Because Poles abroad were able to vote, their country has matured faster than Ireland managed as a young independent state, suggests Tony Kinsella.
There is something heart-warming about watching vibrant democracy in action. The two million young Poles, many born after the fall of the communist state, who turned out last October 21st to unceremoniously dump the often primitive and occasionally grotesque Law and Justice (PiS) government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, offered us another example - much closer to home.
Watching those bright, determined, optimistic young Europeans queuing to vote in Lodz, Warsaw, Brussels, London and Dublin threw the parallels between the Irish and the Polish experiences and reactions into sharp relief.
Two relatively poor, significantly rural and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic countries emerged from periods of foreign domination to take responsibility for their own futures. Poland, on reflection, has moved faster than Ireland.
My father, Thomas Patrick Kinsella, was born in Dublin in 1911. He began his education in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, was a young boy during the War of Independence, finished his schooling in the Irish Free State and graduated in de Valera's ambivalently labelled "Eire".
He had a fierce, passionate pride in his country, a country that was for him, something new. I can remember him standing ramrod straight as Amhrán na bFhiann was played, beaming when he saw a tricolour floating over a public building. We once stopped in front of the then newly opened US embassy for him to remark proudly on its presence as proof Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the world.
He was also a Roman Catholic, practising if not overly devout, and in later years the practising element faded. His generation certainly lived a confusion of identity and belief. It was a loose "to-be-Catholic-was-to-be-Irish-was-to-be-Catholic" formula the Poles of the Kaczynski twin's generation would instantly recognise.
In communist and Nazi Poland, Roman Catholicism was at least as much a badge of national identity and resistance as it was an expression of religious belief. The Solidarity demonstrators who flooded out of the Gdansk shipyards bore crucifixes to proclaim their Polish identity more than their profound belief in the transubstantiation of the host.
It was inevitable figures such as the Kaczynskis would come to the fore in the independent Poland. The essence of their policies, foreign and domestic, was to reach backwards to correct past wrongs.But the majority of Polish voters decided at the recent election that righting past wrongs is often best achieved by building better futures. Young Polish citizens voted for the economically conservative Civic Platform not so much out of approval for its policies, but out of rejection of the farcically sectarian PiS party.
Had Ireland's young emigrants of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s been able to vote in Irish general elections at consulates in Birmingham and Bristol, the sterile stasis of Ireland's political leaders of those decades would have been swept away.
If a framework of democratic European states, such as today's EU, had been prepared to channel into the young Irish state the vast sums the EU will pump into Poland under structural aid up to 2013, then we too might have turned our collective gaze towards the future rather earlier.
Donald Tusk's new government offers real change: Oxford-educated foreign minister Radek Sirkorski (44), married to Anne Appelbaum of The Washington Post, is a former British journalist; British-born finance minister Jacek Rotowski (56) is a graduate of the London School of Economics. They and others will bring a very different emphasis to key Warsaw policies, including Polish membership of the euro zone.
The appointment yesterday of Wladyslaw Bartoseski (85), doyen of Polish foreign policy and Auschwitz survivor, to improve Polish-German relations is one of the most positive and the most poignant of Tusk's appointments.
Poland has travelled farther along the road - from a fixation with the past and its horrors - in 20 years than Ireland managed in 50. The Poles have also begun to shed their understandable, if unsettling, confusion of religion and identity.
Many of Warsaw's difficulties have not gone away, but there is every reason to believe the methods of addressing them have radically changed. It is a victory for Poland, for Europe, and for democracy. One more than worthy of celebration.
I like to think my father would have raised his glass.