Modern Ireland claims to be pluralist - but it plays the same games with history as it accuses previous generations of doing, writes Jim Duffy
Ireland loves its history. But it likes one-sided history. The side may change, depending on each generation's fad, fashion or political correctness.
Take the early 20th century myth: how an oppressed Ireland rose up against its British oppressor in 1916. Not exactly. In reality only a tiny fringe rose. Far from having the country behind them, they needed protection from Dublin mobs, while nationalist newspapers called for the execution of Pearse, Connolly and the rest of the leaders.
Roll on a couple of years to the triumph of republicanism in the 1918 general election, and many of its critics jumped on the 1916 bandwagon, with far more claiming to have been in the GPO than physically would have fitted in the building. And yet, somehow Ireland was neither as anti-British nor as pro-Sinn Féin as the later spin suggested.
Throughout the 1920s Remembrance Sunday wreath-layings at the temporary cenotaph in College Green drew crowds in their tens of thousands. Catholic churches and the Pro-Cathedral were packed for High Masses for the Great War dead. Even more amazingly, only five years after a bloody Anglo-Irish war and Civil War, the king's daughter, Princess Mary, could come and holiday in the west of Ireland, with minimal security, and be warmly welcomed.
But that side of history was airbrushed out of the official narrative. Out went the Great War dead, Redmond, or indeed those who supported Cosgrave in the 1920s. Instead came the 1916 story, with all the awkward bits edited out.
Then the reverse happened. Turned away from republicanism by the antics of the Provisional IRA, nationalists later in the century abandoned their ritualised celebrations of 1916, their Easter parades and naming everything that moved (or had a train running into it) after Rising leaders. Instead the focus was on the forgotten Irish of the Great War. Out went E Company and in came the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The Orange Order had a plaque erected in Dublin to commemorate its founding, while long forgotten statues to royalty (those the IRA had not already managed to blow up), got cleaned up.
The change in attitudes was shown in the attention paid to restoring Queen Victoria's monument in Dún Laoghaire, as against the threat hanging over the building on Moore Street that had served as the last headquarters of the Rising. Earlier generations of politicians would have stampeded to support its preservation, to link themselves to the "national martyrs". Today even the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, who represents the area, stays quiet.
Perhaps no single organisation has experienced more shifting in spin than the Catholic Church. For most of the century the church was on a pedestal: priests were all holy men and nuns national heroines, nursing the poor, orphans and fallen women. State leaders tripped over themselves to Catholicise the new State, with Catholic views on divorce, contraception and censorship put into law.
Yet in reality, the scale of the Catholicisation of the new Ireland was exaggerated. De Valera frequently stood up to the church; he refused to be bullied by it into supporting Franco and refused demands that Catholicism be made the state religion in the Constitution.
To the fury of the church in his article mentioning its meaningless "special position", he also recognised the Church of Ireland and, worst of all in an era of anti-Semitism, the Jewish Community. But those acts too were edited out of the national narratives, lest they show the real complexity of independent Ireland.
By the end of the century, the clichéd glorification of the church was replaced by clichéd demonisation. Every priest was a possible child abuser. Everyone who went to a Catholic school was presumed to be a "victim".
The irony is that modern Ireland, in its conviction that it is pluralist, plays the same games with its history as it accuses past generations of doing.
It rightly condemns the writing out of history of Ireland's Great War dead, yet now does the same to its republican past. Instead of over-the-top parades celebrating the Rising in 1966, it had a dumbed-down five-minute ceremony in 1991, the 75th anniversary of the Rising. It rightly condemns past generations for being so blinded by their glorification of Catholicism that they never noticed the abuse - but then commits those very sins in reverse by talking as if there was nothing but abuse and corruption.
The task 21st century Ireland faces is to become genuinely pluralist, to find a way to see the full complex story of Ireland; of 1914-1918 and 1916, of poppies and Easter lilies, Pearse and visiting princesses, of preserving and restoring monuments to Queen Victoria and buildings associated with the Easter Rising.
Jim Duffy is a historian and political commentator