When our State emerged as a recognised member of the world community 75 years ago, many doubted our capacity to create a viable political unit. These doubts were strongly reinforced by the bitterness and destruction of the Civil War that had begun five months earlier - and perhaps also by the fact that the revolutionary elite who had overnight replaced the British administration and the former domestic political class lacked many of the economic skills required of a modern administration.
Nevertheless out of the chaos of the tragic months during which the State's independence was established and internationally recognised, a strongly-rooted and stable parliamentary democracy was created. Peace and order were quickly restored, and within a decade the wrecked physical infrastructure had been reconstructed.
The institutions of State were soon firmly established, an incorrupt public administration and judicial system was in place, and within four years a public appointments system based on merit had been extended from the Civil Service to local government.
Moreover, an unarmed police force had established its moral authority; and by the end of the decade tight discipline had been secured within the ranks of a greatly-reduced Army. This ensured a smooth handover of power to those defeated nine years earlier; the great bulk of whom within three years of the end of the Civil War had taken their seats in the Dail, as the principal opposition party.
Finally, from the outset the State showed by stringent control of spending it could live within its means, which because of the loss of the transfers of resources from the richer neighbouring island following independence, and because of the need to divert resources to the huge task of physical reconstruction, were substantially reduced.
Within 10 years of the foundation of the State a second government, composed of men who had been defeated in the Civil War, was demonstrating similar commitment and skill in securing, through the introduction of a new Constitution, the domestic legitimation of the State in the eyes of the one-third of the population who had initially been alienated by the manner in which it had been brought into being.
That government benefited, of course, from the work of its predecessors, but built carefully upon that achievement, doing nothing to disturb the administrative structures it inherited. The additional personnel brought in, drawn from among those who had been excluded from the public service by virtue of their Civil War stance, were relatively few in number and were fitted in without undue disturbance to the established structures.
By securing the return of the British bases in Cork and Donegal, that government avoided involvement in the second World War. Together with its ruthless suppression of the IRA from the late 1930s onwards, this made possible non-belligerence. That policy was supported by the op position, and may well have obviated the danger of a renewed Civil War; one in which the IRA with German support, and possibly the help of some breakaway members of Fianna Fail, might have confronted the democratic authority of the State.
There was, however, a less impressive side to the achievements of the first four decades of Irish independence. The State, eschewing the pluralism that had been espoused by successive leaders of Irish separatism in the late 18th and 19th centuries, rapidly became dominated by a single-ethos approach, which was divisive vis-a-vis the Protestant population in both parts of the island.
At one level, the debt owed to the Irish language revival by those who had won independence for our State led both the first and second governments to impose an Irish-language requirement upon entry to and promotion within the public administration and upon the school-leaving examinations that were the gateway to much private as well as public employment.
Furthermore, the ethos of the early State was not only Gaelic but Roman Catholic as well. At the outset there seems to have been a feeling that so long as the endowment of religion was made unconstitutional, and efforts were made to protect Protestants against the sectarian violence of the early period and to give them half of the seats in the first Senate, for the rest the government was entitled to behave as if this was in fact a Roman Catholic State. De Valera saw no problem about introducing elements of Catholic teaching into his new Constitution, so long as he resisted efforts to declare the State formally to be Catholic.
While at the literary level this vision of a Gaelic Roman Catholic Ireland was challenged by Sean O'Faolain as early as the 1940s, it was not until the 1970s that these serious issues began to be addressed at the political level.
Meanwhile, during the first four decades of political independence the State had had limited economic success. This was partly the consequence of forces outside its control, for example, the impact of Britain's cheap food policy upon what was still a predominantly agricultural economy. But the Economic War with Britain and the excessively prolonged process of industrial protection were both self-inflicted wounds.
More generally, the inevitable inward-lookingness of a post-revolutionary period and caution of an ageing group of conservative-minded nationalist revolutionaries combined to produce inertia.
However, in the end deficiencies as major as this tend to be self-correcting. Even before the first generation of leaders, men like de Valera and Mulcahy, had retired from active politics, the stagnation of the Irish economy in the 1950s and the consequent growth of emigration had jolted the administrative and political systems into drastic action.
Between 1956 and 1959 the failed policies of self-sufficiency, concentration on the domestic market, and exclusion of foreign industrial investment had all been reversed, and Ireland had embarked upon a period of sustained economic growth.
IT is true that subsequent economic policy was not free from error. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a dangerous over-toleration of wage inflation, and in the late 1970s public spending was allowed to run out of control, necessitating corrective action sustained over eight years.
But ultimately the lesson of these blunders was well learnt, and even through these failure of macro-economic policy the sustained impact of other well-judged policies in education and industrial development were providing the basis for the spectacular economic growth of the recent period.
An openness to reviewing received ideas and to accepting new ones has notably marked the second half of the 75 years of independence, and this has enabled this State to handle successfully the twin challenges of Europe and Northern Ireland.
In both cases it was necessary to rethink radically the particular form of nationalism we had inherited from the revolutionary period. As new EC members we might easily have allowed ourselves to be misled into seeking to hang on to as much as possible of our recently-acquired sovereignty.
Instead we recognised from the outset that we would gain more from large countries losing their sovereign right to exploit us by operating tariff barriers against our competitive products or by cheap food policies to exploit our farmers, than we could gain by retaining our less useful sovereignty in such matters.
When the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland demonstrated both the provocative character of our former policy of seeking Irish unity against the wishes of a Northern majority as well as the divisive impact of our attempt to create a single-ethos society in our part of the island, we had the wisdom to abandon these counterproductive stances and to embrace the principle of consent as a precondition to unity.
Although not entirely free from the virus of Thatcherism, Irish society has retained a sense of community and of mutual solidarity. It is also notable that despite the scale and speed of changes in attitudes and values among those growing up since the 1960s, there has been a remarkable absence of intergenerational tension in our society.
However, this should not blind us to the need to build a civic morality to compensate for the rapidly-weakening religion-based value system of the past.
The real test of the success or otherwise of the Irish State is to be found in the answers our people would give to the question: would we have been better off in economic, social, cultural or psychological terms had we remained part of the United Kingdom? I believe that very few would answer any part of this question in the affirmative.
If I am right, then perhaps these same citizens might be willing to concede that over the generations since 1922 we have not been as unfortunate in the quality of the political leadership provided by all parties as these same citizens have been prone to assert.