As straws in the wind go, Ms Sile de Valera's Boston speech in September seems to have been lofted higher and further in the breeze of public discourse than she could possibly have expected.
"Participation in the European Union has been good for Ireland," she acknowledged, before putting in the boot. "The Union has worked well. But it is not the cornerstone of what our nation is and should be."
She looked forward "to a future in which Ireland will exercise a more questioning attitude to the EU", and said that the push to greater integration "is a move I would not personally favour". Even without the Tanaiste, Ms Harney's, supportive intervention and its alliterative counterposing of Boston and Berlin as our natural and not-so-natural soulmates, the speech from an Irish minister was a remarkable sign of the new times.
A couple of months later we would be in Nice voting for the abolition of the veto in decision-making on structural fund rules as Spain, our former ally in the ranks of the EU less-privileged, fought a losing rearguard action to defend it. The veto will go in 2007, and, probably soon after it, Spain's last access to Cohesion Funds. Not that we will worry. The last of ours dries up in 2003-04 and by 2010 we may even be a net contributor.
The speech and the vote are intimately linked and neither would have been possible even three years ago. The year 2000 marked our passage from the EU's have-nots to haves, saw us stretch our per capita income lead over our former colonial masters, Britain, and saw us move from grateful supplicants to ingrates with short memories. The message sent out by our Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the islands, was heard loud and clear in Brussels as the President of the Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, made clear to this paper good-humouredly in a pre-summit interview.
"Outside Europe, you have nothing. What would you be outside Europe?" he asked. "But you are not grateful for that. It's the first time in history that your country has become an immigrant country. In 20 years you made a revolution that you have not done in four or five centuries. And yet you don't acknowledge that this fantastic change has come about because of Europe. And you didn't lose your sovereignty. You are Irish. Terribly Irish."
Terribly Irish.
Not that Mr Prodi is interested in gratitude, simply in pointing out that a more supportive approach to the institutional needs of the Union as it enlarges is in Ireland's interests.
The Commission argues that small states suffer from short-termism in their insistence on defending their right to a commissioner and vetos that will ultimately be counterproductive. A large unwieldy Commission will lose its credibility and be bypassed by the large states, they say, while, ultimately, more collective decision-making will help to open and keep open markets to successful economies like Ireland. If the Nice summit has paved the way for enlargement, it has also, and perhaps just as importantly, opened up a new debate on the EU's future shape. Should the Union have a constitution? Should we enshrine human rights as part of our fundamental law? Can we find ways of involving national parliamentarians in the work of Brussels? And, most importantly, can we define with clarity a consensus on what Europe should be doing and what the member-states should do, a definition of competences?
The idea is, through broad consultation, to come up with answers for another IGC in 2004. The founding father of the EU, Jean Monnet, saw the emergence of the community in a very different light from that in which we see it today. It would grow incrementally, addressing problems as they arose, building support as it showed that it could solve such problems. And the treaty reflects that in committing the Union to no particular destination but "an ever closer union".
"I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a community of which they had no experience," Monnet once explained. But the alienation of the public from the EU may well be precisely a product of that sense, many years later, that no one knows where we are going or when we will stop. The time has come to set a limit to that onward march.
Having got the difficult institutional issues addressed at Nice out of the way and set a road map for treaty reform, the EU also steps into 2001 with three other colossal projects in hand: the completion of the transition to a single currency, the acceleration of negotiations on accession, and the establishment of a real, independent military capacity.
The notes and coins of the single currency will be launched in January 2002 and much practical work still needs to be done, particularly preparing small businesses for the brief transition to exclusive use of the new notes. The hope in Brussels is that their arrival will give a psychological boost to markets and a hike to the undervalued euro.
But despite much media comment on the "weakness" of the euro, EU officials are still confident about the whole project, with Mr Prodi pointing out that even that pillar of strong currencies, the deutschmark, had its ups and downs on the market. The fundamentals, they say, are still right: growth is healthy, indeed predicted to be stronger than in the US, where inflation is rearing its ugly head.
The hope is that the Swedes, in their first presidency, which begins in January, will be able to accelerate the negotiation process for accession. The Commission has set 2001 as a target date for the opening of the final chapters of talks and the member-states are to start internal discussions shortly on how to respond to acceding to states' demands for transition periods in areas ranging from agriculture to the environment.
The rule of thumb will be "as few as possible, as short as possible", but the EU itself will also be under pressure to seek temporary derogation on free movement of labour.
For the applicants the challenges are reasonably clear and have various degrees of difficulty, but most will want to be reassured that the EU genuinely intends to bring them in gradually on their merits rather than wait for a big bang accession when the giant of the group, Poland, is ready. In theory, following the ratification of the Treaty of Nice, which may take up to 18 months, the Union will be ready to admit new members from the beginning of 2003. At that stage it is also supposed to have established a capability to deploy to a crisis zone 60,000 troops at six weeks' notice in a force that is sustainable for a year.
Member-states pledged numbers at the troop commitment conference in November. Now the challenge is to turn quantity into quality by training the forces for interoperability and creating the heavy lift and intelligence capacities needed, and to create a new hands-off relationship with NATO. 2001 will also see if the Union has learnt the lessons of the first BSE crisis in its handling of the second. All the signs are better. The Commission has been aggressively proactive and transparent, applying in a aggressive new way the precautionary principle.
Mr Byrne, whose confidence has clearly grown in a year as Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs, has taken to the challenge with gusto. The issue is a classic example of the limitations of purely national solutions to problems in a globalising era, a classic justification, if one were needed, of the EU itself. Yet it appears that it is needed, and that the case is still not made, a reality I find bewildering as I leave Brussels as a correspondent after six years.
That the arguments about the EU are still posed in terms of "are you for Europe or agin it?" is truly bizarre, whether on the right or the left, whether in the form of "Boston versus Berlin" or "capitalism versus socialism". It is as strange as asking the question "are you for Paris, or agin it?" Paris is. The EU is. And us within it, a polity with far more political diversity than we can dream of at home, all shades battling, with very few exceptions, not about "whether Europe" but "what Europe". It's about time we cottoned on.