Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter gathered in Buncrana, Co Donegal, at the weekend, a town so recently devastated by the Omagh bombing, to debate the politics of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the United Irishmen and their connection to Lough Swilly.
Mr William Thompson, UUP MP for West Tyrone, said at the seminar at Tullyarvan Mill that he would accept a United Ireland when the majority of the electorate in Northern Ireland wanted it.
Academics, historians, musicians and politicians agreed that the aspirations of Tone in the 1790s were very relevant today, but the mistakes made by the United Irishmen and Tone's naivete, that ultimately resulted in their failure, must not be repeated if the peace process was to succeed.
Opening the seminar, Mr Pat "the Cope" Gallagher MEP rejected the idea that any genuine republican would ever contemplate that the Omagh bombing had "the tiniest scintilla of justification. The rising of republicanism in Ireland goes back to the 1790s and as our Taoiseach rightly stressed this week, the republican thinking of the United Irishmen was generous, pluralist and life-enhancing," he added.
Mr Billy Mitchell, secretary of the Progressive Unionist Party, said that the claims of modern Irish nationalists and Irish republicans to be the legitimate heirs of the United Irish movement had led most loyalists to dismiss the events of 1798 as being irrelevant.
A policy by academics and historians to suppress the literary remains of key Presbyterian United Irishmen such as the Rev Steel-Dickson, Ballycraigy, from the history of the period was matched by the lack of attention to local social and political history in the school curriculum.
"East Antrim came out to a man in '98 in support of McCracken and the ideals espoused by the United Irishmen. After 1798 this same area was to accept the Act of Union to a man and the descendants of these insurgents became the East Antrim Battalion of the UVF in defence of the Union," Mr Mitchell said.
Mr Thompson admitted that he knew very little about the United Irishmen and had not fully understood the Presbyterian connection that Mr Mitchell spoke of.
"When I received this invitation in April I could not have envisaged how our two towns would have been bound together in grief and sorrow," Mr Thompson said, having visited the bereaved families in Buncrana on Saturday morning.
Different aspects of 1798 were addressed by Dr Daire Keogh, Mr Breandan Mac Suibhne, Dr David Dickson, and Dr Kevin Whelan in a series of lectures now available as The Great Rebellion of 1798, from the Thomas Davis Lectures, edited by Cathal Poirteir of RTE Radio.
In all, it was a successful first autumn school on the shores of Lough Swilly where Wolfe Tone was landed after his capture by the British.