Other nations, or so it seems from a distance, are grounded in certainties which grow subtly stronger all the while, whereas the Irish nation is set in increasingly treacherous quicksands of ambiguity, ambivalence and amnesia, writes John Waters.
Unlike the British, the French or the Poles, we are paralysed in our sense of history by conditions beginning with the letter "a", and this paralysis has in my lifetime never seemed more total than it does now, as we approach the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising.
There is one good reason for this: the unfinished business of Irish reintegration. Without this incompleteness or, more precisely, without recent attempts to complete it, none of the "a-words" would have any dominion. Had partition not occurred, or had it proved less controversial and problematic, there would be no sense of discomfort now about remembering the beginnings of independent Ireland. At the least, had the lid been kept on the Stormont state, we would be going about the business of commemoration without much thought for ambiguities, and the idea that survived in Irish culture for more than half a century - that the Easter Rising was the most glorious and triumphant episode in the history of Ireland's struggle for freedom - would be as current today as it was at the time of the 50th anniversary in 1966.
The conventional way of putting this is to say that, had it not been for the Provisionals, the leaders of 1916 would still be heroes in the eyes of the vast majority of Irish people. There is an element of misstatement in this, which I will come to later, but it broadly gets the substance of the matter across.
Because the Provos laid claim to the tradition of 1916, those who correctly condemned the often barbaric and indiscriminate slaughter of the 1970s and 80s set themselves to unpicking the myth of 1916 so as to demolish the Provos' claim to heroic status.
In its contemporary context, this was a necessary and valuable exercise, but it was not without baleful consequences which will dog us into the future.
One consequence was that the debunking of 1916 left the independent Ireland with a dislocated sense of its own beginnings. Reared on the glorious myth of 1916, we recoiled from the prospect of losing it, and yet we seemed to have little choice but to give it up. Many of us were convinced by the need to pull the historical rug from under the Provos, and were therefore acquiescent in the rewriting of the past; and yet we were at the same time secretly traumatised by the loss of our inherited sense of where we had come from. The revisionist project succeeded because of the urgency of shutting down the Provos, and for no other reason.
Absent this imperative, the newly-emphasised aspects of 1916 - the civilian casualties, the absence of a democratic mandate and all the what-ifs and why-nots - might have been absorbed and rationalised or allocated entirely different meanings than they have. What changed was not the facts of the past but the usefulness of its meanings. But this surely tells us that these meanings can be overturned again if or when the context changes, as it now undoubtedly has.
This idea will strike some people as morally dubious pragmatism, but their response will derive from a position that is itself pragmatic: the debunking of 1916 to unplug the Provos. There is an equally clear moral context for the restoration of 1916 to a more positive place in the psyche of the post-ceasefires Irish nation: that without it we are cast into an historical black hole, a people "without an anchor, without a horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless, a race of angels" (Frantz Fanon).
The massive inflows of people into Ireland from countries which, whatever their difficulties in other contexts, have no difficulty with the meanings of their own pasts, makes this question especially urgent now.
All nations have their memories of beginning, and it is wrong because it is damaging that ours should be denied its people by virtue of its misappropriation and the necessity of bringing this misappropriation to an end.
Although most of us have sullenly or silently acquiesced in the rewriting of the record, very many of us do not hold in our hearts the views we feel obliged to venture in the public realm. In and among ourselves, we know what we know. And what we know is more than what we have been indoctrinated with, either by the revisionists or before that the irredentists.
What we know includes all we have acquired from the background radiation of a culture which has been alive all our lives with "the breath that moves through free peoples" (PH Pearse).
We know in our hearts that, without the men of 1916, our lives would not be as whole as they are, that freedom, whatever its costs, is beyond price, and that men who are prepared to die rather than accept less than that priceless state are rare and blessed and worthy of intense and studied remembering.