The best way to crown the 1798 bicentenary and "to fulfil some of the ideals of the United Irishmen" would be to reach "a new, lasting and peaceful end" to the Northern Ireland conflict, the Taoiseach has said.
Mr Ahern was launching the Government's 1798 commemoration programme in Dublin yesterday. He acknowledged the need to remember both those "forced to defend themselves against tyranny and oppression" and the "many honest and honourable loyalist victims who were civilians caught up in the rebellion in Wexford and elsewhere."
He stressed: "We are commemorating the most sustained effort in Irish history to reconcile and unite what were then three communities with different religious beliefs and ethnic backgrounds" - Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters.
"Today the demand for reform and equality cannot be suppressed.
"The way is open to negotiate a political settlement peacefully and on a footing of equality, and under the auspices not only of the British Government but of a sovereign Irish Government that can trace its political lineage back to 1798, when the first republics in Wexford and Connacht were declared.
"But we should also acknowledge that there were many of the unionist and even the present-day Orange tradition whose ancestors were members of the United Irishmen."
The chairman of the Government's commemoration committee, Minister of State Mr Seamus Brennan, stressed the international links which the rebellion had forged with America, France, Australia and Newfoundland.
"1798 was not just a series of minor skirmishes but part of a bigger international movement, indelibly linking Ireland to what was happening elsewhere in the Atlantic world. It was Ireland's first modern revolution, which was profoundly inspired by the American and French Revolutions."
The historian Dr Kevin Whelan, a member of the commemoration committee, said they had tried to construct the year's programme in a spirit of "parity of esteem" between the northern, mainly Presbyterian, rebels from Antrim and Down and the Catholics of Dublin, Wexford and elsewhere.
He hoped the commemoration would allow people on this island to talk about their differences in an inclusive and generous way "without the insistent pressure of contemporary events and politics."
An Ulster Unionist councillor from Co Down, Mr Harvey Bicker, recalled how 100 years ago the grave of Betsy Gray, a Presbyterian rebel leader who died at the Battle of Ballynahinch, was destroyed. He hoped that the time was now right for educational initiatives to show the people of the North that "1798 belonged to us all."