It is now roughly just the same distance forward in time to the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising as back to the start of the first Robinson presidency, write John Waters
Soon, we will have to begin thinking about how, if at all, we are to mark this event and recent developments do not predict a comfortable ceremony.
If we cannot comprehend why such things are important, it is probably too late to start thinking about it and so the most sensible thing may be to ignore the whole thing. But the issue of national identity is not merely ornamental - it is of utilitarian and psychological and of manifold other practical importances. It has to do not just with how we might live, but what we might live on.
Certainly, we have done remarkably well in avoiding or fudging these matters, but we cannot count on our luck continuing indefinitely.
If the centenary were happening now, it is likely that, apart from a few republican organisations and cultural bodies, everybody would prefer to forget it. (Fianna Fáil, of course, would find a way of simultaneously remembering and forgetting.) But if we fail to mark the occasion, the occasion will mark us, if only in the eyes of future generations marked by our silence.
We live in a different country to the one that 37 years ago marked the 50th anniversary of its modern revolution. Much of our collective energies in the time since have been devoted to questioning, redefining or attaching some settled meaning to that event. No sooner was the bunting put away than the 1966 commemoration began to lose its aftertastes of reverence, enthusiasm and innocence. Since then, we have been deconstructing ourselves.
Of course, no revolution is unambiguous and ours was as fraught with controversy as any. It is rare to come across a once-colonised people capable of agreeing on the facts of their existence. What for one is an act of liberation is for another a betrayal and these are largely matters of the heart. The unfinished nature of the business, too, has obscured from us a settled view.
We have acquired a sense that the revolution, if not entirely mistaken, was founded on wrong impulses and ideas, being reactionary and insular and lacking in vision. These impressions have been formed not from a close study of the revolution or its intentions, but on the basis of reactions to its interpretation at different times - Dublin initially and Belfast later.
In truth, the main shortcomings of the Rising were that it was truncated, that the imaginative project envisaged by the leaders was short- circuited by their deaths and that the job of Independence-making was inherited by lesser minds.
It is arguable that what was celebrated in 1966 was a counter-revolution, a travesty of the Republic proclaimed at the GPO.
At a time when we might otherwise have been examining how poorly the Irish State had come to resemble the vision of Pearse and Connolly, the quarter-century war in the North caused this analysis to be stillborn, making way for the conclusion that the revolution itself was at the root of our dysfunction.
As part of a developing repugnance, a rather attractive analysis was offered that it might be possible to slip the reins of history altogether, that, really, Ireland was less joined to its insular past than its global future and what the hell was Ireland anyway?
It has been hard to argue with this analysis, because it is always hard to argue with money. And yet, behind the new, allegedly self- confident self-images of the modern entity we still call Ireland, some unsettling questions remain.
Like, are we happy that our role in the globalised economy is as dependent as it is? Or, was there really no other way that Irish society and its economy might have developed?
To talk of the new global realities is another fudge, when we mean American reality, which now dominates us economically and culturally more than Britain once did.
In opting for the "global" exit from our unresolved questions of national identity and self-sufficiency, we seem to have imagined this option to be without price-tags and conditions or that the new relationships would be as free of inconvenient ethical trappings like loyalty and honour as the old.
As demonstrated by the controversy over Iraq, Shannon et al and the seeming unwillingness to accept the new realities we have so readily embraced in other respects, we clearly hanker either for some half-imagined sense of our independence or some capacity to practise native cunning as of old.
It is time to get our thinking straight. We can be independent or not, but not both.