Star-shells bursting in the night sky over Vinegar Hill and pageantry on the streets of Enniscorthy last week raised the curtain on a year of multiple significance for Co Wexford.
As local politicians clustered under the Christmas tree in Enniscorthy's Market Square on New Year's Eve to associate themselves with the opening of the 1798 bicentennial, there was applause for the promise that this intensive commemoration would be "inclusive, tolerant and pluralist."
But it is inevitable that there will be argument and controversy as the debate unfolds about exactly what happened, and why, in practically every Wexford town, village and townland during the traumatic and short-lived rising.
This is seen as a natural and healthy aspect of the year-long study, in lectures, books, seminars and exhibitions, of the historical context of the rebellion that led to as much loss of life over a few weeks as the French Revolution did over a span of years.
"The county has been shell-shocked for 200 years, afraid to talk about it," somebody remarked tellingly at the Enniscorthy ceremony. The evening was full of light-hearted pageantry, as several hundred "pikemen" marched to the summit of Vinegar Hill to light a ceremonial bonfire and set off a fireworks display, but the deeper purpose of the bicentenary programme will unfold gradually on a more reflective level.
The aim of the Comoradh '98 committee is to delve beneath the contemporary nationalist symbolism of the rising and explore the complex and interwoven influences, international and national, economic and social, political and philosophical, that gave rise to the episode.
In order to do this, there has been a serious effort to draw in and represent the loyalist perspective on 1798, and the organisers have held several productive meetings with members of the education committee of the Orange Order. The finished programme includes a number of key lectures and exhibitions in Cos Antrim and Down on the course and significance of the 1798 rebellion there.
A pivotal test of the detachment and objectivity of the historical treatment of '98 will lie in the substance of the National 1798 Visitor Centre, the purpose-built, multi-media-equipped commemorative centre which is due to open in Enniscorthy in late March. Matt O'Connor, architect and managing director of the National Building Agency, has been working on the design of this permanent memorial centre since 1992.
Visitors to the £2.6 million centre, which this year alone is expected to attract up to 100,000 people, will approach it across a "Bridge of Democracy" which will show chronologically the global developments which formed the backdrop to the crisis developing in Ireland: the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the creation of the United Irishmen, and so on.
The ideas which inspired the '98 rebellion emerged as part of the whole Age of Enlightenment and the accompanying changes which swept across the continents, Mr O'Connor points out.
The historian Daniel Gahan, brought up in Co Wexford and now teaching in the University of Evensville, Indiana, puts it succinctly in his work Rebellion! Ire- land in 1798, which is to be the official book of the new visitor centre.
The rebellion, he writes, "was more than a chapter in the story of Irish nationalism. It had a long pedigree, culminating in the enormous intellectual and political upheaval that shook the entire European world over a period of 80 years or so between the 1760s and the 1840s, the effects of which are still being felt.
"Certainly, nationalism played a part in that upheaval, and so it is legitimate enough to see 1798 in that context. But it was also about the rise of the modern concept of `the people' and of the sanctity of the people's will, of their sovereignty . . . the set of political values that we choose to call `democracy' today emerged out of this period in America and in various parts of Europe."
The new centre will not leave its visitors with a comfortably dogmatic perspective on '98. Its final section will deal with "the history of the history", and will show how 1798 has been interpreted in totally different ways. Matt O'Connor elaborates: "You explain to people that what they have seen is just an interpretation; that '98 will continue to be interpreted."
This year, therefore, with its hundreds of cultural, historic and sporting events in the commemoration calendar, will really be only the beginning of a gradual - and hopefully inclusive - process of reassessment and increased understanding of the epic events of 200 years ago which still bear relevance to the tensions and divisions that manifestly exist on the island to this day.