The national archives - How we use and teach our history

Experience has always been, and remains, one of the very best teachers.

However, if you describe learning from experience in another way — formally studying history and understanding why we are as we are through it — very many of us, far too many students, and those who should inspire them, turn away as if the lives of our ancestors had no relevance to our own.

This is especially peculiar in a society engorged on its past and so primed to recall the ignominies inflicted on the noble Gaels so valiant in the long ago.

It is even more peculiar, and in its own way a sharp history lesson too, that this should be so in a nation that as soon as it could made the study of Irish mandatory as if the vocabulary of the past was more important than the actuality of it.

For decades history teaching in Ireland was a deeper shade of green, and more infused with the purple of Rome, than was healthy. It was used to delineate and divide, to embitter and foster the less admirable kind of nationalism, one based on enmity rather than possibility.

At this time each year, as another tranche of our national archives are made public, we have a momentary flurry of interest in our past. And, as we move ever deeper into the decade of centenaries, there may be a chance to energise and sustain that interest. If that could be done dispassionately, and most of all, widely, the change that adventure might bring to our world view could make a substantial contribution to making this a better, more informed, and more honest society.

As we approach the month that will mark the centenary of Edward Carson’s foundation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the House of Lords rejection of the third Home Rule Bill by 326 votes to 69 — and later in the year James Connolly’s establishment of the Irish Citizen Army — it is impossible to describe the renewed violence on the streets of Belfast as anything but a failure to learn from history.

South of the border, as we batten down the hatches before another bruising round in the abortion debate provokes the usual bitterness and hypocrisy, we cannot avoid a similar accusation.

It is hardly be surprising that national archives opened in recent days reveal that Charles Haughey’s dining bills regularly exceeded official limits but it may be more surprising that brewer Guinness considered breaking its centuries-long links with Ireland because of our position on the Falklands War, IRA bombs in Britain — especially Hyde Park — and the Sligo murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten. The company had paid such a heavy price for its association with Ireland that it had prepared — but never used — an advertising campaign to define it as an English company. Had this been known at the time it might have been the kind of reality check that would have started the peace process a decade earlier than it eventually began.

Technology has made it easier, and surely more exciting, than ever to study history. The obligation, to borrow a phrase from another strand of our past, to have an informed conscience was never greater. Can there, as we prepare to mark some of the great events of the age, be a better time to harness the lessons history has made obvious for us all? Will there ever be a better moment to re-imagine how we teach it and use it?