Our Letters page last Tuesday featured a valuable and overdue history lesson from a gentleman in Wales.
Mr Paul Griffin chided another letter-writer, Ralph Kenna, for urging the return of two Sheela na Gigs from the British Museum to their place of origin in Westmeath, pointing out: "During many centuries of exploration and conquest, it was inevitable that a large number of artefacts would find their way to museums and private collections."
"Find their way" is good, isn't it? Picture the scene - the two poor naive little Sheelas, best friends for yonks, heading off together from their humble homes in Westmeath all those years ago. In tears they depart their troubled land to embark on a great journey which, unbeknownst to them, will end in a remote dusty corner of the British Museum, far from their friends and loved ones. Sad, but inevitable, what?
It would be unfair, however, says Mr Griffin, to suggest that the British only took things away: "They also brought with them law, the conventions of civilised conduct and, perhaps most importantly, the language in which Mr Kenna expresses his opinions, in which Pearse phrased his Proclamation, and without which it is hard to imagine the prosperous, modern nation we know today. Let us hope they do not come looking for these things back."
Let us hope so indeed. I like best the bit about the British bringing us the conventions of civilised conduct. We badly needed reminding of this. In all the excitement and pride over our prosperous, modern nation, we tend to forget what a thick, filthy, ill-mannered, poverty-stricken pig-ignorant crowd of bog-trotters we were just a few short centuries ago, before the British Empire took us under its kindly and cultured wing.
Honestly, some of the younger crowd today have no idea of how backward we were. And look at us now, thanks to the British and their baggage, still generously unclaimed after more than 600 years! Why, we can even handle the multiple cutlery crack in fancy restaurants without disgracing ourselves.
As for law, no one can deny that in almost every detail the legal system in this State is modelled on the one which Britain imposed on us - beg pardon, bequeathed to us, centuries ago. Before that - well, it is painfully embarrassing to recall what passed for law here.
But again, for the benefit of younger readers, the truth must be admitted: we once had what was called Brehon Law, which involved a number of self-styled legal scholars, with absolutely no academic qualifications, acting as arbitrators in disputes.
These people, with nothing to distinguish them but years of knowledge and experience, specialised in "negotiated" justice: families and clans were held responsible for the misdeeds of group members, and in the case of murder (commonplace in muck-savage medieval Ireland), blood money was payable.
Oddly enough, Brehon Law appeared to work quite well, but really, it was just so embarrassingly archaic, belonging as it did to an ancient Indo-European social system, and even finding parallels in traditional Hindu law. Can you imagine?
The brehons (judges) themselves maintained that the system represented the law of nature. That's how quaint it was. To sighs of relief from an Irish populace increasingly more cultured as a result of British occupation and rule, Brehon Law was finally eradicated towards the end of the 17th century.
As for language, well, as Mr Griffin pointed out in his letter, this was perhaps the most important of the cultural riches left to us by our British occupiers. Before that, we all spoke Irish - even in public: and the shame of this memory is now almost too much to bear.
It is a tribute to the determination of England, in difficult times, that it was entirely successful in convincing us of the superiority of its language. For centuries England had to contend in this country with ignorant Irish-speaking shleveens who clung to the belief that a complex and expressive native language was somehow an essential component of nationality.
Even physical force was at times necessary to counter such naivety, and the 17th century in Ireland saw numerous mass murders by British soldiers, sadly necessary in order to convince us of the poverty of our native Irish language and culture, and encourage us to replace them with English alter natives.
Luckily, English prevailed, and as native Irish-speakers gradually retreated to the grimmer parts of Ireland (the west and south-west), the Irish language became quite properly associated with peasantry, poverty, the eccentric and the insane. There it lingers on still, a salutary reminder to all of us of the cultural abyss from which we were saved by centuries of still-unappreciated British rule.