End delusion, tackle underachievement

This week, most of us celebrated St Patrick’s Day with the usual Irish verve, with our devil-may-care indifference to the circumstances of our everyday reality. Over the coming days, we’ll do something similar, even if a shade or two more sombre, as we recall the Easter Rising of 1916.

There will be heartfelt expressions of reverence and gratitude for those men and women, who, we are assured, laid the foundation stones of this Republic. Soldiers will march, bands will play, and reasonable, if entirely predictable, speeches will be made. Great events will be re-enacted with an almost unshakeable belief that those events were the genesis of a free, independent, and decent country.

The alternative narrative — that 1916 led to almost a century of dominance by Fianna Fáil, who, for all the great good they did, all but destroyed the country nearly a decade ago and left a legacy of debt that will stymie this society for decades; that 1916 led to something very close to a Catholic theocracy of undisguised bigotry in which other voices were silenced; that 1916 sowed the seeds for 30 years of terror in the North — is hardly mentioned, much less given the kind of credence rational consideration would suggest it deserves.