They Fear To Speak of '98

It was oddly fitting that the opening of the new National Museum building at Collins Barracks this autumn should have been haunted by the dead of 1798. The small field in front of the museum - Croppies' Acre - is the last resting place of executed rebels, and there was controversy about whether or not the museum's car park would desecrate the site. Whatever the merits of the argument, it was somehow right that an important stage in the construction of this State's collective memory should be marked by the difficulty of knowing quite where 1798 fits into our past. For, after 200 years, the greatest explosion of violence in the country's modern history remains curiously mute.

Seventy years ago, for example, the then young playwright, Denis Johnston, submitted his first play to the Abbey. It opens with a hilarious pastiche of poems and ballads about 1798 and its aftermath, a deliberately ludicrous send-up of the sentimental romanticism with which that bloody era was remembered. Johnston's conceit was that an actor playing Robert Emmet in one of the nationalistic melodramas that infested the Irish stage for many decades, gets knocked on the head and wanders the city in costume believing that he is the patriot himself.

At the Abbey, Lady Gregory turned down the play thus giving it the title under which it was eventually produced - The Old Lady Says No! But, as encouragement to a young playwright, she told him that she thought the opening sequence - the send-up - was exactly the sort of thing he should be writing. She didn't get the joke. And it was not so surprising that she should fail so completely to do so. Her own 1798 drama The Rising Of The Moon and the even more famous one on which she collaborated with W.B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, were, after all, eminently open to parody.

The fact is that 20th century Irish culture has long struggled to come to terms with the legacy of 1798. That legacy - Protestant as much as Catholic, internationalist as much as separatist, more involved with modernity than with tradition - contains elements that disturb the two grand narratives of Irish culture - the Orange and the Green - with almost equal profundity. Since no one can quite manage to claim it, it has remained outside the cultural mainstream. If the first of the anniversary offerings, the Official 1798 Bicentenary Commemorative Album released by RTE under the title Who Fears To Speak is anything to go by, sentimental slush retains its appeal. In it, some of the few genuine expressions of the emotions that stirred the revolutionaries - great ballads like Dunlavin Green, Henry Joy and The Liberty Tree - are, like many of the revolutionaries themselves, tortured to death.

They are, firstly, mixed indiscriminately, and without acknowledgement, with late 19thcentury nationalist ballads such as Boolavogue and The Boys of Wex- ford. And as if this were not bad enough, they are then drowned with hideous orchestrations, so that even in the mouths of outstanding singers such as Len Graham and Aine Ui Cheallaigh, they turn to mush. If this is what remembering 1798 is all about, it seems the official memorialisers still can't tell the difference between the reality and the pastiche.

The task is, admittedly, a hard one. One of the difficulties is that, at the time, the rising itself provoked relatively little in the way of direct artistic response. There are the ballads and the eye-witness accounts. There is, in Wolfe Tone's engaging autobiography, a vivid account of the motives and actions of one of the leaders. But the reactions of individual artists are, like Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1799 play Pizarro, (ostensibly about Spaniards and Incas), both scattered and oblique.

In a literal sense, the cultural and intellectual legacy of the Rising was itself scattered. Four banished United Irishmen leaders - Thomas Addis Emmet, William Sampson, James McNeven and John Chambers - had a substantial effect on intellectual life in early 19th-century New York, but their largely Protestant radicalism was marginalised in Ireland. Other former United men such as Peter Finnerty - whose later imprisonment spurred the young Shelley into publishing his first poems - had a stronger effect in England than at home. By the time the 100th anniversary of the Rising was celebrated in 1898, it had become increasingly difficult to separate the memory of the anti-sectarian heritage of the United movement from resurgent Catholic nationalism. Effectively, that heritage became the property of such as Sean O'Casey's Uncle Payther in The Plough And The Stars who dresses up in romantic 18th-century costume and weeps over Tone's grave at Bodenstown. Protestant workers from the Shankill Road were stoned and jeered when they tried to join the Bodenstown commemoration in the 1930s.

In recent years, attempts to reexamine the cultural meaning of the rising from inside the nationalist tradition have remained at best problematic. Seamus Heaney wrote a touching poem Lament For The Croppies in the 1960s, but stopped reading it in public after the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, because it is capable of being appropriated, as so much of the legacy of the United Irishmen has been, by violent nationalism. Brian Friel's Translations has, towards its end, a poignant evocation of 1798, but what it evokes is the character's opting to stay in the pub rather than join the fighting.

The most substantial enterprise - RTE's television dramatisation of Thomas Flanagan's historical novel The Year of the French - was a confused and lifeless failure. Only Pat Murphy's film Anne Devlin, with its feminist take on Robert Emmet's tragic coda to the rising, managed to revivify the complexity of the times. Strikingly, the most passionate re-imagining of 1798 in recent decades has come from a Northern Protestant, the late lamented Stewart Parker. His play on the Ulster Presbyterian revolutionary Henry Joy McCracken, Northern Star (revived last year by Rough Magic), draws its force not merely from despairing anger at the "fumbled birth" of dissenting radicalism but also from a brilliant conjunction of past and present. If there is a model of the spirit in which the rising should be remembered, Parker's play is it. For it reminds us, above all, that 1798 belongs in equal measure to both religious traditions on the island.

And 1798 is well worth remembering. It, and the events around it - the founding of the Orange Order, the Act of Union, Emmet's abortive rising, the successful repression of republicanism in Britain - form a clear turning point in the history of these islands. It is the moment when the sectarian contours of Irish identity were set in place. It is also the point at which a certain idea of what it meant to be British - monarchical, imperial, militarist - triumphed over what were, for a time, very real democratic alternatives. The defeat of the rising was, it should be remembered, also a terrible blow to the democrats of Scotland and England.

Rather poignantly, the 200th anniversary of the rising falls at another moment of change. The British settlement that was solidified in the 1790s is being fundamentally re-shaped by devolution, the challenge to hereditary power, the end of empire and Tony Blair's turn towards Europe. The sectarian, tribalistic Irish identity that emerged in the aftermath of the rising's bloody failure is being challenged by the Northern peace process. If ever there was a time when reflection on a past event might help us to map the present, it is now.

Historians have been re-drawing the map of 1798 itself in fascinating ways. The historian, Marianne Elliott, in her biography of Wolfe Tone and in Partners In Revolution, has recast the rising as a complex of events that links Ireland, England, Scotland and France. She has reminded us that Irish movements could have a huge impact on British history - the great British naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore, for instance, were led by United Irish sailors. And she has drawn attention to the way the United movement in turn developed deep links with English and Scottish radicals. To remember 1798 for its separatism while forgetting its internationalism would be deeply dishonest. Likewise, the historical geographer, Kevin Whelan, has tried to locate the United movement within the popular culture of its time, challenging the supposed divide between the educated leaders and the ignorant, politically illiterate masses. Through work like his, the mass of ordinary Catholics begins to appear as much more than a mob. And again, this helps to set an agenda for the commemoration - the rediscovery of ordinary people as conscious actors in history.

With such scholarship to guide it, the commemoration of 1798 should be an opportunity to reopen the relationship of the present to the past. It should be concerned, not with claiming the rising for any one tradition, but with approaching it as a moment of possibility before tribal loyalties were set in stone.

It should provide a context in which Catholic nationalism recognises the greatness of the Protestant contribution to Irish modernity. It should provide a space in which Protestants on this island can reflect on the radicalism that is so central to their own vision. It should provoke a joint reflection in Britain and Ireland on the way in which our identities are intertwined. And if the commemoration is not to be conducted in this spirit, but instead to be a long wallow in the sentimental celebration of abysmal violence, then we should all fear to speak of '98.