VARIOUS political ghosts will walk in Ireland this year. 1997 is the 75th anniversary of the Pact Election, and of the beginning of the Irish Civil War. In particular, it is the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the Treaty between Britain and Ireland by Dail Eireann.

This treaty finally accepted the end of the old two-island United Kingdom and ended, for both parts of Ireland, the Act of Union between, the two islands which had been, made law in 1801.

The Treaty of 1922 marked the end of the union ostensibly and officially for the South, more indirectly and unadmittedly for the North. It is curious that the coming of Irish Independence, an event to which Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith and many others, looked forward almost obsessively, should be commemorated by the Irish State and by Irish newspapers with relatively little fuss.

The reasons for this forgetfulness - are fundamentally healthy. The rage, and bitterness of the generation which lived through the Treaty has - I suspect, come to be allied with the very sane apathy and ignorance, of the following generations which have passed on a consequent unknowingness.

De Valera rewrote the history of the formation of the Irish State in a way in which few took interest; his opponents did not bother to write propagandistic history of that kind at all.

Amid all the furore about "revisionism" it is often overlooked that it was de Valera, not Collins and Cosgrave, who won the propaganda war over the Treaty settlement; after all, de Valera stole everybody's political clothes in the 1930s.

However, Irish people have always sensed that a great disaster occurred between the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on December 7th, 1921, and its ratification on January 7th, 1922.

SEVERAL folk explanations have been offered for the disaster that we commonly refer to as the Irish Civil War. These popular explanations, seem to me to fall into three categories.

First explanation: The version of Irish independence advocated, in late 1921 after the Treaty negotiations: by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins was represented by Eamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, Liam Lynch and others as a betrayal: Collins and company had been bought by the British.

Brugha wanted the Treaty signatories arrested for treason on their arrival at Kingstown/Dun Laoghaire. The Irish Civil War was the consequence.

Second explanation: The Treaty, and the new Free State, recognised Northern Ireland as a separate political entity, with the right either to remain part of the new state or to cleave to the United Kingdom in, terror of all those peasant revolutionaries, bolsheviks and Catholics down south. The Irish Civil War was the consequence.

Third explanation: The Treaty demanded an oath of allegiance to the King of England. This is the rock on which the settlement foundered; the Treaty debates scarcely mentioned, the North, and the accusations of treason levied against Griffith and Collins did not really stick.

In fact, what was described as an oath of allegiance to King George V, his heirs and successors evolved rapidly between December 1921 and June 1922 into an oath of allegiance "to the Constitution of the Irish Free State and an oath of fidelity to King George V in his capacity as Head of the British Commonwealth of, Nations.

The original, more "imperial" version of this requirement was insisted upon originally by Lloyd George in an effort, as Liberal and minority prime minister of a Liberal Party/Conservative Party government, to fool the Conservatives that the 26 counties were not really going to get sovereign independence under, the cloak of Dominion Home Rule. The Irish Civil War was the consequence.

Incidentally, the distinction between allegiance and fidelity was brought up in the Dail by a pro-Treaty speaker. Plaintively, he argued that when you got married you swore fidelity to your wife, but not allegiance. After a short silence, a voice from the anti-Treaty backbenchers called out: "Wait till you get married!"

In reality, the new Irish Free State was to get the status of Canada - customs powers, tax and tariff powers, and its own army. The only people who did not realise that this amounted to sovereignty were the Bonar Law Tories and the de Valera Republicans.

The former group was Lloyd George's real target, but in fooling them he also, unintentionally, fooled de Valera. Alternatively (and this is the $64,000 question for historians), Dev may have decided to be fooled; he distrusted Collins and Griffith, for good and bad reasons. He trusted the advice of Erskine Childers, for similar ranges of reasons.

The recent film by Neil Jordan comes close to suggesting an analysis, along these lines.

The nationalist movement, having displayed an extraordinary solidarity and collective courage over four years, split irrevocably on the Treaty.

IT may be that the genuine popular solidarity that was generated by resistance to British bullying, the Black and Tans, attempted forced conscription and the arrogant executions of Easter Week generated an idealism and spirit of self-sacrifice that was new; certainly, it gave rise to a self-righteousness and inability to compromise that is now, two generations later, instantly recognisable as a local and relatively mild version of the quasi-religious, political fanaticisms that wrecked modern Europe.

What is fascinating is that the movement did not split, formally, speaking on the issue of partition, but on the issue of the Oath. For the first time, each Dail deputy was being asked to stake, his own honour on a formula which he scarcely understood himself.

The Oath looked sacramental, something which was central to the culture of literal religious belief which Ireland certainly was at that time; an oath was a serious thing.

Taking the Oath also smelled of "taking the King's shilling" and behaving in a way that the "lads of the" parish" or the local Public Band, as the anthropologists might put it, might dislike.

In Jordan's film this is captured well; when Collins gets home to Sam's Cross, a voice in the pub sneers: "I suppose you're here to sell us that Treaty of yours".

If the truth were to be told, the Irish Republican Movement of 1916-22 actually split on this matter of perceived personal honour and behind that, on a sense of personal betrayal, real or perceived; all else was guff.

The leaders of the movement, by and large extremely dedicated young men and women, had a pathological distrust of each other, faced as they were with political power and political decisions beyond their dreams.

De Valera distrusted Collins, - whom he saw as an able man but a plotter. He saw him as someone who had taken over the organisation in Ireland while he, the Chief, was in the United States with Harry Boland-raising money for the cause.

Boland thought Collins had gone soft on the armed struggle; in January 1922, Boland remarked to Collins that he, Collins, was tired of fighting and wanted to have a nice time". He suggested that Collins's real problem was that he was "demoralised".

Collins, Mulcahy and company found the opinions of those who had spent over a year in the fantasy land of the United States as being, at best to be assessed at a discount.

On the other hand, de Valera, Collins, Boland, Brugha and Stack all saw Griffith as an old man who could not be trusted to stand by the Republic, whether or not he was to be respected personally.

Griffith, after all, had long advocated a kind of monarchical federalism between Britain and Ireland, an idea which had been killed by the political event termed "1916". Griffith's political ideas had been radical in 1905; by 1922 they were seen as antediluvian.

Most of Ireland, for better or worse, got its independence in 1922. The brilliance of the constitution builders of 1922, the administrative competence of the first leaders of the new state, the innovativeness symbolised by the Shannon Scheme and the imposition of meritocratic recruitment to the public service all were not so much forgotten.

Rather, they were erased from the public memory in favour of a corrosive cynicism generated mainly by the anti-Treaty forces who finally gained power in 1932. It is almost as though Irish political culture had a crucial historical memory erased by a surgical procedure.

The fact that the anti-Treatyites were permitted to gain that power by democratic means, and do so without ever publicly thanking anyone, is the best monument Michael Collins, William Cosgrave, Kevin O'Higgins and Richard Mulcahy, the often unacknowledged founders of the Irish democracy, could have.

In private de Valera admitted their achievements were considerable.