WHEN Queen Elizabeth arrives on her historic first visit to this country, could someone take her gently aside and whisper in her ear: "Take us back, ma'am. Please take us back."

Ludicrous, I know, but there are a substantial number of beleaguered residents of this shambolic State who not only harbour regrets that we ever left the economic embrace of Britain, but would gladly return.

No reigning monarch has set foot on Irish soil outside Northern Ireland since George V arrived on the Royal Yacht at Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire, in 1911. He was enthusiastically greeted wherever he went, just as his descendant will be.

I can't gauge the inner feelings of the people but, as an exile of 35 years, I believe Her Majesty's visit has forged an extraordinary subconscious link in their minds between the current economic shambles and the discredited political system which enabled the virtual bankruptcy of the former British colony.

I'd stake a decent wager that a correctly formulated question on returning to the British economic fraternity, Commonwealth and parliament would elicit a positive response.

Supposing, in my fantasy, Britain agreed to underwrite Ireland's crippling debt in return for assuming sovereign power and changing the colour of the postboxes back to red, what would the response be? Positive, is my hunch.

For it has all gone pear-shaped in the Republic of Dreams. Record unemployment, the return of emigration, the collapse of property prices, the slashing of public services and salaries, tourist numbers at a record low, the indignity of losing sovereignty via a Brussels and IMF bailout, and the depressing resurgence of Sinn Fein in the South.

I'm sure I'm not the only still-proud Irishman at home or abroad thinking the previously unthinkable: why did we leave the British Empire?

Wincing at the memory of the smug, patronising, mewling triumphalism of the Celtic Tiger years, I've been brooding on what has happened to the 26 counties of divided Ireland since independence. With Enda Kenny's new Government grappling with the insoluble financial mess, it is easy to place the blame on the doorstep of decimated Fianna Fail.

As commentator Fintan O'Toole observed before the election: "Ireland has been placed under adult supervision. And that cuts right through to the most tender nerve of a former colony. What colonial overlords tell their subject peoples is: You're not fit to govern yourselves."

Virtually every English person I know has an Irish relative. And why? Because of generations of emigration. A recent history of the motorway system showed thousands of Paddies toiling on the new roads -- some of the half-million men who were coerced into leaving home in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Our loss was Britain's gain. Think of the Gallagher brothers, Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy, Granada's Gerry Robinson, the Pogues' Shane MacGowan, Paul O'Grady, Paul Merton, Steve Coogan -- all first-generation Irish whose parents could not be given a decent life by the architects of 1916 and their successors.

In 1910, Dublin was a jewel in the empire's crown, economically booming, culturally flourishing, with WB Yeats proud of his new creation, the Abbey Theatre, and a reasonably happy populus.

My paternal grandparents ran a busy grocery and bar in the sleepy provincial town of Cavan. They were quite content to be Irish under the Crown. Then, out of the blue, a group of Irish nationalists seized the GPO in Dublin and started the Easter Rising.

My family, like most of the country, was appalled at the outrage and the subsequent destruction of Dublin.

Looking at faded sepia photographs of Cavan from that time, I see a town adorned with fine public buildings, statues and a pleasure garden. I can't think of a single attractive building put up in my native town since independence. But the extensive Farnham Gardens are gone, as are dozens of pre-independence structures that added grace and dignity to the town.

With few exceptions, this is replicated throughout this Mickey Mouse State. And when there was money, the buildings put up by our new masters were, and remain, a disgrace to art, architecture and urban planning. It is too painful to

even contemplate the hi-tech sheds raised by the Catholic Church in the name of religion.

But the man I blame most for the destruction of Ireland is Eamon de Valera. He instigated a Civil War which claimed more lives than the War of Independence, took power with his Frankenstein's monster of Fianna Fail and promptly went about further offending our former masters in London.

He withheld agreed payments to the British Exchequer, leading to an Economic War with England which financially crippled Irish farmers dependent on Britain for cattle, pig and crop sales. This lasted from 1932 to 1938.

My maternal grandfather, a farmer with a smallholding, was badly affected by Dev's campaign against Britain. He went to his grave cursing Dev for his short-sighted actions.

And the mood music for Dev's messianic drive towards an unattainable Irish idyll was the trudge of thousands of feet towards the English mail boat and the gang planks of transatlantic liners as the best and the brightest headed for Piccadilly or Broadway.

In addition, cordial relations between the English and the Irish suffered greatly. But there was worse to come.

How did Dev respond to the declaration of the Second World War and the dark spread of Nazi evil across Europe? He insisted on staying neutral.

But thousands of young men and women from southern Ireland were allowed to cross the Border and join the British forces. Most of my father's friends joined the fight against Hitler. And when they returned home on leave, they were not permitted to wear their 'foreign' British uniforms in the 26 counties.

While the overwhelming mood in the Republic was pro-British, Dev insisted on maintaining a level playing field for Churchill and Hitler.

Meanwhile, Dev's dream of a United Ireland faded forever as he drove a wedge between the two divided parts of the small island. An uncle of mine made a fortune on the black market smuggling butter, meat and petrol across the recently created Border.

When the Nazis were defeated, De Valera studiously travelled across Dublin to the German Legation to sign the book of condolences on the death of Herr Hitler. How wonderfully correct.

Between an economic war with the old enemy and studious neutrality, De Valera managed to create with Father (later Archbishop) John Charles McQuaid an Irish Constitution (1937) that gave sweeping powers to the Catholic Church in the fields of education and hospitals, consolidating the grip of the priests on the rural community.

The Constitution also lay claim to Northern Ireland, elements of which have been repealed only under the Good Friday Agreement.

The old rascal was still in charge during the Fifties when even more people took flight from his depressed State.

Protestants didn't leave the country en masse. It was just that if they married a Roman Catholic, the children had to be brought up in the Church of Rome.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church's rigid control of education, orphanages and other institutions created the background for the obscene outrages against children which have yet to be addressed properly by the Pontiff in Rome, Benedict XVI.

Censorship was rampant, and the writings of emerging Irish talent such as Edna O'Brien and JP Donleavy were banned. In 1954 the official government censor banned Eric Cross's The Tailor and Ansty for mentioning a couple who were cohabiting.

De Valera finally retired to the Vice Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park when he was elected president in 1959. But the political shower that came after him made Dev look like the Dalai Lama. IRA sympathisers like the svelte Charles Haughey. A leader of Fianna Fail, he was Taoiseach three times between 1979 and 1992.

In his first term he vindictively opposed Britain's retaking of the Falklands to get his own back on Mrs Thatcher for not caving in to the IRA hunger strikers in 1980. He also had £400,000 of a £1m debt to Allied Irish Banks cancelled when he said, "I can be a difficult adversary."

The full extent of the Haughey-endorsed backhanders, corruption and dodgy planning decisions is still unclear, but the short man in the expensive hand-tailored French suits was the Godfather of the New Ireland. He created a culture that elevated the wink and nod, the discreet payment offshore, and the pursuit of greed to the level of an art form.

Remember his justice minister's response to being caught on licensed premises after hours? "What will it be, Garda, a pint or a transfer?" Oh, how we laughed!

By the time the Celtic Tiger was a cub, the country was awash with gazumping, diddling, lying, bullshitting and false promises.

The euro created a climate of low interest rates and cheap money. Every three-bed-semi-dweller became a euro millionaire. People borrowed well beyond their annual salaries multiplied three times with a year added for luck. The nation was awash with money. My trips home to this new Nirvana were punctuated with enthusiastic back slaps and, "Sure aren't we a great wee country." It wasn't a question.

This false prosperity was massaged by a bonanza of Brussels-funded projects, roads, bypasses, bridges, canals and tunnels. The spectre of mass emigration was replaced with inward migration. Sure, everyone wanted to live and work in Ireland.

But when the powers that be suddenly stumbled on the possibility of corruption in the magic roundabout of business and politics, there was a collective huff of indignation. Tribunals were set up. These wallet-fattening exer-cises continue interminably, making us almost speechless with disbelief, anger and embarrassment as the actions of a golden few are examined.

Happily, in recent years President Mary McAleese has attended commemorations in St Patrick's, one of Dublin's Protestant cathedrals, for the fallen of two world wars and not just the lads who took over the GPO in 1916.

So, with talk of debt default punctuating the bar room conversations from Cork to Donegal, I reiterate: we got our independence and we made a balls of it. Isn't it time to relinquish it?

Originally published in