a symptom of long-term changes that were already well underway. And it is easy to forget that that decision was made over a decade before we were actually allowed to join. It roughly coincided with the other great changes of the early 1960s - the end of protectionism, the beginning of the age of electronic media, the second Vatican Council.
By the time we joined, the economy had already been opened up to multinational investment. Television was already having an equivalent effect on our culture. The broad political authority of the Catholic church was already being slowly eroded by the emergence of new centres of power. The unthinking certainties of Irish nationalism were already coming into conflict with the brutal realities of civil conflict in Northern Ireland.
The second complication is that the EU in Irish life is a bit like camels in the Koran, so pervasive as to be invisible. It is in the roads and the bridges and the sewage pumps. It also in a whole range of political and economic assumptions. We simply take it for granted that we can't subsidise Irish companies or pursue independent monetary policies or increase the rate of VAT on certain goods. The EU has set limits on our collective behaviour which we hardly even notice anymore.
There is, thirdly, the fact that Ireland is still, at a cultural level, a lot closer to America than it is to Europe. There has been a kind of divide in the way we have encountered modernity. Institutionally and economically, we deal with the modern world through Europe. Culturally, we deal with it through it America and, to a lesser extent, through Britain. If you think of the best known imaginative expressions of modern Ireland - the movies of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, the songs of U2, the novels of Roddy Doyle, Riverdance - it's immediately clear that the dominant influences they are dealing with come from the west, not the east. As long as the language barrier remains, Ireland will always be inclined to place itself primarily in the English-speaking world.
In spite of all this, though, there is no doubt that 1973 was a turning point in Irish history. For membership of the EU had one massive, overriding effect on Irish society. It didn't create the conflict between tradition and modernity that we have lived with for the last 25 years. But it meant that that conflict could only be resolved in favour of modernity. After 1973, it was simply impossible to imagine an alternative project for the Irish future which could even begin to compete with the European one.
Before the EEC, you could just about make a case for an isolated, protected, conservative Ireland. You could propose that the main goal of Irish people was to preserve intact a set of religious, cultural and social values they had presumably inherited from their ancestors. At least in the way we talked about ourselves, this ideal had immense prestige. Even though it was contradicted in daily life all the time, it still had behind it the authority of religion, of the education system and of political rhetoric.
The EU destroyed those illusions. Looking back, it's clear that one of the things the EU accomplished in Ireland is that it bought off the conservative heartlands of rural Ireland. It offered modernity in a form that seemed at first to be purely material. It was modernity not as sex and secularism and confusion but as green pounds, mechanised milking parlours, beef mountains and headage payments. It seemed to be about money, not about politics, society or culture.
It probably helped that in the initial period of EU membership, rural Ireland gained while urban Ireland lost out. In the countryside, new bungalows were springing up like mushrooms moistened by the sweet mist of prosperity that seemed to descend on the fields. In the towns and cities, mass unemployment was laying down deep roots as traditional, uncompetitive and labour-intensive industries shut up shop.
Before it quite knew it, the conservative heartland had bought into a modernising project much more radical in its implications than anything it could ever have imagined. The road paved with ECUs was leading inexorably to a trans-national, federal super-state. Yet the economic benefits of following it, and the economic costs of trying to go back, were so great that there was no real choice except continuing to put one foot in front of another. As with most journeys, only looking back do you realise how far you have come.
Things came to a crunch in 1992, with the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, when anti-abortion activists appealed for a "no" vote. Faced with a choice between taking a stand on the most visceral moral issue and the possibility of rocking the EU boat, conservative Ireland put its mouth where the money was. Effectively, the EU gave conservative Ireland a stake in its own destruction. Would it have died anyway? Yes. Would it have died without a potentially disastrous struggle? Probably not. For when we look back over the last 25 years, the astonishing thing is not that there were sometimes bitter social tensions in the Republic but that they were contained with relative ease. With massive levels of unemployment and social exclusion, with a fierce struggle between secular and religious forces, and with a violent conflict on its doorstep, Irish society should not have been able to accommodate huge economic and cultural changes. Without the EU's success in luring conservative Ireland into the modern project , it almost certainly could not have done so.
The Amsterdam Treaty referendum is in itself a mark of the massive effect of the EU on Irish consciousness. Twenty five years ago, the suggestion that Irish people would be voting to belong to a political union which is moving towards a common system of criminal justice and a common foreign and employment policy, and which will soon stretch far into eastern Europe, would have seemed impossibly far-fetched. Now, all of this is taken so much for granted that it is hard to excite any interest in the vote. The EU has so utterly altered us that its version of the future has become ours.