One of the most moving events for me of the 1798 commemorations this summer was being asked to unveil a memorial stone on the mass grave in Old Ross of more than a hundred people who were left without a gravestone or memorial for two hundred years.
The hundred women, men and children buried in St Mary's churchyard were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue shortly after the United Irish rebels were defeated at New Ross. But for two centuries they were neglected, often branded as loyalist prisoners of war, and a source of embarrassment to many. This year, the victims of Scullabogue have been remembered with equal dignity along with those who died fighting with the United Irishmen.
But it would have been impossible to imagine a public tribute like that during previous commemorations. As Professor Kevin Whelan writes in one of the many new books published to coincide with the bicentenary, "The 1798 rebellion remains buried under an oppressive weight of misrepresentation . . . The Catholic Nationalist version which dominated the centenary, 1938 and 1948 commemorations created the 1798 which people think they know."
Historians such as Whelan, Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong have done much in recent years to challenge the way in which the myths and ballads of the late 19th century have shaped and formed our ideas of what happened in 1798. Kevin Whelan's comments come in a new book edited by Mary Cullen, 1798: 200 years of Resonance (Irish Reporter Publications, no price given). The generosity of spirit he encourages is reflected in the essays by Norman Porter and Martin Mansergh.
Porter tries to reclaim some of the values of 1798 for unionists, or, in his own words, "to capture and sustain the anti-sectarian legacy of 1798". In our post-referendum days, his view of unionism offers hope not only to southern nationalists but a gripping challenge to Northern nationalists and unionists alike.
In an equally generous approach, Dr Mansergh pays tribute to Unionists such as Councillor Harvey Bicker, who chairs the Co Down 1798 Commemoration Committee, and rightly says: "Our task today, like that which the United Irishmen set themselves, is to transcend the conflicts of the past."
And so it is sad to see the Rising being used for narrow, marginal political purposes and to read in the same collection Sean O Bradaigh's essay which could have been written in 1948 or even in 1898. He displays no knowledge of recent historical studies which show that the founding and leading United Irishmen included not only Presbyterians and Catholics, but members of the Church of Ireland, too, and that the turning point for the Wexford Rising was the Battle of New Ross, not the defeat at Vinegar Hill. Unfortunately, the worst of the myths and ballads are still being perpetuated and recycled with fervour and with glee. The best and the worst of those ballads have been put together by Danny Doyle and Terence Dolan in The Gold Sun of Irish Freedom: 1798 in Song and Story (Mercier Press, £6.99). The book comes complete with musical notation and simple guitar chords, and combines a linking narrative with the history, songs, poetry and fables of the Rising.
But while tales such as that of Biddy Dolan and the conman who collected money to finance Father Murphy's escape are engaging, the narrative is racy and questionable, recycling many of the old myths. And, in parts, it is plainly and simply inaccurate: Henry Munroe was neither Scottish nor Presbyterian, but a member of the Church of Ireland from Co Down. Perhaps the authors' sympathies are exposed when they say the French fleet at Bantry was defeated by "the Protestant Wind".
The critical approach to understanding the events of 1798 was pioneered as long ago as 1955 by Dr Charles Dickson, with his The Wexford Rising in 1798. Using previously unpublished letters, documents and archive sources, he set the standard for his successors, and his work remained the definitive account of events in Co Wexford until Dr Daniel Gahan's seminal The People's Rising. Now Dickson's account has been republished (Constable, £9.99 in UK). The book remains valuable for its methodology, its succinct biographies, and its critique of the early bibliography of the Rising.
Three recent studies of the rising in neighbouring Co Wicklow and in Co Kildare show how that critical approach has been developed. Two accounts of the Rising are provided by Mario Corrigan's popular All That Delirium of the Brave - Kildare in 1798 (Kildare County Council, no price given), and Liam Chambers' scholarly Rebellion in Kildare (Four Courts Press, £9.95). Corrigan's book benefits from local photographs and takes a look at the 1898 commemorations, too. Chambers' book is based on his MA thesis at Maynooth, and effectively points out that the Rising was not a sectarian rebellion forced on the peasantry by a draconian military government.
That view comes through too in the memoirs of one of the forgotten Protestant heroes of the Rising, Joseph Holt, edited by Peter O'Shaughnessy. Rebellion in Wick low, General Joseph Holt's Per- sonal Account of 1798 (Four Courts Press, no price given) is the first full and accurate transcript of the Irish part of the memoirs of Michael Dwyer's friend. The book benefits from the annotations and footnotes, and appendices provide a variety of opinions on Holt as well as his obituary from the Dublin and London Magazine.
But perhaps one of the finest and most original books this year has been edited by Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. The Women of 1798 (Four Courts Press, £9.95) has its gaps - there is no biography of Betsy Gray or of Lady Pamela FitzGerald - but that is a small quibble given how women have been neglected by most historians of the Rising and, as Anna Kinsella points out, by the ballad writers, too. Robert Dwyer Joyce's The Boys of Wexford opens in praise of "the captain's daughter" but she remains unnamed - it was a double indemnity to be both a Protestant and a woman when tales of the Rising were being rewritten for the 1898 commemorations.
In his essay, John Beatty examines seven contrasting accounts of the Rising by Protestant women in Co Wexford, and points out that it is difficult to classify loyalist women of the day in neat liberal or conservative categories. Nancy Curtin provides a much-needed study of Matilda Wolfe Tone, and Anna Kinsella tells the contrasting tales of Mad Madge Dickson of Castlebridge and Mary Doyle, the oft-neglected heroine of New Ross.
Many of the dead of 1798 will remain neglected if heroes and heroines are selectively chosen in way the Richard Roche has approached his book, Here's to their Memory (National Graves Association, no price given), which tries to list the gravestones and burial places in Co Wexford of supporters of the United Irishmen. Apart from an unfortunate number of inaccuracies (John Henry Col clough, for example, was a Catholic, not a Protestant), Roche also appears to have paid little attention to Brian Cantwell's monumental work, which has shown why many of the 1798 graves are misdated.
And if it had been published any later, this book would have found no place for the new memorial in Old Ross to the victims of Scullabogue. If the story of 1798 is to be told, then it must be told without a partisan approach, for the aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen, not to perpetuate old separations and divisions.
Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist; his study of the Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798 appears in Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798