These days I always look forward to Dublin trips, anticipating them as eagerly as a visit to London, New York, Paris or any vibrant, cosmopolitan capital city. Yet I will never forget my first trip across the Border many years ago. That the Border existed was not in doubt. We all knew about it. Across it was the place where priests in black frocks ruled the land, and where the IRA men hid their guns.
We crossed from Newry, a dozen gawping teenagers peering from the windows of a cramped minibus as we passed through security and customs, bound for a football match in a strange place called Drumcondra. We're in the Free State, one of us said. We're in a foreign country now. Naw, we're not really in the Republic until we reach Dundalk, said another. There's nothing between here and there but fields and sheep.
Dundalk, a few minutes down the road to Dublin, was different from thrifty, prosperous Ballymena, whence we had come. The town seemed grim and desolate, more so in the rain. On wasteland, near a drab town centre, we stopped for a call of nature. No sooner had we stopped than the bus was ambushed by a dozen mucky kids, begging for money: gypsy children speaking a language we didn't understand. Or maybe English, in a way we'd never heard before.
In Dublin, with an hour or two to spare before the big football match, we wandered away from the slimy Liffey and the eeriness of O'Connell Street on a Sunday afternoon, and stepped into a Dickensian cameo of poverty and deprivation, tempered with an edge of menace.
Dublin was smelly. It was dirty. Noisy drunks gathered on the street corners swigging God Knows What from big dark bottles while others in the flats above us sent empty bottles crashing to the ground in the street ahead of us. Grubby girls with no shoes and holes in their skirts and old women wrapped in dirty shawls with palms extended thanked anyone who spared a penny and cursed those who wouldn't.
Sure, we could have seen squalor like this on Belfast's Shankill or Falls Roads, but none of us ever had. For us Ballymena boys, who had never ventured far from home, this was a new experience. For years my perception of the South was informed by the dankness and drunkenness I witnessed on those dirty side streets, and the tug on my sleeve from a wide-eyed waif without a crust of bread to her name.
That was some 30 years ago. Almost a third of a century has passed and history has been reversed. While the South prospers, the North is in a mess. No doubt it is still possible to find drunks and urchins in Dublin today, but where in the world would you not?
What strikes home today is that much of the poverty has been replaced by confidence and affluence. The mangy cat that was the early Free State has been replaced by a Celtic Tiger sharpening its claws on the world markets, cutting its teeth on the technological information age and feasting on the achievements that have enabled the Republic to rise from the bottom rung of the European wage ladder to the rooftop of economic growth in 10 energetic years.
Dublin has acquired the mantle of a truly international city. O'Connell Street teems with life. Temple Bar bursts with vibrant cosmopolitanism, as richly European as Barcelona or Vienna. Hotels spring skywards from every corner, all the better to cope with floods of tourists and international business chiefs arriving in the capital to plan investment programmes.
Consumerism has replaced Catholicism as a way of life. The dingy streets where Molly Malone wheeled her humble barrow are now home to giant emporiums, offering shoppers everything you could find in the West End of London, and a lot more than you will ever find in Belfast. The colour of the slime in the Liffey seems to have acquired a more contemporary hue, somehow shinier, like the whole of the city. And good Lord, even Irish dancing is sexy now.
Property prices in some areas rival London's, but given the choice, and a seductive taxation system, who would live in London? Not Damon Hill, or Ulster's own race ace Eddie Irvine or the Rolling Stones. Far from being backward, the Republic has planned ahead for the day, not long away, when membership of the European Union expands to embrace developing nations and the coffers diminish.
Young people have been educated to new levels of sophistication in essential areas like computer technology, medicine and science. The ambitious ones are no longer leaving for Liverpool, Botany Bay or Boston, but staying to add their energy to the progress that will surely continue in the next century. Even the old dogs are learning new tricks, getting the best out of European membership and the growth of internationalism while folk up North discuss who should be allowed to walk along which road on what day.
So what's the problem? Is it just begrudgery that prevents Ulster Prods from running with open arms to embrace John Hume's vision of a new, agreed Ireland? That is true in some small part.
But there is much more to it. An undercurrent of mendacity emanates from the Republic's politicians. Unionists perceive hubris in the Dail. You have, in the view of some unionists, just elected a President who detests them and all they stand for. Unforgivable ambiguity persists towards the Provisional IRA, which has maimed and murdered thousands across the Border because of their religion or their political allegiances.
It is because Dublin is the city that Belfast might have become, without the IRA, that so many Northerners resent its success, and look for reasons to ridicule. If it wasn't for the European money tree and the Yankee dollars, you'd have real problems, we say, ignoring the reality that money from London, Brussels and the US is just about enough to keep Northern Ireland's thick neck above the water.
Why, we moan, should the Republic have money from the European Peace and Reconciliation Fund when its towns and cities haven't been blown to pieces, and its farmers driven from their land?
The chasm of mistrust and suspicion has yet to be bridged. Building a tunnel across the Irish Sea is a project which will require less dexterity and perseverance than spanning the gap between the two kinds of Irish.
If the challenge facing unionists is to forge a new relationship with their southern cousins, then that which faces citizens of the Republic is to rid themselves of the avarice which surfaces with indecent regularity in the promptings of your political leaders. This will require, among other things, an imaginative approach to dealing with Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution.
In the history of boundary disputes, whether between countries or among neighbours arguing over the garden fence, there has never been an example of a peaceful and permanent solution arrived at by one man laying claim to another's piece of earth.
Geoff Martin is Editor of the Belfast News Letter