Ruairi Quinn said yesterday that we had come of age. To which you may feel like adding: after more than 75 years of independence, over 40 in the United Nations and 25 in the European Union, it's about time.
The occasion was Bertie Ahern's announcement that Ireland's share of EU funding for the next seven years would amount to £3.4 billion, or half as much as we'd enjoyed for the last seven.
Mr Ahern was satisfied with the result. So were Peter Brennan of the employers' organisation IBEC, who'd forecast the outcome, and Tom Parlon of the Irish Farmers' Association, who'd feared the worst.
More to the point, though, this will be Ireland's final term as one of the Union's great beneficiaries; as some commentators say, when it ends in 2006 we'll be on our own.
Not quite. Part of the coming of age to which Mr Quinn refers is the realisation that our position has developed from independence to interdependence.
We've moved from virtual isolation, during and for several years after the second World War, to a deeper involvement in - and vulnerability to - the wider world.
The question to be asked about our coming of age is not what took us so long but, now that we know how we stand, where we go from here. We no longer have the old excuses for failure - or for refusing to take responsibility. We've been running our own affairs long enough to have overcome the influence of colonialism.
Our new commitments were made with our eyes open, whether as members of the UN or the EU or as a party to the Belfast Agreement, which significantly changed relations in these islands.
If we ceded some sovereignty, that was our choice: on balance, given the social and economic advantages of EU membership, we decided it was worth it.
Now, what we make of such economic wealth and political influence as we have is up to us. Since we've got over the argument about artificial, if not entirely phoney, regional divisions, we should set about reducing the more corrosive and ominous divisions that have opened up, even in some of the most prosperous parts of the State.
THERE was a telling juxtaposition of news items on RTE Radio One yesterday when an account of the EU settlement in Berlin was followed by an OECD report that half a million people here have literacy problems.
This, more than any regional disparity, is at the heart of division in the Republic.
And the deprivation of which it's a symptom passes from poor generation to generation as surely as wealth and property are inherited by the better off.
The superstition has persisted for years that you'd better not talk about obvious differences along class lines while so-called regional differences were being discussed in Brussels.
Now that the EU negotiations are over and we've been told to prepare for dependence on our own resources, it's time we began to look at life as it is, not as it's supposed to be in the land of wink and nod.
Work on a new national plan began with publication of the Economic and Social Research Institute's proposals to spend £50 million over the next seven years, this time with special emphasis on infrastructure.
It's a good beginning but not by any means the whole story. What should emerge from a vigorous public debate is a plan designed to meet the social and economic needs of the population as a whole.
The trouble is that vigorous public debate is not our style. Nor are we given to taking principled stands, unless there's money at stake.
And even when we disapprove of their actions, we prefer not to risk offending our friends, especially if they happen to be rich and powerful.
The nearest the Taoiseach came to outrage in Berlin was when it looked as if EU spending on Irish agriculture might be cut more severely than he'd expected.
AS for the NATO attacks on Serbia, David Andrews's description of Ireland's position expressed neither approval nor disapproval but discomfort: we were, he said, in a moment we would all prefer to forget, between a rock and a hard place.
This is not a policy. It's a feeble excuse for not having a policy, as Gay Mitchell complained in these columns and, with other Fine Gael, Labour and Green Party deputies, in the Dail.
Unfortunately, the Government's discomfort just now doesn't stop at hand-wringing over events in the Balkans.
The Coalition is between a rock and a hard place wherever you look: on the privatisation of Telecom Eireann, on attempts at resolving the housing crisis; on the appointment of an EU Commissioner worth the title.
It doesn't take a keen eye to recognise Telecom's misfortune with the loss of two key personnel in a week. As Emmet Stagg said: "Only the most buccaneer free market ideologue would carry on regardless with the sale at this point."
Privatisation is another issue on which Fianna Fail has changed tune and another on which there has been little or no debate. Yet there is talk of selling off not only Telecom but the ESB, Aer Rianta and Coillte.
We appear incapable of learning from the British experience, where the controlling fat cats made fortunes and the customers paid the price.
On housing, we've conveniently forgotten the lessons we ought to have learned from the failure to implement Kenny's admirable proposals of 25 years ago - then, the excuse for not interfering with private interests was the Constitution; now, it's called the market.
But we are not alone in our refusal to listen to warnings of threats, dangers and the risks of disaster. Some 15 years ago, Claudio Magris, in his masterly book about middle Europe, Danube, wrote of the connection between the survival of Yugoslavia and peace in the wider world.
Writing shortly after Tito's death but before the federation had broken up, he commented: "Like the Hapsburg mosaic, that of Yugoslavia today is both imposing and precarious.
"It plays a very important role in international politics, and is determined to check and to annul its own internal tendencies towards dissolution.
"Its solidarity is necessary to the equilibrium of Europe, and its disintegration would be ruinous for this balance, as that of the double (Austro-Hungarian) monarchy was for the world of yesterday."