What's the real Europe - boring institutional debates or Champions League football, Ryanair and personal relationships that cross all boundaries? Fintan O'Toole on how we Irish have grown to love Europe.
Take any given week in the year. The second week in last December, for example. It happened to be the week in which negotiations for a new Constitution for the EU were coming to a head, and the newspapers and airwaves were full of qualified majority voting, vetoes, defence pacts. The stuff, in other words, that most people feel they ought to make the effort to care about but feels too much like the political equivalent of an anorak. Try as journalists and politicians might to give it its proper weight in the nation's consciousness, it was just more evidence of the boredom and irrelevance that is Europe.
What else was going on that week? Well, there was a fierce debate about the ruins of Carrickmines Castle and the fact that a major motorway interchange was about to be driven through it. A report commissioned by the EU Commission had criticised the original Environmental Impact Statement. Those who wanted to preserve, as they saw it, a vital piece of Irish heritage were hoping that the EU might intervene and help to protect the castle. No one thought it the slightest bit remarkable that the best way to preserve Irish heritage seemed to be through an appeal to Brussels. We had all become used to an idea which even 20 years ago would have seemed bizarre.
Also that week, the telephone company Eircom began an advertising campaign to draw attention to significant reductions in its rates for calls to the continent. Even 10 years ago this information would have been assumed to be of the slightest interest only to a small number of business people who dealt with companies in France or Germany. The ads would have been placed, perhaps, in the business pages of quality newspapers.
Now, however, the good news was advertised on prime time radio with a young Irish man and woman phoning their Spanish girlfriend and boyfriend. Not only had calls to the continent become a mass-market issue, but it was assumed that the Irish masses had plenty of sweet nothings to whisper to Barcelona or Bremen.
On the Tuesday and Wednesday night, hundreds of thousands of Irish sports fans were tuning in to live coverage of the Champions League. They were watching Damien Duff make a decisive pass for Chelsea against Besitkas in a game played in Germany. They saw John O'Shea give a confident performance for Manchester United against Stuttgart. They sympathised with poor Liam Miller as he and his Celtic team-mates got the run-around in Lyon.
And, if they were Celtic or Manchester United or Chelsea fans, they were also cheering on continental Europeans with names such as Petrov, Silvestre, Hasselbaink, van Nistelrooy, Larrson. They had no problem defining "us" in that context at least, as a polyglot, multi-racial, mixum-gatherum of old and new Europeans.
Most of us, in other words, have become entirely used to existing in a European context. The crushing tedium of the institutional debates belies a profound shift so pervasive and uncontroversial that we hardly ever discuss it.
Thirty years ago, when Ireland was just feeling its way into what was then the Common Market, Europe was still an abstract concept for most Irish people. It was the place where ECUs and headage payments and the money that paid for intervention storage and butter mountains came from. If we went there, it was mostly to a Spanish report that had been made to feel like a little piece of England. Or to holy places such as Rome and Lourdes where the context was not so much Europe as Christendom. The bits of Europe that came into our homes were either giant stuffed donkeys and sombreros or rosary beads blessed by the Pope.
Now, thanks to Ryanair and the Champions League, to immigration and to the relative prosperity that makes a foreign holiday a real possibility for most people and what was once foreign food a part of our staple diet, Europe is tangible. We take cheap flights to airports we didn't even know existed until Michael O'Leary discovered that they were within a hundred kilometres of cities we had heard of. We meet young continentals in our own bars and hotels.
Some of us have had ever-closer unions with actual Europeans. Our diet has changed so much that we wonder whether there is a French word for baguette and whether they have tapas bars in Spain. Paninis are now as Irish as potatoes. Buying clothes in Zara and wondering where you can get Valrhona chocolate in Mullingar is as much a part of who we are as the All-Ireland hurling final.
All of this is not, strictly-speaking, new. European-ness seemed to come in waves in 20th century Ireland. The people who established the State usually thought of themselves as Europeans. (The first major obituary of James Connolly in 1916 called him, not a "true Irishman" but a "real European".) In the inward-looking decades of post-revolutionary exhaustion, this changed, and Europe became again the place where, if you wanted to escape Ireland altogether, you took refuge as Joyce and Beckett did in Paris.
Ironically, the process of modernisation that entailed Ireland's entry into the EU also entailed the gradual weakening of the most profound sense of European identity for most ordinary people. Urbanisation and secularisation weakened the hold of Catholicism, which had involved an implicit identification with the Catholic Europe of France, Spain and Italy.
It is odd to think that most well-educated Irish people now in their late 40s had a working knowledge of what had once been the common European international language - Latin. Arguably, Ireland in 1980 was less European in this sense than it had been since the 5th century.
But even these profound links were intellectual and, in some respects, quite abstract. Priests, nuns, writers, artists and some politicians felt - in very different ways - European, but most people outside those spheres probably did not. What's new about the current context is that it has much less to do with beliefs and ideas than it has with ordinary daily life. The changes are about physical things - travel, food, sport, clothes, friendships, sex - and they have happened, if not quite spontaneously, then at least organically.
There is a very long way to go, of course. Our mastery of continental languages is still, on the whole, abysmal and in times when language is a far greater barrier than distance, that is a huge self-imposed limitation on the extent to which a European popular culture can be said to exist. The culture we consume is still, overwhelmingly, American and British. Very few of us watch continental movies, or read European novels even in translation.
There is still a huge gulf in the nature of public debate here and on the continent, where the forces that have shaped recent history - the Holocaust, the second World War, the rise and fall of communism - are beyond our direct experience.
Yet, sometimes in regrettable ways, even these differences are fading.
The new Latin is American English and we speak it all too well. Many French people don't watch French movies either, and the same Hollywood blockbusters that dominate our screens are also standard fare in Berlin, Budapest and Barcelona. The memory of the epic events that scarred mid-century continental Europe is fading just as fast in Germany, France and Italy as Irish memories of the past are giving way to amnesia. For these reasons, good and bad, Europe is no longer an idea and has become a fact of life. There is in train a process of contact, migration, encounter and cross-fertilisation that even the most boring of Eurocrats can't squeeze the life out of. If they could, indeed, just find a way to give institutional form to the openness and fluidity of European life, they might not cause so many eyes to glaze over.