This week, as we celebrate the clear result of the referendum on the Treaty of Nice and look forward to inquiries into the baleful effects of the Catholic Church's secretive ways, the following question occurs to me: Do we always have to wait until our backs are to to the wall before we engage in open, whole-hearted debate and arrive at definite conclusions?
Of course we don't but, looking at our record, we can't avoid the conclusion that waiting until decisions and action are forced on us is one of our less endearing habits.
It was so when I started work as a reporter in the Clare Champion. It remains so as I write this final column almost half a century later.
Damnit, there have been times when it almost proved fatal. And among the reasons for it was that we had a convenient excuse for our failures in history: the 800 years of oppression allowed us to blame others for what was still amiss 30 years after independence.
Of course dominance by Britain had helped to retard our development. But by the middle of the last century so had the idea that we could survive economically on our own: a notion, by the way, which ran counter to the doctrine of interdependence preached by Eamon de Valera as leader of the League of Nations in the 1930s.
After the war, the idea persisted that we could survive, not only in isolation but as a largely rural society and determined to remain so. This was absurd, but we made a virtue of short-sightedness even when the signs of doom crowded every railway station and clogged every port.
We waited until the last minute to question the orthodoxy of self-sufficiency and isolation because to do so earlier would have been unpatriotic or, as we feared in our superstitious way, might bring the whole house of cards down around us.
In any event there was another choice, an alternative to emigration but more fatalistic.
Among the 100,000 or so who marched through Dublin and Limerick in the IRA man Sean South's funeral were several Fianna Fáil TDs.
Like the rest of us who took part, they probably had no idea where we were going or what we might do when we got there; we were looking for emotional release.
(I wrote about South's "murder".) For a society dying on its feet it was, ironically, a safety valve.
And it was not until I worked in Belfast - for the Irish Press in 1959 - that I began to have the faintest idea what our great demonstration meant to people of "the other persuasion" as they were called by a character in Joyce's masterly story, The Dead. Those of "the other persuasion" were people whose ways were a mystery to us in the 1950s and 1960s But so were the ways of the hierarchy.
Indeed, if the orthodoxy of nationalism and the caesura drawn across Southern society by the Civil War distorted debate and inhibited development, the silence and secrecy imposed by the Catholic authorities left deeper and more lasting scars.
REMARKABLY, the change in policy which favoured industrial development and foreign investment provoked less debate than the changes promised by the second Vatican Council which might have given the laity a sense of shared ownership in their church.
I had long before ceased to feel any attachment to Catholicism, though John Horgan's reports from Rome during the Vatican Council were fascinating.
And no one with a spark of intellectual curiosity or human sympathy could fail to be stirred by the arguments of Enda McDonagh, Gabriel Daly, Fergal O'Connor or Margaret McCurtain.
I may be accused of dwelling unduly on the 1960s here. But it was in the 1960s that it finally seemed we were about to lose the habit of waiting until our backs were to the wall before entering a serious discussion about what was to be done.
And it was in the middle to late 1960s that we began to ask whether we had used our independence well, just as our contemporaries in Northern Ireland began to ask whether it was possible for people there to reform Northern Ireland without an appeal to tribalism or resort to violence.
These were political questions, of concern not only to party organisers, vested interests and controlling elites but to the public at large and especially those who would be directly affected by such change as the electorate considered necessary.
But the political system isn't always a match for changes in other areas. As industrial development progressed, so did the opportunity to cash in on its profits, especially where the interests of property and politics coincided.
Someone had to pay. And they did: usually those who could least afford it - the poorest of the poor.
We joined the European Community (the EEC as it was); and we've had rich returns for our shared sovereignty. But it has taken us 30 years to hold our most thorough debate on Ireland's role in the EU and what Europe means to us.
But industrialisation which is not matched by social development is, as the European social democrats should have taught us, a cold comfort. In our richest years, when we had the chance to make this a fairer and more civilised place to live in, we didn't take it. If our backs were to be against the wall again, we would not be prepared for it.
Everyone knows how untrustworthy people find the Dáil and the Government. But as Michael Mills pointed out the other day, the media must share responsibilty for our political failures.
It's ironical that he should have become an Ombudsman for this State but the newspaper industry should fail to provide an Ombudsman of its own.
Finally, thanks to the readers; comradely wishes to my colleagues and to the new leader of the Labour party.
And, to one and all, this question: do we have to wait until our backs are to the wall again and Irish society is about to fall apart before challenging the latest orthodoxy - that market forces will solve everything?
They won't, you know