It was one of those special days, when Belvedere College finally felt able to honour the memory of past pupils who died in the wars of the 20th century, writes Kevin Myers.
These include the republicans Kevin Barry and Cathal Brugha, and they number two sets of three brothers among the 50 or so who were killed in the Great War. A plaque to the dead was unveiled, a book - The Cruel Clouds of War, giving brief biographies of all who died - was published, and a deeply moving video was released.
The driving force behind the day was a teacher, the splendid Oliver Murphy; and the formal unveiling was by Garret FitzGerald, a former pupil. He gave a deeply uncomfortable account of the pro-German, anti-British sympathies when he was a student in Belvedere in 1939.
Extreme nationalism of any kind is often enough the handmaiden to organised stupidity, so it would be comforting to think that anglophobia in modern Ireland was now a thing of the past.
Two recent letters to this newspaper last Tuesday on this very subject suggest this is not the case. Tom Cooper declared that what was not acceptable and "should not be tolerated" were the efforts at conferring a "new respectability on the British Army under the guise of honouring the war dead". That army had ruthlessly suppressed the Easter Rebellion, he wrote, and perpetrated ruthless atrocities against "those who dared to assert their own national identity".
Maurice Earls, writing in a similar vein, managed to bring in the hecatomb of Khartoum of 1898, one of the most appalling events of the 19th century, as if it were somehow relevant to the business of memorialising the Irish dead of the 20th century. He added that the War of Independence could not have been won "had not Britain been broken in the Great War".
Bad history is always a useful start for those who want vent spleen. If Tom Cooper wished to know about real ruthlessness towards civilians in the Great War, he might usefully consult John Horne and Alan Kramer's German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, which details how 5,000 French and Belgian civilians were butchered by the invading German armies in the summer-autumn of the first months of the war.
It is probably useless to point out that so many of the Mahdi's men were killed at Omdurman because of bad tactics and bad generalship, rather like the considerably greater casualties suffered by the British on the first day of the Somme 18 years later. But what were the British doing in Sudan anyway? A good question, with a complex answer, and one you might with equal validity ask of the Germans ("our gallant allies", according to the 1916 declaration) as they poured through Belgium and France in 1914.
No complexity of any kind, just simple ignorance, is involved in Maurice Earls's observation that the War of Independence could never have been "won" had not Britain been "broken in the Great War". Firstly, these are not discrete events. The "War of Independence" and the 1916 Rising which preceded it, would not have occurred without the Great War, and it is counter-historical to suppose otherwise. And the "War of Independence" was not "won" by those who began it in pursuit of a united Irish republic, which even today has still not been achieved.
What the War of Independence achieved was little enough - barely more than what was promised by the Home Rule Bill in 1914, and probably far less than what would have been achieved by the simple process of non-violent negotiation. The oath of allegiance remained; Northern Ireland's existence was confirmed; powers of foreign policy were almost those of an English county; and the Treaty ports were retained by the British. If this is what Maurice Earls regards as a republican victory, I'd love to know what he would call a defeat. So why was the Civil War fought?
Moreover, Britain was not "broken" by the Great War. The very reason London was determined to get terms necessary for the survival of the United Kingdom - as it did in 1921 - was that it had been victorious in the field against Kaiser's Germany. Far from being "broken", Britain still had sufficient energy and confidence to fight a counter-insurgency war in the summer of 1920 in Iraq, in which 500 British soldiers died.
I don't glorify such deaths, nor such wars, nor such imperialism, but instead note wearily the aggressively Anglophobic, self-pitying, ill-informed tenor in which so much of the correspondence in these matters is conducted.
For it is apparently still not sufficient for many people to lament the deplorable losses of Irish life in all wars during the last century without scoring points against Britain. If the Famine isn't to hand, then Omdurman will do; and if that doesn't come to mind, then perhaps one goes for a single-view version of Irish history, in which Kevin Barry didn't help kill a 15-year-old boy-soldier, in which Constance Markiewicz didn't murder an unarmed police officer, in which James Connolly didn't order the shooting of civilian looters, and in which the harmless make-believe Irish Georgius Rex soldiers were not slaughtered at Mount Street Bridge as they completed their weekly route march in 1916.
If you seek to commemorate the virtuous war dead from a virtuous war in which there has been no atrocity, then you will stand at a non-existent war memorial to a non-existent war. Worse still, those who use attempts at reconciliation as simply an opportunity for yet another Anglophobic tribal sneer are dishonouring the entire purpose of commemoration.