Among countries that joined the European Union since Ireland, with which there is a close affinity, two larger ones, Spain and Poland, figure prominently.
Apart from a shared history as mainly Catholic countries, Spain was a source of succour and refuge to Irish exiles, where Poland was brutally dismembered only a few years before Ireland was subsumed into the United Kingdom.
All three countries have emerged from a difficult and troubled history in a position to benefit from the unprecedented freedom, prosperity and security offered by EU membership and able to profit from each other's experience. Spain has had a more important influence on Ireland's fortunes in the EU than is generally appreciated.
A difficulty of our early years of membership was the modest redistributive regional and social funding, with initial financial benefits coming mainly via Cap subsidies and the scope they created for domestic spending substitution.
The accession of the Mediterranean countries in the mid-1980s coupled with the single market programme, then the single currency, and the fact that Spain had a more effective veto it was not afraid to use, enabled Ireland with skilful negotiation to secure inclusion in vital increased structural and cohesion funding. Nearly twice as many nights are spent by Irish people in Spain per year as in Britain. Spain has not just sea and sun, but a rich cultural heritage. The euro makes European travel easy and attractive. Cheap flights have made many cities that are not national capitals more accessible (though Andalusia has applied to be regarded as a nation within the terms of the Spanish constitution). Spanish is a popular language option in schools, where a generation ago it was rarely available.
Our daughter is spending under the Erasmus programme a year at the University of Seville, a fine 18th century building that once housed the royal tobacco manufacture. Bizet's Carmen is said to have been based on a female worker there.
A painting in the fine arts museum depicting the death of the maestro refers not to an artist, composer or conductor, but a revered bullfighter. The Teatro della Maestranzo, virtually beside the bullring, doubles up as an opera house and a concert hall. It has about twice the capacity of our own National Concert Hall for a city population not quite as large. The revised Book of Estimates contains an instalment of €22 million to enable the long overdue expansion of the NCH.
Interestingly, at a concert by the Royal Symphony Orchestra of Seville last Friday, the programme included, between a difficult modern work by a Spanish composer Bernualo, and Maurice Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, Mozart's Piano concerto no. 25. Another concert this week was to feature the Sinfonia Concertante K.364. It is hard to recall when the mature Mozart piano concertos or symphonies or any of Haydn's last symphonies were last played in a concert hall in Ireland, it happens so rarely. If Seville is any guide, such works are popular with audiences, whatever about performers.
Seville is pleasant at this time of year (24 degrees mid-afternoon), its streets lined by orange trees, with the occasional lemon tree in parks. It not only has strong musical associations with Rossini's Barber, and as the reputed home of the legendary Don Juan. It also produced three great artists, Velásquez, Murillo and Zurbarán (the cathedral-size gallery in the fine arts museum contains Zurbarán's impressive depiction of God the Father and the apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas). Despite the expulsion of the Moors and Jews at the end of the 15th century, and the heavy volume of Christian art, some of the most impressive sights are the Mudéjar decorated rooms in the Real Alcázar and the Casa de Pilatos, giving Seville a partly oriental atmosphere.
Even part of the cathedral, dominating the city with its tall bell tower and containing the magnificent tomb of Christopher Columbus, is still visible as having been a mosque.
Busts and epic victories portrayed in the early 20th century crescent-shaped Plaza d'Espana honours the great explorers and the reconquest of the southern cities and provinces of Spain.
The uncritical sense of glory is long gone. Still, modern Spain makes a lot of investments, some risky, in its former colonies in Latin America.
There is the same insecurity about job displacement as here. Spain, along with Portugal and Finland, is to open up its labour market following Ireland, Britain and Sweden, to eastern Europe from May 1st, which may provide healthy EU-wide competition for labour.
A metro taking a wide arc through the city is under construction, but has run into major Roman remains.
In terms of income, Ireland, described in Le Monde this week as "the fiscal champion of Europe", has outpaced Spain, but prices of food, drink, petrol and housing are significantly lower in Seville than in Dublin.
The Basque peace process continues to preoccupy politicians, and the tantalising prospect of a lasting Eta ceasefire on the IRA model.
Given Ireland's historic relations with and debt to Spain, there is no reason to depart from a benevolent neutrality on its constitutional questions.
At the same time, some empathy with the Basque country may help win acceptance of the futility of violence.
Self-determination in an Irish (or Northern Ireland) context is a different proposition, as unionists will not be coerced.
Eta on the other hand has shown a marked propensity to gun down its critics, politicians, journalists and academics, so that there is no guarantee of self-determination being a free exercise. Under UN definitions not adequately or widely understood, wide-ranging autonomy within a multinational state can constitute a valid exercise in self-determination, something on which all parts of Spain are increasingly seeking further advances.
The fondness of young Irish people for Spain and of young Spanish students for Ireland holds out the prospect of an even closer and more fruitful political partnership between Ireland and Spain within the EU for decades.