The first 25 years of the State ended without celebration. The 50th anniversary was overshadowed by the Arms Crisis and a sense of alarm at deepening divisions in the North.
Today, perhaps, we can begin to take stock of 75 years of independence which opened on December 6th, 1922.
And although this is a week in which Charlie McCreevy turned his back on a unique opportunity, shamefully deepening divisions he might well have reduced, we have much to celebrate.
At a glance the 75 years are easily divided and described: in the first 25, hardly anything changed; in the second, we all but died; but extraordinary advances in the last quarter-century have changed this society out of all recognition.
Such divisions are more easily suggested than sustained. One of the achievements of the early years was the Shannon Scheme, a triumph of engineering and imagination about which we might well have boasted in our new industrial age.
As for some of the social problems of the 1980s and 1990s - they take us back with a jolt to divisions we thought belonged to the 1950s. We are nothing if not contradictory, but then who isn't?
There's no denying that we were slow starters: if independence was the end of the centuries-old nightmare we'd been told about, we took our time waking up to reality and the new dawn.
We took our time and said little. In 1947, I was at school, aged 10, and an avid reader of what passed for popular history: Dorothy McArdle's wildly partisan fighting stories and tragedies of troubled times.
At least they were livelier than the textbooks, all of which ended in 1916.
But neither the fighting stories nor the official histories satisfactorily explained how we got from there to here.
In our corner of Clare, where so many had fought so hard for independence, no one celebrated its achievement 25 years on.
In many ways we were still closer to the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries than to the 1920s.
On our shelves, the books our parents bought: Kickham's Knocknagow, which inspired de Valera's homely vision; Canon Sheehan's great novels, The Blindness of Dr Gray and Glenanar; Annie M. P. Smithson's stories of patriotic nurses, Butler's Lives of the Saints and the poems and prose of P. H. Pearse.
We paid much more attention to the 150th anniversary of the 1798 Rising (in 1948) than to the foundation of the State.
It was as if the Battle of Aughrim had happened shortly before the last fair of the 'Bridge. And we still felt the betrayal of Limerick, its treaty broken before the ink was dry.
Why did we hear so little about the beginnings of the State? Partly because it was a difficult birth and, as Roy Foster wrote, the Civil War "had created a caesura across Irish history separating parties, interests and even families and creating the rationale for political divisions that endure."
On one side of the caesura were those who'd presided at the birth, on the other the party which had governed without a break since 1932. It was easy to see why teachers who'd seen the two days might prefer the romance of James and William in the 17th century to the freshly-laid minefields of the 20th.
Then there was the Catholic Church. Its control of health and education had long been secured in return for opposition to subversion in the 19th century.
Bishops condemned the Fenians and Parnell. But while some had doubts about the War of Independence, all eventually supported the establishment of the State.
Parish priests were managers of schools, chairmen of GAA clubs, leaders of community organisations and the moral policemen of their flock, in some cases with a degree of authority that a mullah of the deepest dye might envy. A teacher who dared cross them risked his or her livelihood - with additional penalties for challenging God's anointed.
If the pride of the parish or the glory of the little village were Kickham's (and Dev's) ideals, governments in the first 45 years of independence failed miserably to reach them.
This was no idyllic society for the landless or the urban poor. Servant boys slept on hay in many a farmer's loft, servant girls were paid 7s 6d (or 37.5p) a week.
In cities and towns the lanes were populated by women their neighbours knew as shawlies and silent, staring children.
Authority was everywhere and it ruled by fear. It wasn't only policemen, teachers or priests who exerted control as a matter of course. Children were afraid of all adults and women often sacrificed - or were forced to sacrifice - health and happiness in the interests of husbands and families.
Secrecy was authority's fearful ally. There was a strong belief that if you didn't talk about something it didn't exist. In our small parish, where my father kept records for the parish priest, several cases of incest were noted. Noted but never publicly acknowledged - except by jeering children in the schoolyard or neighbours in the heat of an occasional feud.
Secrecy cloaked the removal of people from their homes, either because of an unwanted pregnancy or because they were being taken to the local mental hospital - signed in by relatives and, in many cases, never seen again.
There was so much to be ashamed of, so much that never came to light.
All of this was taken for granted. As was the pervasive affliction, tuberculosis, until the discovery of new forms of treatment and the arrival of Noel Browne in the inter-party government of the late 1940s.
It took Browne to point to some other home truths - about the power of the Catholic Church and the selfishness of its allies in the medical profession: an alliance which still exists, though in a new form which has yet to be fully explored.
Browne's was the most striking of several brave advances which nudged the state towards the ideal Des O'Malley had in mind when he announced in 1985 that he stood by the Republic.
Fianna Fail governments in the 1930s promoted vocational education, local industry and the interests of small farmers; Sean Lemass, as John Horgan recalls in his biography, won an argument with Sean MacEntee and convinced his colleagues to follow Beveridge.
It took the reforming governments of Fine Gael and Labour (lately FG, Labour and Democratic Left) to lead the way towards more radical change. The left especially promoted openness and exposed the extent to which corruption has penetrated public life.
But standards of debate have fallen too and in journalism as well as in politics. An American commentator lately complained, as others have done, about the absence of Catholic commentary in the media; nationalists consider themselves similarly excluded.
This is one of the legacies of a state which for 50 of the past 75 years, if not longer, timidly accepted conformity and what passed for tradition as the most secure and durable version of Irishness - Catholic, nationalist and immutable. It's a version of Irishness that has been challenged with some success. And the challenge must not be relaxed now that smugness has taken hold again.