A head-wrecking, doom-laden story of civil war, butchery, and betrayal leaving tens of thousands dead? Summoned up in an exhibition with the militant title "Up in Arms"? A gloomy trek even for people in the best of spirits, surely. Hardly an obvious choice of venue then, for two communities desperate to reach out to one another . . . But one night recently, some 60 Catholics and 40 Presbyterians from the village of Crumlin, outside Belfast, boarded a couple of buses paid for by the borough council and headed for the Ulster Museum. Led by the Presbyterian minister, the Rev Brian Kennaway and Catholic priest, Father David Delargy, their number included the recently bereaved parents of Ciaran Heffron, a young Catholic student whose murder had left both communities almost incoherent with shock and loss.
For decades, the quiet, middle-class area had remained largely unscathed, despite an influx of Catholics from West Belfast which had seen its 70/30 ratio of Protestant to Catholic neatly reversed in just 20 years. When the time came to show its colours, it was not found wanting. "The whole Protestant population of Crumlin came out for the funeral," says the Rev Kennaway. And afterwards, as they cast around for ways to convey their solidarity with their stricken Catholic neighbours, he was struck by the possibilities of a visit to the Ulster Museum's "Up in Arms".
"I thought of it as something we could do together, something that would compromise no-one's principles - theological or otherwise - something that offered a shared history," says the minister, who also happens to be convenor of the Orange Order's education committee. Shared history? This may come as a bit of a shock to Southerners weaned on the balladry of Catholic heroism, Boolavogue and occasional, misty-eyed nods to Wolfe Tone. Never mind the effect on generations of Ulster Protestants reared "because of that very bigoted Stormont government" (in Rev Kennaway's words) with hardly any Irish history at all. Their 1798 may be summarised in a shortlist of epic Presbyterian heroism: the Battles of Antrim and Ballynahinch ("glorious" defeats for the Presbyterianled United Irishmen); the hanging of the young Presbyterian farmer, William Orr (originating the catchphrase "Remember Orr"); folkloric memories of another stout-hearted Presbyterian, Betsy Gray, murdered in Ballynahinch, where she went to share the fate of her brother and fiance.
But ask a typical Northern loyalist what his Southern brothers-in-arms might have been up to at the same time and the sorry answer - if he has one at all - will probably be "Scullabogue". For him, the image of 1798, Southern-style, is demonic, encapsulated by the burning alive of more than 100 Protestant civilians and a few Catholic associates in a Co Wexford barn. He may also have chewed over the concept "Murder Without Sin" - alleged by loyalists to be the status ascribed by Catholic clergy to the killing of Protestants. Not much shared history there, on the face of it.
Then to complicate matters further, every time the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, orates on a 1798 theme, it is fixed more firmly in many Protestant minds as a purely republican rebellion, one owned and celebrated only by present-day nationalists.
The fact that what is arguably the single most important decade in modern Irish history with all its complexities has been reduced to such simplistic notions has meant it would take a masochist of some sort to attempt the job of presenting an overview, not conveniently anchored in the deeds of some local, heroic confrontation, but set firmly in the intercontinental, international and - most significantly - national contexts of the time. "This was important because there is a perception that our rebellion is different from their rebellion," says Trevor Parkhill, Keeper of History at the Ulster Museum. But even if he succeeded in that, how was he to convey it in digestible form to such a polarised, poorly informed audience? That the Ulster Museum - slap between the poles - should attempt it at all is noteworthy enough. That two men such as the Rev Kennaway and Father Delargy, from vastly different cultures, should leave such an exhibition each with a feeling that the truth has been served is the best accolade it could wish for.
Father Delargy was frankly startled. "I knew virtually nothing about 1798 beforehand and a lot of the people on the trip were in the same position . . . But I certainly had my eyes opened. It was the scale of it. We talk about 3,500 deaths in nearly 20 years - but here we were talking about 30,000 in a few short weeks. Also the fact of just learning that it was the Anglicans who had all the power and that the Presbyterians were nearly as badly off and disenfranchised as the Catholics, that they weren't just fighting for Catholic Emancipation but their own and also - to my own great surprise - for separation from the Crown. What came across was that at one stage in our history, the Catholic and Presbyterian people were quite clearly united in a common search for justice."
The Rev Kennaway - whose education committee has produced two booklets on 1798 - has no quarrel with this interpretation. "The Penal Laws affected Presbyterians as much as Roman Catholics. They were disaffected because of the franchise, because of the voting system, because they weren't allowed to own property . . . In some respects, Presbyterians were better off and in some respects Catholics were better off. Presbyterian marriages were not recognised, but Catholic marriages were. So when it came to inheritances, Catholics were alright. But Presbyterians couldn't hand on their estates - though they hadn't many to hand on."
Soon after 1798, of course, the two groups parted company, their common purpose shattered by government concessions to the Presbyterians that saw them drop their independence aspirations and radical ways like a stone and some even throwing their lot in with the Orange Order.
"It seems their behaviour afterwards wasn't nearly so noble," says Father Delargy kindly. In their defence, the Rev Kennaway points out that there was never anything starkly black and white (or orange and green for that matter) about the passions behind 1798. "There were many people who were radical in terms that they were liberal in theology but conservative in their politics and some who were vice versa. There were some Church of Ireland involved in it as well and of course Catholics were on both sides. It was quite a mix-up. It's not simply as Gerry Adams would want us to believe - that 1798 was the birth of republicanism. What you were getting certainly was a brand of republicanism."
But what happened to that old Presbyterian radicalism? "Well, a lot of the things that Presbyterians were complaining about were dealt with. Some would argue that those in authority did that to try to get them to unite with their Anglican neighbours to oppose what was then still the perceived threat - Roman Catholics. And some would argue that, in fact, that was what happened. But there is still a lot of antipathy between Presbyterians and Anglicans - so much so that although Anglicans are no longer the church of Ireland and are not the Established Church, they still behave as if they were."
Wheels within wheels. Indeed the exhibition begins with a silken reminder of what an opulent existence the Protestant ascendancy enjoyed in that era, and which explains why they were so desperate to cling to the status quo: an earl's ornately-embroidered satin suit and a fine silk robe and petticoat with ribbons and leaves of gold thread owned by a countess. Close by is the splendid 28-piece Kildare toilet service given by the 19th Earl of Kildare to his wife on the birth of their son, the future Duke of Leinster (seen here for the first time courtesy of the British National Heritage Lottery fund, which paid £450,000 for it). There are enormously elaborate swords, trinkets and ceremonial clothes with which they decked themselves for the numerous balls and military reviews. And behold Viscount Castlereagh looking the image of innocence with his golf club, in what is probably the first picture of an Irish golfer.
Further along, examples of the might of the Crown forces versus the primitive armoury of the United Irishmen are displayed: an elaborate field gun with carriage and flintlock muskets with bayonets on the one hand; a few crudely made pikes on the other. Helping to weave the international stories into the national, the national into the local, is a wealth of paintings, memorabilia and objects such as a cat o' nine tails; samples of French revolutionary paper money; a 1795 edition of the loyalist ballad Croppies Lie Down; the original minute book of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland - including its first meeting in Dawson Street, Dublin, in March 1798; a 1792 second edition of Paine's The Rights Of Man (which sold 40,000 copies in Ireland at the time); a picture of the rather plain informer, Leonard MacNally, who got no more than he deserved with "a body that was nearly as broad as long; his legs were of unequal length, and he had a face no washing could clean . . ."
Little nuggets of history (such as the fact that William Drennan coined the phrase the "Emerald Isle") are interwoven with poignant reminders of the leaders as real people with real lives and loves. Wolfe Tone's diary entry covering his gadding around Belfast while setting up the United Irishmen included mondain notes such as: "Very drunk. Home. Bed" but is displayed along with with his grief-stricken last letter to his father: "I had not the courage of supporting a meeting which would lead to nothing and would put us both to insufferable pain". And there is his last heart-wrenching letter to his wife Matilda: "As no words can express what I feel for you and our children, I shall not attempt it"). She was then only 29 with three small children, and there is a painting of her here with two of them.
Here, too, is Henry Joy McCracken's coat of green - reputedly worn when he commanded the United Irishmen at the Battle of Antrim - and the gold memorial ring containing a lock of his hair cut off by his sister Mary Ann just before his execution. A tableau has Mary Ann sitting in an armchair in old age (she died at 96), remembering how she tried to accompany poor Henry Joy to the gallows before being forcibly removed. Mary, as the postscript in the magnificent exhibition catalogue tells us, went on to devote herself to business, to the rearing of her brother's illegitimate daughter and to much charitable work with women and children.
And then there is what for many Northerners will be the exhibition's centrepiece - Thomas Robinson's enormous painting of The Battle Of Ballynahinch, a picture which, despite its great Northern resonances, is appearing in Belfast for the first time in 200 years. Twice raffled in its time, it was finally acquired by the Irish Office of Public Works and is on loan to the Ulster Museumn. The painting is accompanied by an audio commentary apt to draw tears from a stone. The story of the McCullough brothers fighting on different sides; the rebels who came along dressed in their "Sunday go-to-meeting clothes" all wearing something of green or green and yellow; their disastrous inexperience which led them to believe that a British bugle signal to retreat meant that reinforcements had arrived and caused the rebels themselves to retreat, thereby losing the day in a battle that effectively ended the Northern rebellion.
NO wonder that visitors leave the exhibition with heavy hearts. Over and over in the visitor's book, the words "sad" and "deeply moving" crop up. They reflect pessimism, pain and gratitude. "How little has changed"; "So much pain, so much sorrow"; "Now I know there was much they didn't tell us at school". From California, a note of ballad Irishry: "Yet thank God, een still are beating hearts in manhood's burning noon, who would follow in their footsteps by the Rising of the Moon". And a note from a Belfast visitor: "What have we learned in 200 years?"
We have learned a little, it seems. The Rev Kennaway sees parallels, "between the folks who were disaffected then and the people who are disaffected now (as we have been since 1985 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement) and how the government handled it then. Two hundred years ago, they handled it with a show trial for William Orr. Two hundred years later, I think they have learned in this sense: while they have got the leadership together and said, `Right, work out something yourselves', they've actually gone to the level of putting it to the people, so that the people themselves cannot say we did not have a part in the decision-making process. And for good or ill, they are now locked into that decision-making process. But they were ignored in that process 200 years ago. So I think to that extent they have learned something."
Who fears to speak of '98 ? Fewer and fewer. The walls are coming down. The Rev Kennaway talks to the Lodges and explains why their ancestors were rebels and how they share a history with Roman Catholics. "I think we're mature enough now to look back and say: `This is what happened. Some say it happened because of X, others say it happened because of Y. So you can make up your own minds'."
Groups from staunch loyalist housing estates such as Killicomaine (Billy Wright's old stomping ground) have been to the exhibition. All across the North, in commemorations funded by both unionist and nationalist controlled councils, both sides are involved in ecumenical services, children's mural painting, dramas and lectures. In a subtle gracenote, Belfast City Council has commissioned a new concerto to commemorate Mary Ann McCracken. And people such as Trevor Parkhill of the Ulster Museum and Jane Leonard, its exhibition outreach officer, travel out to communities, tirelessly spreading the word that museums are not just elitist containers of fusty relics but living reminders of a shared and - sometimes - glorious heritage. All of which makes even more puzzling the fact that 1798 is not yet on the history syllabus for Northern schools. Lessons begin at the Act of the Union in 1801.
Up In Arms runs at the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast until August 31st. Open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m.5 p.m.; Saturday, 1 p.m.5 p.m. and Sunday, 2 p.m.5 p.m. Admission: adults £3; children £1 sterling. Tel: Belfast 01232 383001.