The legacy of the 1798 Rebellion has been reduced into a malleable collection of romanticised half-truths, fostering a belief in a mythic golden age of brotherhood between Catholic and Protestant communities while playing down the sectarian hatreds which shadowed and ultimately destabilised the revolt, the Parnell Summer School has been told.
The school, held in Parnell's ancestral home at Avondale, near Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, explored the theme of The Republic, both as a political concept and a social reality. Speakers, including leading historians from North and South and a broad spectrum of political figures, questioned the notion that democratic republicanism constituted the ultimate expression of Irish nationalism.
The Minister for State at the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Mr Eamon O Cuiv, said the portrayal of the uprising as an expression of a national hunger for political and religious hegemony was as misleading as the appropriation of 1798 by 19th century republicans, who remoulded the rebellion into a symbol of the oppression of the Catholic majority by Protestant occupiers.
Mr O Cuiv said the bicentennial celebrations of 1798 were deeply coloured by present-day considerations.
"We are reinventing the Uprising for our own purposes. We want it to support the present process of peace and reconciliation," he said.
Prof John A. Murphy of UCC cautioned against adopting the principles of the United Irishmen as a blueprint for the current peace initiative. An over-eagerness to embrace the revolt as the birth of egalitarianism in Ireland had led to a reluctance to confront the darker side of the Rebellion, he stated.
Prof Murphy said the classical political concept of "the Republic" had been distorted out of all recognition by Irish nationalism.
Even the word republic had come to possess a "Utopian ring far transcending the practical meaning", he explained.
"For absolute fanatics `the Republic' has been imagined as an Utopia whose existence has been subverted by British malignancy and Utopian betrayal," Prof Murphy said.
Those who continued to cling to a belief that a 32-county republic was the inevitable consequence of self-determination were "removed from reality", he suggested.
Democratic Left's Ms Liz McManus said the principles of equality and fraternity espoused by the United Irishmen had their successor not in modern Irish republicanism but in the concepts of justice and equality as enshrined in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"We must live out their ideals in a way appropriate to the needs of today. Unless such rights are universal they are nothing more than an extended privilege," she said.
The Labour Party spokesman on the environment and former minister of state at the Department of Transport Energy and Communications, Mr Emmet Stagg, said the ideals of 1798 were being stymied by the unwieldiness and democratic deficit, which he said had permeated many State institutions.
He expressed concern at what he termed a concentration of power in the hands of an unelected political elite and called for far-reaching reform in the upper echelons of the Civil Service.
"A small group of people are secretly wielding more influence than our elected representative. This reality is contrary to the principles of 1798," Mr Stagg said.
The school continues until Sunday.