This week’s commemoration is all about how we see ourselves now

What if Pearse and Connolly had survived? Perhaps the first item on the agenda would have been a split, writes Gerard Howlin

Memory is not to be relied upon. It is both imaginative and insidiously self-serving. History, as institutionalised memory invested with academic rigour, is especially questionable. The rigour it employs as its credential insists as much. At best, it relies on sources which, however accurate, are incomplete. Many sources are self-serving by dint of their partial accounting or partiality. Nonetheless, imperfect but never-to-be-fully-trusted memory and history are frequently all we have. And we must have a past, a context, a reason why.

This week is a great gathering of memory and source material. It is an impressive accretion of knowledge that pushes out our sense of context for the Easter Rising. When the rubble was cleared away, so too was a lot of inconvenient fact. Working-class Protestant Dublin, the world of Bessie Burgess in O’Casey’s plays, and the role of women of every political stripe, were shunted aside.