Sleet whips across a bleak, soot-blackened boulevard. Pedestrians slip and slide on icy, uneven pavements past crumbling buildings and damp-streaked concrete monstrosities towards the one shop open on the entire block, writes Hugh Linehan.
Inside they fill their shopping bags with black bread, bottled borscht and sausage and queue patiently to pay.
It could be a scene from any Warsaw Pact city in the 1970s were it not for the well-stocked shelves and the traffic jam outside.
In fact, it's February 2003 on Amiens Street, Dublin, and the customers stocking up on pickled vegetables and sour cream are Poles, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.
Within a few months, many of these shoppers will be fellow members of the EU. Welcome to the new Europe. In case you haven't noticed, it's already here. The accession of central European and Baltic states to the EU next year marks the most fundamental shift in the EU's centre of gravity since the Treaty of Rome.
The indifference with which most Irish people treat such matters is an indictment of our own blinkered, narrowly-defined self-interest as much as of the EU ruling class's dismal failure to connect in any meaningful way with its people.
But, if we care to raise our eyes from the trough for a moment we might see something interesting.
Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the separated twins of Slovakia and the Czech Republic - we're all Woodrow Wilson's children. Our troublesome frontiers, the names of our states, our capital cities left behind by a vanished ruling class - all our founding principles were established in the chaotic flurry of small-nation-assembling that followed the end of the first World War.
In this, as in many other ways, we have more in common with these new arrivals than with most of the rest of the EU.
Some years ago I interviewed an Irish film director, and asked him whether he considered his nationality important to his work. It wasn't, he said, except for the fact that Irish people "are one of the few white people in the world who've been colonised enough to understand that feeling". Tell that to the shoppers on Amiens Street.
To be fair to the director, he decried any idea that this "special" status gave us any right to feel sorry for ourselves. But post-colonial theory, with its emphasis on the parallels between Ireland and other countries in the British empire, has provided a sentimentalised comfort blanket for those who like to think of us as somehow unique among European countries.
The truth is that the Irish national experience bears scant resemblance to that of colonised countries in Africa, Asia or South America. It's far more similar to the histories of the nationalities which once formed the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires - exploitative certainly, but also highly ambiguous in terms of the fluctuating relationship between ethnic identity and economic power.
Like us, those countries had cultural revivals in the 19th century, followed by independence movements in the early 20th. Like us, they retain an ambiguous love-hate relationship with the countries which once governed them.
Like us, their borders do not always reflect the ethnic identities of the people on each side of them. It's only our own irredeemable Anglo-centrism (now there's an example of a post-colonial inferiority complex) that prevents us seeing the parallels. That, and the quintessentially middle-class self-indulgence of enjoying First World living standards while claiming a special empathy with the world's oppressed.
THE small nations of central and eastern Europe have not been able to afford such luxuries. The collapse of their democracies under totalitarian pressure in the 1930s, the horrors they endured from 1939 to 1945, the disappearance through annihilation and violent expulsion respectively of the Jewish and German-speaking minorities which provided much of their intellectual and entrepreneurial energy, followed by more than 40 years of Stalinist oppression and stagnation, all of these make our own history seem like a dream-like success.
Another modern Irish shibboleth, that this country has experienced a transformation of unique and seismic proportions in recent years, is also found wanting in comparison.
Most of the forces at work in contemporary Irish society have their roots in events of more than 40 years ago: economic liberalisation; free education; the arrival of the electronic mass media.Contrast this with those countries whose entire economic, legal and political systems have collapsed and been remade in a mere decade.
But, on the rare occasions when the accession of the new countries is mentioned here at all, it's usually as a threat. Millions of Polish farmers will finally render Irish agriculture untenable. Hi-tech companies will relocate from Leixlip to Lodz. The new kids in school are going to steal all our nice, shiny toys. Well, life is tough when you grow up.
The arrival of these countries marks the end of the long, totalitarian nightmare of 20th century Europe, a nightmare which we managed to avoid completely. Now that's pretty unique.