Earlier this summer, in the days after the British vote to leave the European Union, Irish diplomats on the continent were struck by how often they found themselves having to answer the question: will Ireland follow the United Kingdom out of the EU?

“You’d be surprised by how many of our partners – senior officials across the EU – needed assurance, and continue to need assurance, that Ireland is staying within the EU and will not be dragged out because of our links with Britain,” says one Irish diplomat.

At first, the focus of the Government's response to the Brexit bombshell was on the need to contain damage to the Anglo-Irish relationship.

According to one source, the first draft of Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s earliest statement on the referendum result did not contain any reference to Ireland’s commitment to its own EU membership (these were added after the draft was circulated to officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs).

The focus on the Anglo-Irish connection was understandable. Brexit raises difficult questions not only about the future of trade across the Irish Sea but also about the Common Travel Area, the Border and the peace process.

These were naturally the chief concerns of the Department of An Taoiseach and the Anglo-Irish division in Iveagh House, which was closely involved in Brexit contingency work for the past year.

Yet, for Ireland, there are much wider questions in play than the Anglo-Irish relationship. Brexit will require a fundamental shift in how Dublin positions itself at European level and, more broadly, how the country thinks about its relationship with the continent.

Closest ally

Overnight, the Government will lose its closest political ally in Brussels. When Ireland's ambassadors and other senior diplomats met for a private four-day conference in Dublin last month, one of the themes that emerged regularly, according to people who attended the event, was how Ireland should align itself once the UK has left.

With the 28-member EU, there are a number of informal alliances or blocs, among them the Nordics, the Benelux states, the Franco-German couple, the three-state Baltic Assembly and the Visegrad Group, an alliance comprising the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Members of those groups do not always take common positions, but they seek one another out and often take agreed approaches to issues of shared concern in advance of wider EU deliberations.

Although London and Dublin did not agree on everything – on agricultural subsidies, for example, the two governments were always poles apart – their civil servants worked closely together and often found themselves in agreement.

Dominant view

At the heads of mission conference, the dominant view was that instead of seeking alliances to join, Ireland should work harder on its relationships across the bloc. As one participant said, Ireland has always tended to seek out friends on an issue-by-issue basis. In France it found a kindred spirit on the Common Agricultural Policy. During debates on trade and financial services, it stuck close to the British, the Dutch and the Finns.

At other times, we found common cause with the Nordic states or the "Club Med" group of Spain, Greece and Italy. The post-Brexit world will require Irish diplomats to work even more assiduously to cultivate these overlapping connections.

Ireland’s trading relationships will have to undergo a similar expansion. Even if the Brexit talks result in minimal damage to Ireland’s business ties to the UK, recent months have shown that Ireland is far too heavily exposed to instability next door.

Finding new global markets for Irish goods has for years been a political slogan; now it's an imperative. That means looking in a more systematic way at the vast potential of China and India.

However, it also entails broadening Ireland’s trading relationships on the continent itself, where many countries remain vastly underexplored by Irish businesses. Britain absorbs 36 per cent of Irish exports. Our next nearest neighbour, France, has a similarly sized population to the UK yet takes just 6 per cent of our exports.

When he was taoiseach, one of Garret FitzGerald's common refrains was that if Ireland was to carve out a place for itself in the European Union (as it became) as something other than an adjunct to Britain, it would have to build close, meaningful relationships with France, Germany and other key states on the continent. The coming upheaval could deliver some uncomfortable truths about the extent to which that aim was fulfilled. But the message itself has never been more relevant.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is foreign affairs correspondent