It is a curious irony that Ireland, a nation that for many centuries found the continent of which it is nominally a part largely invisible behind the bothersome hump of Britain, should now be the one to decide whether others can be allowed, in the common phrase, to "join Europe".
Having been excluded from the Roman project two millennia ago (failure to meet weather criteria), Ireland also stubbornly resisted the blandishments of its successors, the so-called "Holy" Romans.
After 760 rather traumatic years we finally managed to resign from that club and, deciding there was no company better than our own, entered a new era of independence inspired by the ideals of Sinn Féin - a phrase, we are told, that should be translated not as "ourselves alone" but "we ourselves", which is obviously quite different.
Years of Emergency
At any rate, in 1922 we ourselves took control of our economy, and our unemployment and our emigration, and all went along fine until 1939, after which, unfortunately, due to the actions of others, for six tough years of Emergency tea was scarce and our mothers and aunts had to paint their legs going to dances for want of proper stockings. It is true that some at the time (this newspaper not least) might have wished us to join in the events then taking place in Europe, but the national mood was not for joining, so join we did not.
Taking care finally of unfinished business, we quit the Commonwealth in 1949, though our entreaties to be allowed into the exciting new club of the UN were ignored until 1955. Then President de Gaulle, strangely unable to distinguish his good Irish friends from the Brits, vetoed our Common Market application in 1963, leaving us in the cold for a further 10 years.
NATO membership, on a point of principle, was never a runner, what with John Bull still squatting in the fourth green field, though in 1951 Frank Aiken did offer the Yanks full oversight of Ireland's defences against the Russians - so long as they would agree to pay for them.
Poland, by way of contrast, has throughout its history always been more of a "joiner" than Ireland. In the late 14th century it joined Lithuania in creating a multinational commonwealth that at one stage extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In the late 18th century, more unfortunately, it joined no fewer than three empires more or less simultaneously, when its powerful neighbours, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary, began carving up its territory between them - a process that culminated in 1795 when the Polish state disappeared off the map.
Language and religion
Throughout the 19th century the Poles clung to their language and religion, in spite of sustained efforts by Prussia and Russia to impose their own cultures on the annexed territories. Their many rebellions were, like our own, both heroic and unsuccessful until Marshal Jozef Pilsudski finally re-established the state by force of arms, defeating Trotsky's Red Army in the 1919-1920 war.
After just 21 years, however, the country was carved up once again in September 1939 when Hitler invaded from the west, north and south and Stalin from the east. In spite of the shock of a rapid defeat, the Polish government managed to evacuate much of its army through Romania to continue the fight in France, Norway and England. Towards the end of the Battle of Britain in autumn 1940, up to 20 per cent of the RAF's fighter pilots were Polish (others were Czech); later, Poles of the Second Corps fought at Tobruk, Monte Cassino and Bologna. Polish mathematicians put in much of the groundwork for the deciphering of the Enigma code, while the Resistance stole, dismantled and sent to Britain the parts of a V2 rocket. As the Nazis implemented a policy of murder for pleasure, one in four of the Polish population was killed.
The new Poland established in 1945 was, like it or not, part of the Soviet bloc, and the Poles had little option but to join its economic and defence institutions, Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. Having said that, the country endured a less severe communist repression than some of its neighbours, at least partly because of the countervailing power of the Catholic Church.
New relationships
The story of the rise of Solidarity in the early 1980s and the eventual collapse of Communist power is well enough known. And it is surely not so odd that a country freed from the Russian embrace should seek the comfort of new relationships on the rebound: Poland joined NATO in 1999, but though it applied for EU membership in 1994, eight years later it is still waiting.
Waiting, it would now seem, for us and our referendum. True, there are those who assure us our vote will not prevent enlargement, or even that we should vote No in protest at the tough terms of entry imposed on our eastern cousins. But this is a subtlety which commands more respect on the banks of the Liffey than of the Vistula or Danube.
So in the end we will have to decide simply on the basis of whether we think these people are up to it, whether in fact they qualify to share in the task of safeguarding the best democratic and cultural traditions of our continent.
Given our own rich history, it is a question there are certainly none better than we ourselves to answer.