All of this was swept away by the tide of fiscal and social progress that membership of the EU brought. The old Ireland of social repression, generations of unemployment, of grinding and unbreakable poverty for so many – a nation convinced of its inferiority – was confined to the dustbin of history. In mere decades we have used the dynamo of the EU to prime the pump and to make a quantum leap from agrarian nation to industrialised trading nation which has exported its way to a level of prosperity not even dreamt of by preceding generations.