On the level of popular culture, too, we were internationalists. Look at James Joyce (if you can bear to, after the week that was in it). He lived on a practical level a wholly European life, and on the level of art, a world life. His head was everywhere. For example, at a lovely concert in Listowel recently we sang along to music and songs he used in his work . . . Mozart, music hall, 'Macushla', ragtime, Parisian waltzes, 'M'appari', 'The Croppy Boy'f. It was only as Ireland closed in and closed down in the 20th century that we lost this ease with diversity.

That's why this coalition is far more modern than any of the other possibilities . . . because the Greens look out from Ireland, rather than pore over, as the big parties do, its minutiae.

But it's the minutiae that gets them elected.

Because their identity up to now has managed to be self-contradictory in a not very interesting way. In all the years I've been sitting around talking about this or that I can't recall a single occasion when anyone brought up the subject of the Greens off their own bat. There's really not been much to say about them. None of the Dail Greens have the glamour that attaches to a few of the continental Greens, and none have the vivid presence of Joe Higgins. After the first few years none of them have even been particularly irritating. Somehow they've given off an old-fogey, bourgeois aura in spite of the fact that Green ideology supposedly incorporates hippie values, or, at least, incorporates opposition to the ruthless materialism of world-destroying capitalism.

I used to think that maybe they were pretending to be uberrespectable middle-class types so as to sneak their beliefs past a conservative electorate.

But I spent a day once with Trevor Sargent on his canvass and I realised . . . what tends to be forgotten . . . that all politicians have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of us. The work Dail deputies do is very much the same from one TD to another. Sargent was and no doubt is as good as the most seasoned Fianna Fail hack at dealing with the on-the ground-problems that deliver gratitude at the ballot box. His constituents clearly recognised his efficiency. On the doorstep, he might as well be in Fianna Fail.

But real Fianna Fail hacks don't look out into the world. Far from it. In established communities their big selling point is that they're local . . . that they come from people intimately known all the way back to the Civil War . . . beyond the war, in fact, since there were always local reasons why one family was on one side and one on the other in that pitiable episode. In the new communities like the housing estates in Kildare and Meath and north Dublin where no one cares about the Civil War or anyone's background, FF's big point is that they have the inside track . . . they know how things get done in this country and are not restrained by doing them for their constituents by scruples about the general good. The planet doesn't enter into it.

But there were always a few ways of being Irish and an internationalist at the same time.

It has been managed for decades by Writers' Week in Listowel . . . to take an example prompted by the Joyce concert I went to there. Listowel blends two perspectives perfectly effectively.

Maybe there's an element of luck . . . you need a town of exactly the right size and it has to be full of Kerry people and it has to have a shrewd and passionate presiding genius such as the late John B Keane and workshop participants who are down-to-earth and people of vision at the same time. But given all that, there's no disjunction between Jimmy Deenihan and Niall Toibin and the statue of John B and a theatrefull of people singing 'Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" and a talk from the Palestinian editor of a distinguished Arabic newspaper and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill going over someone's work with them in a corner and seeing a genius of our time . . . the writer J M Coetzee, for instance . . .

wandering past the Maid of Erin.

Something of that localism which is simultaneously an escape from the local will colour our government now. And though no one meant it to happen, it is entirely appropriate that the Ireland that hops to Bucharest and Forli and Los Angeles and Buenos Aires . . . the Ireland where it seems that everyone's kids are off for the summer to Sharjah and San Diego and Darwin and Vilnius and Addis Ababa . . . should have at policy-making level people who are members not just of an Irish political party but of large, strong movements . . . the European and Global Greens. The turning outwards takes some of the old-fashioned look off Fianna Fail, not to mention the so-called independents, several of whom evoke not so much oldfashioned as antique ways of being. Whether or not it will be effectively heard, the Green note is a new one, and one that rings true in an island which every day becomes less insular.