IF you are my age then you can remember travelling in Continental Europe during the era that they thought Eerland was the Netherlands and said Princess Beatrix to you pleasantly and when you said it a second time they thought you meant Iceland and offered Reyjkavik as part of the conversation.
I used to be driven to bring a page from an old school atlas with me to explain the exact location, and it was always followed by a very long ahhhhhh and the fear that I might be about to deliver a lecture on who we were as a people and what we had contributed to the world over the centuries.
As a lonely 18 year old in Compiegne, I yearned for just one person of the thousand or so friends, neighbours, relatives, lovers, and enemies of the family that I stayed with to have heard something, anything about Ireland, even something I could contradict. But they were blank about my land and indifferent and shruggy, even though they had heard of places such as the Isle of Wight, which used to drive me mad.
There was no wine in Ireland, they ascertained on Day One, and that seemed to be us written off.
That year Ballymoss did, bless his or her gleaming little flanks, win the Arc de Triomphe Stakes, at Longchamps but it was my last day in France; and too late for me to gain any permanent national identity and praise from it.
In Italy I met a kind woman who ran a guest house and despite huge efforts finally gave up on knowing where Ireland was but explained to the other guests that I was like the very disturbed man - they once had from Cornwall and the best route to go was to say anything except the words English or British which were like red rags to a apparently. And so you were left like some kind dissident begrudger with no land of your own that anyone had heard of but a monstrous chip your shoulder.
Part of the much mocked, feel good factor of being European is that they know about us now. They don't always know the right things, but a lot of their views stand up fine for me. They've heard of our poets, our singers our playwrights our knack of winning Eurovision, our Troubles, our peace tai, or narrytown, of our referenda, of our seafood, our President, horse drawn caravans, Temple Bar, our bishops, our football.
YOU don't have to take out a torn atlas now. And that's what I like about being European. It makes me feel like a member of the wedding, as if I belong to something bigger which doesn't take away anything of what I am.
I don I mind having a purple passport because it still has a harp on it. I'm looking forward to the single currency because it would just be easier, thats all. Civilisation didn't end when we became metrified I don't think it would end if we started to spend Ecus. I'd like Europe to accept the postal stamps of each nation as valid no matter where you put them into a post box. We can all have our flora and fauna to keep our individuality.
I don't miss those huge, thunderous stampings of passports at border posts. It was always a bit reminiscent of war films anyway, and you had to contend with the fear that you wouldn't be let in somewhere or let out once you were in. If you had taught history for eight years, you would believe that too many problems, rumblings, overtures, battles, wars and eventual peace treaties come about because people think themselves utterly different to other people who lived in the next valley or canton or province.
However mellow and dull it might appear, I would prefer to think that everyone had more to unite them than divide them. I'd sacrifice a lot of local colour and tradition and sense of something: if I got a half decent promise that whole land masses where people had spent centuries tearing each other to bits might live peaceably and get on with it.
SO I am moved by European flags, anthems, hopes, dreams and plans. I look with an uninformed but hopeful eye on policies that mean the big will help the small, the rich will help the poor and the potential losers in every land will be protected.
And I would be prepared to put up with bureaucracy and some tedium in order to get it.
Now as in so many areas, not all my friends agree. Many are not at all of like mind. I do accept that my own reasons for voting Yes in Dublin and in London to Europe were based on fairly faulty and selfish reasoning - like I thought we would all get up earlier and have traffic jams at 6 a.m. like they do on the Continent and that we would have vats of cheap French wine.
In my own case the failure of these two things to materialise didn't really matter since I started to work at home and had no traffic jams at all. And then loads of Australian and South African wines came in at a price people could afford so we didn't have to worry about the French wine any further.
I don't care if it's sentimental, I feel pleased when it's our turn to get the European presidency. I don't fear that we'll make a dog's dinner of it, that it will cost too much or that it's irrelevant. Our current status is far better than any history book written before the Treaty of Rome would suggest. The only harm we could do is to be cynical and indifferent about holding the presidency, to shrug and say it has nothing to do with us.