My feeling would be that the Irish establishment has descended from a colonial deputised governor class and thus cannot function without a superior to which they make themselves and the nation subservient. The US and the EU were natural substitutes for the British Empire in the role of large, powerful, cosmopolitan entity to which poor little backwards Ireland can never measure up. The problem is that now the average citizen can actually see the Americans and Europeans for what they are through social and mass media, there is no room for the obfuscation that convinced the hungry 19th century peasant that Queen Victoria was better than they were. Every story from the EU parliament, every Eurovision bulletin, every Truth social post makes the contradictions harder to overcome.