The timing is no less poignant for being accidental. The counting of votes in next week's referendums on the Belfast Agreement will begin on the exact 200th anniversary of the start of the 1798 rising. It was on the night of May 23rd 1798 that the rebels intercepted the mail coaches leaving Dublin, giving the signal for insurrection.
Soon, Henry Joy McCracken was leading his men, mostly Presbyterians, as they marched through Dunadry and Muckamore towards Antrim town, singing the Marseillaise and dragging their only cannon, a brass six-pounder. If we could freeze the picture there on the road to Antrim town, with those followers of Henry Joy singing in French that the hour of glory had come, it would be a moment of pure possibility when words like Irish, British, Protestant and Catholic were not millstones around people's necks. But of course the road had to reach a destination, and in this case it was butchery.
Soon, Henry Joy and most of his followers had joined the 30,000 dead of that terrible summer in which the sectarianism of modern Ireland was set in stone.
It's pathetic, I suppose, that we have to look so far back for a moment when things seemed suddenly fluid, when it was possible to believe that history could be made rather than endured. And it's ominous, as we think again about making history, that the backward glance takes in a kaleidoscope of horrors all too familiar in our times - savage repression, sectarian atrocities, judicial murders, the dirty war of neighbour upon neighbour.
For the point of 1798, of course, is that it failed. It gave us a history in which genuine idealists like McCracken and Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell and Edward Fitzgerald, would always be mocked by the turn of events, their desire for a new world succeeding only in making the old one worse.
In that sense, the coincidence of the anniversary and the referendums tends to induce fatalism by reminding us what happens to those who dream of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. The dreamers awake to bloody nightmares.
In another sense, though, the conjunction of the two events is oddly appropriate. Underlying the technical questions of the referendums is another, starker question: are the 1790s finally over? Are the moulds that hardened then about to be broken? Will the voters, North and South, decide that 200 years are long enough to get over the trauma of one botched attempt at a new beginning and gather the courage to embark on another?
It's true, of course, that nobody looking for a new start would want to set out from where we are now. You would not, ideally, begin with a peace process that has come from the top rather than arising from the disgust and anger of ordinary people.
You wouldn't want to have a society like that in Northern Ireland, which is more polarised, more segregated and more embittered than it was 30 years ago. You wouldn't want to have to bridge the huge psychological and emotional gap that has opened up between North and South in those years.
You wouldn't choose to depend on people who seem to expect gratitude for their generous decision to refrain from killing their neighbours. You wouldn't want to have to be grateful for the fact that some of the leaders of the peace process, like Gerry Adams and David Trimble, owe the strength of their authority with their own sides to past intransigence.
You wouldn't want to have to create an incredibly complex set of institutional structures just to induce a minimum of trust between the parties. You wouldn't want to have to guarantee "parity of esteem" to two traditions that, as Edna Longley once put it, really deserve "parity of disesteem".
And you certainly wouldn't want those who have seen their loved ones murdered and their own lives embittered to have to face the prospect of seeing the killers and the apologists for killing out on the streets, on their television screens, or even in positions of power. But those are not choices anyone on the island really has.
Yet maybe that's the strength of this deal, what makes it different from the great idealism of the 1790s. It's not about what anyone wants, more about what everyone has to live with. The men who marched to their deaths after May 23rd, 1798 thought they were bringing a new world into existence. Nobody, though, expects to wake up in a new world on May 23rd, 1998. The best that anyone can hope is that sectarianism will become something like it is in Glasgow now, a latent animosity that is mostly expressed in ritual combat between two soccer teams. With political normalcy and relative economic prosperity, Glasgow has not banished the old demons, but it has at least managed to propitiate them with sacrificial offerings that stop them from wreaking too much harm.
What the referendums do offer, then, is not a chance to transform reality but an opportunity to acknowledge it. People on both sides of the Border will, if the referendums pass with good majorities, wake up not in Utopia but in Ireland.
But it will be an Ireland that will have done what it has perhaps never done before - owned up fully to what it is: a complex, contradictory place, a place that doesn't have a history or a people, but histories and peoples, a place that could only be simple or pure after massive bloodletting, and perhaps not even then, a place in which the day of glory that Henry Joy and his men sang of will never arrive, and ar la will never tiocfaidh.
Voting Yes next week is mostly about trading illusions for realities. And one of the realities, after all, is that history, even in Ireland, doesn't always repeat itself.
Indeed, the vote itself is taking place in circumstances for which Irish history offers no precedent. Never before have all adults on the island been offered the chance to have their say on the same day and on the same proposal. (Even in the all-Ireland Westminster election of 1918, which might be regarded as a kind of referendum on the future of the island, women under 30 could not vote.)
Never before have the British and Irish governments, and the leaderships of both militant Irish nationalism and mainstream unionism asked them to give the same answer to a question about their political future. Never before has that question been framed in such a way that it asks them to decide not what are they willing to die for but what can they live with. Never before have we been invited so clearly to decide, however grudgingly, that the one thing we have no choice but to live with is each other.