When, in summer 1990, Nelson Mandela arrived in Dublin to be accorded the freedom of the city, local wits greeted him with chants of "Ooh, ah, Paul McGrath's da". Despite the connotations of ooh-ahing on British football terraces, the Dublin chanting wasn't racist. In fact, in the Ireland of the time, Mandela could hardly have been more highly complimented. Our first team to qualify for the World Cup finals had just returned from Italy, where Paul McGrath had been our best player.
The World Cup in Italy was an extraordinary sporting, cultural and social event in Ireland. It was political too, of course - at least for Charlie Haughey, who, with Schillaci-sharp opportunism, paraded on the pitch in Rome's Olympic Stadium after the quarter-final match with the host country.
Three summers earlier, this Taoiseach for all sports had been on the podium for Stephen Roche's Tour de France victory as yellow jersey met Charvet shirt in, naturellement, Paris.
Though Jack's Green Army in Rome wasn't quite as green as Charlie's walkabout suggested, the public mood was such that most people laughed and few objected. After all, though Charlie's parade was shameless band-wagoning, there was an equally undeniable sense of self-congratulation, as well as bountiful fun and excitement, about Ireland fans during the period.
"Ireland fans, the loudest and best-humoured in the world," wrote Roddy Doyle and the description was held to be self-evident.
Certainly, novelty and the relative success of the team kept spirits high as the tournament progressed. Italy was just a few hours flying time distant, so that attendance at the games was within the financial reach of thousands.
In strutting or, given the tenor of Charlton's "infliction" tactics, goose-stepping its way on the world stage, the team provided a dramatic example of growing Irish integration with, rather than traditional isolation from, the rest of the world. Ireland, no less than its footballers, was a player.
It wasn't, of course, as simple and unambiguous as that. There was a less than global dimension to the flexing of identity which characterised the period. Ireland was a player all right, but a core element of that identity was that Ireland was decidedly not England. Their fans - or, at any rate, too many of their fans - were hooligans, racists, xenophobes, vainglorious in victory and violent in defeat. Ours sang when we lost (which maintained the good-humoured accolade but, arguably, at the expense of self-respect) and threw a colossal party to mark the team's return.
In that sense, the 1990 World Cup was in a direct line from numerous historical attempts to assert Irish difference from Britain, principally England. From the "de-Anglicising" of Douglas Hyde, through the Irish Ireland of DP Moran and the nation-building "morality" project to make ours the greatest little Catholic state in the world, the un-Englandness of Ireland was the focus in establishing Irish identity. Given that certain sections within Ireland considered soccer a mark of English and, therefore, un-Irish identity, ironies abounded.
But sniping about an English manager and English-born players was generally given short shrift in the Republic. Billy Bingham, the Northern Ireland manager, would go on to deride many of Charlton's team as "mercenaries", and some British TV and print pundits - in an era before a Swede could manage England - repeatedly stressed the "British" base of the Irish team. However, at a time - after a decade of emigration - when "the Irish diaspora' was officially being celebrated, such commentary was easily dismissed as sour grapes.
During the England v Cameroon quarter-final match, many among the sizeable ABE (Anybody But England) wing of the Irish fans sang "come on you blacks in green". To the semantically sensitive, there was at least a suspicion of double-racism in the phrase. It might be argued that there was a solidarity of the colonised - the French having exploited Cameroon - against an old, imperial power. But for most Irish supporters it was simply the drive for Ireland to be as un-England as possible that was paramount.
It was almost unanimously agreed that RT╔'s television pundits were a couple of divisions above their British counterparts.
Theirs were generally patronising, clichΘ-ridden and embarrassingly jingoistic. Their tone was tabloid. Ours were measured (Johnny Giles) and passionate, if self-promoting (Eamon Dunphy), albeit critical of Jack Charlton's robust and unsophisticated football. Even in talking football, we were decidedly un-England, although the clash in Sardinia between Ireland and England was a game unto itself, played with pre-Premiership English League vim and vigour, but without guile and grace.
Football argot and props of the time included the rather agricultural, unfussy, designer divil-may-care "Give it a lash, Jack" and giant inflatable bananas. Again, given the link between banana-wielding fans and racism in the English game, the giant inflatables were at least semiotically suspect.
But our lionising of Paul McGrath, in particular - though it was easily done because he played so well - was sometimes invoked as evidence of our lack of racism, in contrast with the overt racism in British football grounds. It was a part of what we are to be as un-English as possible.
More than a decade of Thatcherite Little England propaganda and Maggie's imperious attitude towards the North had sharpened the Irish mood, of course. But the strain - evident even among the middle-class who revelled in the rugby team's recent defeat of England - persists, albeit at lower intensity. Certainly, a World Cup meeting with England could unleash much of the old feeling - it remains, after all, in international terms, a derby match - but after the European Championships in Stuttgart in 1988 and the World Cup match in Cagliari in 1990, the novelty no longer pertains.
Even the meeting with the Pope in Rome, asserting the Catholic identity of the Republic, stressed our separateness from England. Then again, such manoeuvrings in search of an identity are hardly surprising: every country brings its regional baggage to the world stage, even if the football records or delusions of grandeur of some insist on appropriate or inappropriate globalised contexts. However, now that Mick McCarthy's team has qualified for next year's World Cup finals, "things", as Bob Dylan might observe, "have changed".
Clerical, political and business scandals - and indeed professional scandals involving medicine (the appalling treatment of haemophiliacs) and law (the Sheedy case) - and an economic boom have transformed Ireland. The Northern peace process too, of which the GAA's abolition of Rule 21, is undeniably a part has reconstructed outlooks here.
The soccer boom, turbo-charged by Rupert Murdoch's technology and marketing and UEFA's turning of the European Cup into the Champions League, has turned a sport into an industry.
Refugees and asylum-seekers, with, no doubt, some chancers among the mostly genuine, have met with racist attitudes here too. Sure, in Britain, race riots, a disturbingly strong BNP vote and the September 11th attacks on the US have increased hostility towards the four million non-white people who live there, and ensure that race remains a more explosive issue across the Irish Sea. But in Ireland, convenient anti-racism can no longer be invoked as a measure of moral superiority and un-Englishness.
There will, you can be sure, be attempts to recreate the carnivals of 1990 and 1994, when summer 2002 arrives.
School kids will again make banners, publicans will make euros and unlikely people will talk the football jargon of wing backs, ball winners and strikers. Given the time difference between Ireland and the Far East, the more committed party animals will probably be drunk at dawn, and there will, as ever, be self-serving, tall tales of the escapades of those who travel to Japan and South Korea.
But things have changed. This morning, Mick McCarthy and the rest of us will hear which teams Ireland have been drawn to play in the World Cup finals group phase. The sports pages will begin to assess our opponents and anticipation will mount over the spring. With attendance at these finals prohibitively expensive, Ireland's un-Englandness will be more difficult to express in the host countries than it was 11 years ago.
Then again, there's less need or desire this time around. You can only be World Cup virgins once.