In Monty Python's film The Life of Brian, set in Palestine at the time of Christ, there is a scene in which a Palestinian nationalist agitator asks: "What have the Romans ever done for us?" One of his listeners mumbles something about the roads.
"Yes, but apart from the roads, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Another great advance in civilisation is mentioned, and the rhetorical question is further qualified.
This goes on until the aggrieved Palestinians finally accept that, apart from every useful addition to their infrastructure, the Romans have indeed done nothing for them.
The Life of Brian was banned in Ireland for many years, which was probably just as well since this scene has uncomfortable resonances here. Good anti-imperialists that we are, we are nevertheless unhappily aware that much of Ireland's modern infrastructure has been a gift from distant overlords.
At the beginning of this century, it was built at the direction of the London government. Towards the end of the century, it materialised through the largesse of the Brussels Commission.
And now, for most of the country at least, we are facing the prospect of having to take responsibility for it ourselves.
Whether Ireland comes down from its dependence on EU structural funds with a soft or a hard landing, it is clear that we will no longer be able to rely on Brussels and the German taxpayer to fund our infrastructural development. This will be painful but it may not be entirely a bad thing.
In the period between independence and the infusion of EU structural funds in the 1980s, the State did achieve some major physical developments. Rural electrification, though slow and rather belated, was a vast project which brought great social benefits.
The clearance of Dublin's notorious slums in the 1940s, and the construction of new working-class suburbs may not have been handled with a great deal of foresight, but it, too, was a huge undertaking.
The exploitation of the bogs by Bord na Mona and of natural gas by An Bord Gais were important initiatives. The modernisation of the phone system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, though again extremely belated, was a real success and contributed hugely to the economic growth of the 1990s.
Yet often the spur for major infrastructural projects was not some grand Irish vision but the availability of foreign aid. As far back as 1948, the Long Term Recovery Programme, under which much of the investment in telephones and electricity services was made in the 1950s was, in Dr T.K. Whitaker's tart description, "an exercise that had to be undertaken to persuade the Americans to give us Marshall Aid".
That this phrase could be repeated in relation to the late 1990s, substituting "Brussels" for "Americans" and "structural funds" for "Marshall Aid" is a mark of the long-term effects of dependency on the quality of official thinking.
Getting somebody else to pay for our roads, ports, sewage systems and so on, is a neat trick. But it has consequences for the political and administrative culture of the State.
Now that the era of subsidy is coming to an end, it is important that we take stock of what they are. We need to reflect on the habits of mind that have developed so that we can get rid of them.
One of the results of having your development driven from the outside is a tendency to adopt ideas merely because they are in vogue elsewhere. Some of the more disastrous examples of this tendency are set to cost us a great deal of money over the next few years.
The demolition and replacement of the Ballymun high-rise towers in Dublin will begin shortly. A programme of rebuilding the railways after their slow strangulation from the 1960s onwards will take a great deal longer.
Another effect is the lack of a sense of public ownership of the planning process. When "development" is stimulated by the availability of cash from the outside, the whole notion of physical planning as a political and cultural process has a weak grip. It becomes the realm of an enclosed elite.
One consequence of this is the kind of corruption of the planning process that the Flood tribunal is beginning to uncover. Another is the tendency to take dictation from technocrats. In the development of our transport infrastructure, for example, the demands and enthusiasms of road engineers have been given far more weight than the needs of communities.
This narrow vision does not even have the virtue of efficiency. The starkest example of the way EU structural funds have distorted the planning process is the debacle of the Luas light rail system in Dublin.
First, Dublin remained one of the few capitals in the developed world without an underground rail system because, since there was nobody out there to put up the money, the scale and ambition of such a project was beyond the grasp of our administrative and political culture.
Then, when CIE came up with a plan, it lay dormant until the Brussels billions appeared on the horizon. Once the money was available, a detailed scheme was put in place to make sure that it could be claimed. Only then, when everything was in place, did a real debate begin and the inherent problems emerge. The result was a tedious trip back to the drawing board, no Luas this millennium and chaos on the roads of Dublin.
There is a broader social and political cost, paid in the form of a topsy-turvy approach to priorities. We look, not for money to fund ideas, but for ideas that will attract funding. A particularly stark example is the Government's recent proposal for new regional authorities.
The plan was drawn up simply and solely to bolster the Irish case for structural funds. A big, complex political debate about local democracy and decentralisation is reduced to a quick, cute formula for extracting more euros from the German taxpayer.
THERE is, finally, a sense in which the structural funds have helped us to avoid coherent political choices. For the irony is that, at least in the early and mid-1990s, we used the generosity of the European taxpayer to underwrite our own fiscal conservatism.
The most important effects of the structural funds was that they saved us from the consequences of our own governments' cuts in public capital spending.
Our governments argued passionately for expansionist policies in Brussels and for retrenchment at home. We were street angels and house devils (or street Keynesians and house monetarists), spending Europe's money with abandon and minding our own like misers. The result is a kind of ideological double-think that did nothing to encourage clarity in our political principles.
If we go into the new European era with these habits of mind intact, the withdrawal of the structural funds will indeed be traumatic. On the other hand, we may find that the need to fund our own development forces us to get our act together.
Decision-making will have to be more than working out the moment during a long night in Brussels when you've squeezed the last available euro from the kitty. Planning will have to be more than putting together an application that tells the Commission what you think they want to hear.
Maybe, when we're building the road with our own money, we'll want to know where we're going and whether this is the best way to get there.