To many people, it must have looked pretty routine. The President of Ireland visits Westminster Cathedral to lay a wreath to the memory of the 35,000 Irish who died in the first World War. Another day, another dignitary, another wreath . . .

But to those with a grip on their history, Mary Robinson's deed was anything but mundane. As she stood before the gold statue of St Patrick, she became the first Irish president to formally respect the memory of those Irish dead, virtually written out of history by a political culture which had long regarded them as traitors to Ireland's cause.

But that week in 1996 was also momentous for another reason. Historians opened a new page as an Irish head of State made an official visit to Britain. At Buckingham Palace, soldiers of the crown saluted the Irish president by playing the Irish national anthem under the Irish Tricolour, before President Robinson and Queen Elizabeth retired for a lobster and chicken lunch and some chit-chat about horse-racing. And thus was history made. The fact that all this happened only 2 1/2 years ago is what makes it startling.

Next Wednesday another Irish President, Mary McAleese, will quietly continue both processes when she stands alongside the queen to commemorate the Irish war dead of all traditions at the new Island of Ireland peace park in Flanders. From the crest of Messines Ridge, flanked by bands of the Irish and British armies and a choir of Irish schoolchildren, the two heads of state, with the King and Queen of the Belgians, will join Senator Paddy Harte and Glen Barr in reciting the Journey of Reconciliation Trust's Peace Pledge: ". . . As Protestants and Catholics, we apologise for the terrible deeds we have done to each other and ask forgiveness . . ."

Though charged with emotion and meaning, the meeting of the queen and the Irish President at Messines will raise barely a ripple at home. "There's no doubt this meeting is an important landmark", says the Belfast-based historian, Jonathan Bardon, "and the fact that it will go off calmly and quietly, I think, is in itself a landmark."

"It's over," says Prof Tom Garvin of UCD, firmly. "The Empire is gone. The old dependency versus the Empire business is gone as well." He sums it up as "the DeFianna-Failification, finally, of the Republic".

Gone with hardly a whimper. But it has been a long and sometimes bloody process. Who now remembers the logs that blocked Offaly roads during the visits of Princess Margaret in the mid-1960s? Or the Waterford patriot who tried to shell a British gunboat at around the same time?

More seriously, it is less than 20 years since the IRA bombed Earl Mountbatten to death in Co Sligo - along with two teenage boys - delivering a clear message in the process. Mountbatten was the queen's cousin, Prince Philip's great-uncle, a close friend and mentor to Prince Charles. The message was that members of the royal family visited Ireland at their peril.

As for traffic the other way, the Irish State - through its president - made its official disapproval equally clear. In 1981, just two years after Mountbatten's murder, President Patrick Hillery was officially advised to decline an invitation to Prince Charles's wedding. The Constitution was on the officials' side: there was unfinished business over Northern Ireland, ergo no State visits could be countenanced that might suggest a degree of harmony.

And so, even in more relaxed, recent times as Princess Anne flitted in and out of the Republic on private visits and Government ministers casually dropped in on counterparts in Britain and Northern Ireland, the head of State was expected - in a memorable phrase from the newly-published Robinson biography by Olivia O'Leary and Helen Burke - "to stay at home and radiate disapproval, an official nationalist skeleton which could be rattled whenever the British got too complacent . . . Britain's official non-friend." It was a role, they point out, which Mrs Robinson refused to play.

How an Irish president manoeuvred the first meeting with a British royal on British territory (Prince Philip) as recounted in the book is the stuff of a Yes, Minister episode; the result of refusing to take No for an answer in the face of official obduracy and badmouthing, not to mention out-manoeuvring "the most defiantly nationalist Taoiseach of modern times", in the shape of Charles Haughey.

This all happened in the current decade. Since then there has been the official visit of Prince Charles. The fact that President McAleese now speaks of a historic royal visit by the British head of state to the Republic as virtually inevitable is barely noteworthy. As is the barely heralded arrival here next week of Prince Philip to lay a wreath on Armistice Day.

Throughout the island, this lack of an outcry is perceived by most as a new maturity, the inevitable result of new understandings, a new confidence and an absence of historical baggage among the young.

"To my students, the queen is just a pop star, that's all," says Prof Tom Garvin. "You get the odd Provo among them, one in a 100, who would be regarded as an eccentric. To them, a visit by the queen would be `cool'; they'd find her interesting and they would want to see her. And they don't see any politics behind it at all. That's over. It's been over for 10 years."

Nonetheless, any such meetings and visits are still perceived by many to be powerfully symbolic; "a confirmation of the fact," as President McAleese told the Examiner, "that the sets of relationships we now enjoy between these two islands are the most mature they have been at any time for perhaps 900 years."

But in the North, there are those who wonder whether these meetings mean anything at all on the one hand. Or something deeply sinister on the other. One of these is historian A.T.Q. Stewart, whose great-great-grandfather, a confectioner, made a decorated cake for the visit of William IV in 1834. "I think the monarchy has taken a long time to get to this point, but obviously, in a constitutional situation, they will do what governments say they ought to do. And we can take it as read that the present government and probably the one that preceded it, has really one agendum in all this - which is to get out of Ireland, to avoid the inevitable cost that history has spelled out for them."

He also believes that the significance of any such meetings is bound to be reduced, not only by the wave of lesemajeste he perceives in the UK - "the symbolism and the reverence is not what it was even two years ago" - but by the "disintegration of the United Kingdom." And with that disintegration, he believes, the whole Irish question is set in a different framework. "As someone born into that tradition and who has considered himself to be British from birth and so on, I wonder what the concept really means now."

The concept has been up for discussion for longer perhaps than people think. It would be natural to assume that the heroic role of the 36th Ulster Division in the first World War with their sense of duty and sacrifice to the crown would have been emulated by another generation in the second World War.

Far from it, according to Jonathan Bardon. "Recruitment in Northern Ireland in World War Two - when there was no conscription - was embarrassingly low for the government. A high proportion of those who died in that war were seamen who had mostly joined up to go to sea rather than take part in the war. Another embarrassing thing is that even though Belfast made a very important contribution to the war effort - with vessels, aircraft and producing one-third of all cordage and ropes - nevertheless the shipyards and the aircraft factories and the engineering works were plagued by strikes during it."

In any event, while the North ponders its past and the meaning of it all, Prof Terence Brown of Trinity College points out that, constitutionally and politically, its neighbours across the Irish Sea are indeed entering a whole new phase: "There is no way we can be unaffected by the seismic events that are taking place there. The whole historic mindset of Ireland is Anglo-Irish . . . but we have always set our sights on London. If there are parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff, those polities will begin to develop independent lives of their own and our relationships with the neighbouring people are going to become much more complicated."

Prof Garvin agrees that the old UK is changing. No one, however, can be sure of the outcome. "But you must remember that the UK was always a partnership between Scotland and England. Scotland was the junior partner but equal. We were always the other one that had to be held on to because we were a security problem and also because we were very fertile, a big, soft, lovely green country to produce lots and lots of beef. In the 1700s, William Petty wanted the population of Ireland to be reduced to 200,000 cattle drovers."

So clearly, we've moved on and will continue to move. But to what? "I don't know what it all means really," says A.T.Q. Stewart. "It may mean that the thing that has caused all the trouble with us might evaporate. But I don't think so. It's too deeply entrenched to do that. But the kind of thing that is happening at the moment - and maybe it is a symbol of it, this meeting between the queen and the President of the Republic - is inevitably changing the attitudes of British people who don't actually live in England. With all the change around us, it would be a very foolish person who would predict what the future holds."

A token of the new era perhaps is that on Armistice Day, Messines in Flanders will belong to the Irish for 24 hours. After the ceremony to declare open the peace park and round tower, Queen Elizabeth will depart for Ypres six miles away for another ceremony at one minute past 5 p.m., while President McAleese and guests attend a reception hosted by the Burgomeister. The indications are that, so deep is the queen's interest, she will return to Messines from Ypres to be a part of it all.