This weekend, Fianna Fβil will honour the memory of Theobald Wolfe Tone, father of Irish Republicanism at Bodenstown, Co Kildare. Almost all of the parties in the Republic today have their origins in his ideology.

It informs Fianna Fβil's political philosophy, economic and social policies. Many adherents of the Republican tradition of the 1916 Rising were central to Cumann na nGaedhal and later Fine Gael. Similarly the father of Irish Labour, James Connolly, owed much to the traditions of Irish republicanism. An admiration of Tone unites us all.

Thankfully, the days of political parties commandeering the memories of dead patriots is over. No one will claim this Sunday that Tone was a great Fianna Fβiler. By all means parties and groups can claim inspiration and admiration, but never, ever, ownership. The legacy of Tone is more complex than that of Michael Collins, Padraig Pearse and other patriots.

This was a man who 10 years prior to the 1798 Rebellion put a proposal to the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, to let him establish a military colony on the Sandwich Islands from which the British empire could invade and plunder the Spanish empire. Three years later, in his first pamphlet, he moved a defence of the aristocratic Irish Whig Party in the Irish Houses of Parliament. A couple of years later he advanced military support to the Defenders, a group of impoverished Catholics and men of no property. Plainly, there is no one Tone, frozen in time, to fit into our arguments.

Like Tone himself, the United Irishmen, especially in the later part of the 1790s was no political or socially homogenous grouping. There were many in the United Irishmen who acted out of sectarianism as well as those who were idealistic with pure political motivations. It was a movement which saw Catholic and Presbyterian unite in a single cause, and which was part of a wider international republican movement.

What is clear, however, is that in 1798 Tone sought self-determination for the Irish people on the basis of fraternity, equality and liberty. He sought to conquer nobody. His cause found support out of a legitimate sense of injustice amongst Irish people. He failed, of course, and for 120 years thereafter the Act of Union preserved that sense of injustice.

The Act of Union, a union of aristocratic unrepresentative parliaments and not of peoples was unjust and socially and economically detrimental to Ireland and Dublin especially. To take a more recent example, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 - which for Clemenceau and the French was as much a statement revenge not only for the 1914-1918 war, but also for the defeat in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War - contained the roots of future conflict. The same holds true in Ireland today. Any nationalist seeking victory, dominance or triumph over unionism is engaging in an exercise in futility. Any treaty or agreement, where the goal is not accommodation but triumph will inevitably fail. Tone did not seek to conquer but to liberate, he did not seek to triumph but to accommodate. The only effective means of achieving these aims on this island today is through the Belfast Agreement.

Since the rise of nationalism a century or so ago, our blinkered view of our own Irishness, our initial non-recognition of unionism, later our search for triumph achieved little but conflict. Unionism also had its many moments of domination over consensus. Our own history, including that of Tone, became a tool for our sometimes confused nationalistic ends, while down the years the conflict raged on regardless.

As the 20th century progressed, conflict was the norm. We could imagine no alternative. An island of lemmings, orange-sashed and with green flags wrapped around us, we marched for centuries off the precipice and into mindless, unthinking conflict, with equality, liberty and fraternity long forgotten.

Commemorating Wolfe Tone is about resurrecting these principles and living them, socially and politically. Commemorating Wolfe Tone is about finding the best way to unite Catholic, Protestant and dissenter. That is what the Belfast Agreement is about. The alternative is hopelessness.

David Andrews' column will not appear next week as he is taking leave of absence.