If the snakes that St Patrick is alleged to have driven from Ireland are allegorical, then the picture their exclusion is intended to convey is of a land not very different from the one Eamon De Valera dreamed of. Not De Valera alone. For more than a century, the image fostered by the opinion formers, and accepted by the vast majority, was of a nation of simple faith and moral behaviour. It was reinforced by the nostalgia of emigrants living in the much more complex society of the United States.
After independence, laws were enacted to bolster this belief. When a gulf opened up between the lawn and daily practice, legislation remained on the statute book in order not to disturb the consensus view, but was rarely enforced. This was true of bans on contraception and homosexuality, and even divorce. Unlike Italy, which logically prosecuted couples for bigamy if they acquired another spouse after dissolving their marriages abroad, no such provision existed here. The effect was to shut reality out.
But the snakes lived on clandestinely. Horrifying disclosures of sexual aberration by priests and nuns (and also in family relationships) dating from the 1940s, have proliferated in recent years. They have been troubling not because they suggest that all or many people in religious life were perverts or that such practices are common now. There is no evidence for that. On the other hand, where abuses were known, they were covered up, on the old fashioned principle that "giving scandal" was the worst kind of sin. The horror lies in the extent to which there was a general conspiracy to conceal the existence of pervasive evil and to protect those responsible, often with the connivance of the State and/or its officials.
On the eve of another St Patrick's Day, there can be few people for whom the snake free image has any validity. A totally different picture has taken its place. The Irishness that is widely recognised and appreciated in Europe, the United States and beyond, has a dynamism that is all the more vigorous because it is neither constrained by narrow values nor defines itself by rejecting them. Irish men and women are to be found in all parts of the globe. They include missionaries, but also businessmen and teachers, financiers, nurses, technicians and musicians. The opening up of eastern Europe has created a new field for enterprise and development, in which Irish agencies and individuals are active. Irish pop groups have helped to refashion a generation's culture and are the predominant idea of Ireland for many of their fans abroad.
Inevitably, cultural change has affected some aspects of politics. The events surrounding the IRA ceasefire, its eventual failure and the efforts to restore it have revealed a gulf of understanding between the inflexibility of traditional nationalism, as represented by Mr Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, and the more self confident brand of national awareness that has developed in the last 20 or 30 years. Absolutes and exclusions are irrelevant in a society which acknowledges that faith is a matter of choice, not compulsion, sees common human values even when disagreeing politically, and admits that nation is part of the larger unit of Europe. A second wave of snakes has left these shores, or is in the process of doing so.