Spin and counter-spin characterise everything we read, and most of it is tolerated. However, the Taoiseach's claim that "voluntary disarmament will be a unique event in Irish history" on this page yesterday is so inaccurate that it demands a proper response.

There are, in fact, plenty of examples of decommissioning (or disarmament) in Irish history. Some of them are rather quaint: following the War of Independence, for instance, the withdrawing British army handed huge numbers of weapons to the embryonic Irish Army.

Others are more direct: the IRA, for instance, disposed of a large number of weapons in 1968 by selling them off to a fledgling organisation called the Free Wales Army, most of whom were promptly arrested. The Defence Forces still have over 40 Thompson sub-machineguns (a favourite of the IRA in its day) which were handed in on licence as the State scrambled around for weapons in the period before the Emergency.

Far more important, though, are the 40,000 rifles which the UVF handed over to the British authorities in 1916 following the Easter Rising. Although it is commonly assumed that the UVF took their weapons to the trenches with them, the fact that they were mostly of German and Italian origin meant that they were unsuitable for use at the Front, where it would be difficult to resupply them with ammunition. Instead, they were buried in dumps throughout Ulster.

Following the Easter Rising, as A.T.Q. Stewart makes clear in his "Note on the rifles" appended to his authoritative The Ulster Crisis, it became obvious to the British authorities that the civilian population would have to be disarmed.

The leaders of the UVF were eventually convinced that there was no chance of obtaining republican-owned weapons while the UVF kept its rifles, so an order to hand them over to the British army in return for receipts was issued. Many thousands of the weapons were subsequently sold, and some were used in the campaign to restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne of Ethiopia in 1941. Others were used to arm the Home Guard.

Each of these examples gives the lie to the claim that "voluntary disarmament will be a unique event in Irish history". However, there is one, even more direct, example which the Taoiseach can hardly have been unaware of at the time of writing. Last December, lest we forget, the LVF voluntarily handed a cache of rifles, sub-machineguns, sawn-off shotguns and revolvers to Gen de Chastelain's Decommissioning Body for destruction. As Gen de Chastelain put it at the time: "Decommissioning is a voluntary process. We can only do what we are invited to do. The LVF invited us to do this event. We have done it."

Why, then, did the Taoiseach claim that IRA disarmament would be unique? To get a clue to the answer, it is important to look at what has been left out of his account of the past.

First, a loyalist action dating from 1916, and clearly part of the body of Irish history, has been excised. Second, several examples of republican decommissioning predating the formation of the Provisional IRA have been dismissed. Finally, an event which occurred in Northern Ireland last year has simply been forgotten. Taken together, these fuel the suspicion that the Taoiseach believes that loyalists who disarmed in 1916 and 1998, and republicans who did likewise in 1968, have no place in Irish history.

How else could Provisional IRA disarmament warrant the description "unique"? Mr Ahern's article warned that the political parties would be making "a mistake of historic proportions" if they failed to grasp the opportunity which The Way Forward offered.

However, failing to allow all the people of Ireland, North and South, a role in the shaping of history is itself an error of huge import. At its worst, it finds expression in phrases such as this, uttered by a leading Sinn Fein negotiator: "If you look at the history of Ireland there is no history of decommissioning and no history of surrender. Those who talk about token decommissioning are talking about token surrender. That is not in the nature of republicanism."

Such a phrase pours scorn on the very idea of decommissioning and undermines the prospect of peace without victory. They are the words of someone who does not care for a past which includes intermarriage, breaches of principle and exceptions to the rule. Nor do they allow for precedents to be set by people beyond these shores, or outside the approved community.

In many places - El Salvador, Mozambique, Lebanon - decommissioning has been seen, not as an issue which signifies victory and defeat, but rather as an act which is beneficial to the whole of society.

Irish soldiers serving in Nicaragua oversaw the destruction of the Contra rebel arsenal using huge shears. Their commandant said: "By the time we were finished I was sick of the sight of guns." It is a phrase which many in Ireland would echo; but getting rid of them requires that all sides acknowledge that it has its precedents and that the community which shapes the past has many values and different hues.

Sean McDougall recently co-wrote Dilemmas of Decommissioning, published in London by Politeia. He is Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary British History