IN Tom Murphy's play The Gigli Concert, the Irishman asks the Englishman Oh, and your Empire; that's located now in what's them little islands called?" They are called Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Diego Garcia, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, South Georgia, the Turks and Caicos Islands.
By the middle of 1997 these little islands, with less than the population of Cork between them, scattered like the pieces of a windscreen after a particularly violent crash, will be the last remaining British colonial possessions. We have just lived, in other words, through the last year of the last days of the British Empire.
When Hong Kong reverts to China on July 1st, next, the Union Jack will, for all meaningful purposes, have ceased to fly over the last significant foreign field to be forever England. It's not exactly a cause for tears, but it is, even for us, a moment worth marking.
In the current issue of Granta, Simon Winchester points out that in September 1944, British imperial possessions contained a total population of 760,774,473 people. As of July 1st, they will contain 168,075 people.
In the meantime, places as different as Ceylon and Cyprus, Sierra Leone and Singapore, Newfoundland and Nigeria, Brunei and Burma have passed out of the Great British parade. And, of course, most profoundly of all, the jewel, India, has fallen out of the crown. The scene that is still so affecting, even when played in Michael Collins as sardonic burlesque - the handing over of Dublin Castle - has become almost a cliche.
Britain - especially England - is still coming to terms with this process, of course. It is not accidental that the idea of Britishness, bound up - as it was with Empire, is falling to pieces. As the British political theorist David Marquand has put it:
Imperial Britain was Britain. The iconography, the myths, the rituals in which Britishness was embodied were, of necessity, imperial, oceanic, extra European: they could not be anything else. Empire was not an optional extra for the British; it was their reason for being British, as opposed to English, or Scots, or Welsh. Deprived of Empire and plunged into Europe, Britain has no meaning."
THE decrepitude of royalty, the rise of a specifically English nationalism (Margaret Thatcher was the first British prime minister since the early 18th century to describe herself as "an English nationalist"), the terrible lack of confidence throughout English society, the deep divisions about the European Union - all are lit by a distinctly post imperial afterglow.
As Linda Colley puts it in her magnificent book Britons, "No more can Britons reassure themselves of their distinct and privileged identity by contrasting themselves with impoverished Europeans (real or imaginary) or by exercising authority over manifestly alien peoples. God has ceased to be British and Providence no longer smiles."
But, albeit less directly, it also matters to us. It matters most, of course, because of the huge British presence - over a million people - on the island. In the most profound sense, the Northern Ireland problem is not so much a British problem as a problem of Britishness. The cockpit of the Britishness constructed in the 18th century, compounded of Protestantism, empire and monarchy, is in Harryville and Drumcree, in the Royal Victoria Hospital and on the Shankill Road.
It matters, too, because of the numerically larger Irish presence in Britain - there are over 2 million Irish citizens living on Cathleen ni Houlihan's Other Island. And it matters in a vaguer but even more pervasive sense, too in the sense that Irishness itself was constructed as an alternative to Britishness.
What do we do when the Empire against which we defined ourselves is no longer here? When the Irish Free State was first established, and for many decades thereafter, talk of Irishness and Britishness as different world views may have been a gross oversimplification, but it made some sense. Irish identity was primarily rural, British primarily urban. Irish identity was primarily Catholic, British primarily Protestant. The Irish economy was primarily agricultural, the British primarily industrial. Irish nationalism was inward looking and imbued with the values of self sufficiency, British nationalism outward looking and imperial.
At the level of everyday life, "Britishness" and "Irishness" were not just political concepts, but real expressions of a great deal that was fundamental to existence: whether you lived in a city or a village, what kind of job you did, whether or not you used contraception, how you thought about foreign countries. These distinctions were always crude but they were also effective. You could actually tell an awful lot about people's mundane realities - their jobs, their houses, even their sex lives - once you had slotted them into the categories of "Irish" or "British".
Almost none of this is true anymore. If you look back now on the writings of Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera or any of the political or cultural leaders of Irish nationalism, what is striking is the way in which they all accept implicitly that there is such a thing as a "British civilisation", a way of life that is not confined to the island of Britain but that is, through the Empire, a presence in every continent, a structure of thought and feeling that people all over the world have to accept or reject.
Nobody would use such a phrase now, at least not without laughing. Not just the Empire, but the whole idea of Britishness as a coherent, integrated and distinctive way of life is gone.
ONE of the consequences of its disappearance is that there is no room any more to define Irishness by what it is not. The question asked by songwriter Billy Bragg - "How can you lie back and think of England/ When you don't even know who's in the team?" - is a question for us, too.
Shorn of the last vestiges of imperial grandeur, Britain is of very little use as a force against which to define yourself. Even 50 years ago, to say that you were not British was to say something resonant and meaningful.
Today, to say that you are not British is to say nothing at all, except, ironically within the United Kingdom itself. For everyone else in the world - except the scattered inhabitants of a few small islands - the issue just doesn't arise.
And even within the UK, there is no epic world historical grandeur to be gained by "taking on the British Empire". The self image of the IRA as a brave and indomitable resistance to a mighty global force looks even more threadbare. Without Goliath, David is just a gouger with a sling. And without the Empire, a would be killer stalking the corridors of a children's hospital is just a hollow fool on a sordid and meaningless wallow through history's leftovers.