I am now about as old as the State, aged 75 years. It may be an appropriate time to look back over the shoulder, to weigh, to measure, to comment.

My family background was of many strands: my father's, father remained a supporter of Parnell to the end; my father, heeding Redmond, was under arms in France, 1914-18; both were solicitors.

On my mother's side was a Presbyterian grandfather, two uncles who served in IRA intelligence, another who joined the RFC but who transferred to the Royal Navy, to remain with it until retirement. Yet another uncle was a Jesuit, two aunts joined Loreto and another, Cumann na mBan.

The mixture was just as varied in the surnames of that background: Norman Welsh, native Irish, Viking and Scottish Lowland origins, sufficient to create an instinctive distrust of racialism, a good start to the Irish Free State, you might say, such backgrounds being common enough in Leinster and elsewhere.

At a very early age I took Pearse and Connolly at their words, studied Irish and history enthusiastically and was a sponge to folklore, thanks largely to my father who also gave me a love of poetry, quoting Shakespeare, Goldsmith and others long before I entered a classroom.

When the 1939-45 war began it was natural that I should join the State's Defence Forces' (though a cousin served with the Allies in Italy). Knowing nothing of the extermination camps, neutrality seemed to make sense. Anyway, how could we join with Britain and part of our country still occupied by Crown forces?

There is no doubt in my mind that most of the Emergency men would have fought any invader to defend neutrality; but soon enough we discovered that it was not real neutrality; Britain was accommodated whenever possible on the sly.

It was then that I began to understand the nature of the Free State (or Saorstat Eireann, later Eire), a neo colonial entity with its middleclass, Catholic parliament for a Catholic people and, in its terror of the erotic, a classical case for Freud.

It is only in recent years, with the disclosures of sexual abuse of children, that we have been able to begin to estimate the terrible consequences of that terror and the price that was paid, never mind the deep hurt to our creative writers, denied communication with their own.

There were other horrors to discover, one by one, in the dark side of the Free State moon: the torture chamber of Office House, the treatment of political prisoners such as Plant and McCaughey, the denial of the right to return to their own country to such as Gralton from Leitrim.

My father, my best friend, died when I was only 12, the eldest of four. I was lucky to get a secondary education but university was out of the economic question until I retired from newspaper work (mostly subediting), the father of six, the grandfather of 10.

WHEN Dev came to power in the 1930s many of us hoped for the realisation of the 1916 promise, cherishing equally all the children of the nation; but labour must wait, Dev told the hungry 1930s and labour, largely, is still waiting, although, thank God, the slums are no more, TB is virtually extinct (Noel Browne should be canonised), and if you manage to survive long enough in the queue you might, just might, get that transplant.

Recent events in the northeast have upset and scandalised all sorts, of people but it is worthwhile remembering that religious bigotry once covered all Ireland.

As a child, I was told not to buy articles in "Protestant shops" but ignored the order. My mother remembered when there was an Orange Lodge in Rathmines, Dublin. I saw notices in shop windows there advertising employment vacancies but adding: "No Roman Catholics need apply". Similar notices once appeared even in newspapers.

When I began writing for this newspaper (my first published poem appeared in 1944) people were wont to ask if I were now "digging with the other foot".

Since then other kinds of bigotry have arrived, against the travelling community, blacks, "rednecks", gaeilgeoin, trade unionists, socialists, republicans, and a wide spectrum of other deviationists and dissidents, as Micheal Macreil, SJ, showed in a survey a few years ago. Generally, however, the air is less stifling.

Until all censorship of the written word is ended, people encouraged to publish what might be regarded by the pillars of society, God help us, as the most dangerous of subversive ideas, and the sources of journalists protected by law, we cannot be considered a democratic society, even when truth is regarded as the greatest of all subversions.