The "confused heritage" of 1798 includes both republican ideals and Partition, according to the writer and historian, Dr Liam de Paor.
He told the Merriman Winter School in Westport at the weekend that the United Irishmen's ideology of liberty, equality and fraternity was swept away by the brutal manner in which the rebellion was suppressed. "Yet the original ideology was not wholly forgotten, and there were small groups who still envisaged a secular republic," Dr de Paor said, speaking in Irish.
"Fenians were not all republicans, but some of them were, and it was a conspiracy of republicans within the IRB that planned the 1916 Rising, which, in this sense if in no other, was part of the heritage of '98.
"It is almost a freak of history that the Rising occurred and had the ultimate effect that it had. It derailed the course of Irish political history. It is partly because of it that our State is a republic; that is not the direction in which politics had been tending.
"When it came to it, in 1920 and afterwards, republican institutions and liberties seemed more important to a large number of people than did, for example, Partition - although they soon drifted away into ethnic and religious concepts which departed from a true republican ideology.
"We have a confused heritage from a confused and terrifying time: the Irish Republic and the division of Ireland."
Earlier in his speech, Dr de Paor quoted from the '98 ballad, Sliabh na mBan. The ballad opens with a "speirbhean", a sky-woman who symbolises Ireland's sovereignty, lamenting the defeat of the rebels.
"The lamentation, sometimes subdued, sometimes vociferous, has in a sense continued ever since. Part of our heritage of '98 is disunity, which has become pathological in our island, and a burden of `unfinished business'.
"But the matter is complex. Two hundred years is a long time, and it would be strange if the events of one year that long ago, however extraordinary or calamitous, should be having continued effects on our society today.
"It is rather that the events of that year brought into critical focus processes of transformation in Irish society. The crisis was not fully resolved nor the processes brought to conclusion: their effects are still working their way through our country."
Towards the end of the 18th century, Dr de Paor continued, two major attempts were made to heal the divisions in Ireland, which were widely seen as crippling the country in its efforts to cope with the modern world.
"One was the attempt to accommodate the Catholic majority of the population by relaxing the anti-popery laws under the guidance of the Protestant ascendancy and by achieving for colonial Ireland - the Kingdom of Ireland, as it was until the end of the century - an autonomous status as a partner of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in a reconstructed British Empire after the loss of the American colonies.
"The other was the much more radical effort, inspired by the American and French revolutions, to remake Ireland, as it were scrapping the disparate histories and traditions of the peoples who made up its population in a new secular union of equal citizens of a republic.
"The defeat of both efforts had the effect of widening divisions, and this was reinforced by the long and extremely bitter controversy preceding Catholic Emancipation.
"1798 seemed to recede into the background. Protestants partly overcame the difference between Anglicans, Presbyterians and others to show a united opposition to what seemed the growing menace of the poverty-stricken Catholic masses and their leaders.
"The ideology of liberty, equality and fraternity seemed to fade, and to be replaced by nationalism based on ethnicity.
"When, after a generation or two, people began to recover from the shock of the brutal suppression of the rebellions and to ask, `who fears to speak of '98?', they tended to transmute the original meaning of the uprising into something else," he said.