Many of us may be glad to see the back of holy Ireland, martyred Ireland and peasant Ireland. Most of us may have wanted nothing so much as to be normal, prosperous Europeans. But what, now that we have arrived, is left to us? What, if anything, is distinctively ours?
In the first week of December 1999, an anonymous Fianna Fail backbencher expressed his sense of bewilderment to Stephen Collins of the Sunday Tribune. In the space of 24 hours, he said, his party had slaughtered three of its most sacred cows - the territorial claim over Northern Ireland, Irish neutrality and the traditional family.
That week, his leader Bertie Ahern had signed away Articles 2 and 3 of Eamon de Valera's 1937 Constitution and signed Ireland up for the Nato-led Partnership for Peace. His Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy had, in his budget, discriminated heavily in favour of married women who work outside the home, consigning another constitutional piety to the scrap-heap.
The coming together of these three events may have been largely coincidental. All three may have resulted from social and political processes that had been under way for some time. But the symbolism was nonetheless eloquent. Three of the things that would have been taken for granted as aspects of a dominant Irish political identity had been jettisoned all at once. There could be no more obvious symptom of a culture in which the familiar signs and ciphers had lost their grip.
Significantly, the only one of the three changes that week that created a real public backlash was the one that concerned money - tax allowances for women working in the home. In a culture that used to take its abstract symbols very seriously indeed, only the hard facts of legal tender seemed to have any emotional resonance. And even then, no-one seemed too upset when, right at the start of 1999, the punt gave way to the euro and Ireland lost another symbol of its distinctiveness. Money, after all, would still be money.
It would be easy to conclude that at the end of the 20th century, the Irish were a smug, self-satisfied lot, deeply devoted to shopping, scouring the horizon for the errant builders who were supposed to install the fabulous new kitchen, and looking up the auction results to find out how much more their houses were worth this week.
The nation - or at least that part of it that had the power to generate a public debate - seemed far too distracted with the pursuit of material goods to bother with the symbols of nationhood. Who needs an identity when you've got your name on a gold American Express card?
What, in any case, can be distinctive about a society that is plugged so deeply into the global economy and saturated with the goods and chattels, the dreams and nightmares of the wealthy West? The things we make, from microchips to Viagra, are the inventions of trans-national corporations. The clothes we wear are designed by men whose names have become hugely valuable commodities and made by poor women whose names we will never know in countries we will probably never visit. The shops we buy them in are cloned branches of British retail chains. We entertain ourselves, for the most part, with American movies, British television and English football teams whose stars are Italian, French and Dutch millionaires.
The markers of Irishness have all been either diluted or washed away by the tide of economic and social innovation. Catholicism, however battered, is still an enormous force, but it is clear that even the church's loyal devotees do not see it any more as the source of a single, unchanging truth. The nationalist project, as it was understood for most of the century, ended on May 22nd 1998 when an overwhelming majority of the southern electorate voted in the referendum on the Belfast Agreement, to accept the principle of consent.
The notion of the Irish as an essentially agricultural people is long gone, and even its last vestiges in rhetoric and imagery have all but disappeared. The Irish language, as the dreadful results in the subject in the 1999 Leaving Certificate exams demonstrated, has lost even its ability to command lip service among the young.
Other less explicit aspects of Irishness are on the run, too. The old spirit, however imaginary, of republican egalitarianism has been deflated by the evidence of rampant cronyism and naked corruption that continues to flow from tribunals and investigations. The sense of physical intimacy that most of us used to take for granted is being lost in a maze of traffic jams. As congestion overwhelms the roads, especially in and around Dublin, places that used to be close to each other have become, in effect, far apart.
The conviviality we think of as typically Irish is being squeezed out. The bleary-eyed reveller is being replaced by the bleary-eyed commuter who rises before dawn, gets home after dark and has time only to eat and sleep before the jammed-up road beckons again.
Even our sense of where Ireland is has been radically unsettled. As the old, curiously comforting architecture of Ireland, Britain and the North falls away before the peace process and Tony Blair's constitutional reforms, people in the Republic find themselves having to use the very word "Ireland" differently, giving it a new inflection that half-includes the North, yet that contains all sorts of unspoken reservations and sensitivities. A place we don't even have a name for since "the British Isles" became unsayable ("these islands?", "Islands of the North Atlantic?", "the Anglo-Celtic archipelago?") has come into existence.
And we're not the outer margin of Europe anymore. That romantic and dangerous periphery has shifted to the far side of the continent. We are now part of the magnetic centre that attracts investment and migrants. As part of that process, moreover, yet another marker of Irishness is gradually disappearing. Until recently, our collective status as pale-skins was so taken for granted that it did not have to be stated at all. We were the people who went red and raw in the Benidorm sun. But already that is a false assumption and as time goes on and Irish society becomes increasingly multiracial it will become utterly untenable.