Civil War shattered a belief in our uniqueness

In contrast to the other historic anniversaries which have fallen in 1998 - the 1798 Rising, the end of the first World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the 75th anniversary of the end of the Irish Civil War has been marked rather quietly.

Perhaps, because it had no definite beginning and no clear ending, that war is not easy to commemorate. Perhaps, because it was such a nasty, sordid waste, it seems best forgotten. And yet it had such profound effects on everything over the past 75 years that it is at least worth considering what those effects were and how successfully, or otherwise, they have been overcome.

Some of the consequences are obvious. The present political system is still dominated by the Civil War parties and the rather irrational divide between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail still inhibits the development of coherent public debate.

We are still also living with the demented Republican militarism which emerged from the Treaty split. The anti-Treaty IRA leaders Rory O'Connor and Liam Mellowes were, as Joe Lee has put it, "as contemptuous as any Black and Tan of the opinion of the mere Irish as recorded in the election result".

The whole weird theology of apostolic succession from the Second Dail, the proto-fascist insistence that the people have no right to do wrong, still pulses through the Continuity IRA, the "Real IRA" and, evidently, within some sections of the IRA itself.

Eamon de Valera's extraordinary decision to lend his name and prestige to what Tom Garvin has rightly called "the ghost presidency of a ghost republic under the actual control of Liam Lynch's rump IRA" had disastrous consequences which did not end with his own skilful and courageous reconversion to democracy - and which may have a few years of life left to them yet.

There were other long-term consequences, less obvious but no less profound. Some of them are suggested in an extraordinary little book which has just been reissued by University College Dublin Press, under the editorship of Tom Garvin.

P.S. O'Hegarty's bitter and ferocious The Victory of Sinn Fein was published in 1924 in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. What makes it so gripping is the clarity with which it reflects a generally obscured aspect of the events it describes - the devastation and demoralisation of Irish nationalism by the Civil War.

O'Hegarty's book, never republished until now, is remarkable because of its point of view. You could quote long passages of it and if you did not identify the author most people would assume that they were written by a diehard unionist or a contemporary revisionist.

Yet O'Hegarty was a man of impeccable nationalist credentials: a member of Sinn Fein from its very beginning in 1902; a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from 1908; a fierce cultural separatist active in the Gaelic League and the GAA; the founding secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs in 1922.

Parts of the book are laughably cranky. He is enraged by the prominence of women in republican politics and inclined to rant about how they became "unsexed" by activism. Like most Gaelic Leaguers, he sees as a sign of moral depravity the fact that "jazz dancing, the motions and postures of which . . . vary between suggestiveness and decency, has swept Ireland like a prairie fire".

Yet some of what he wrote is dazzling in its prescience, its honesty and its withering contempt for rhetorical posturing. His description of Sinn Fein's great electoral victory in 1918 is arresting. "We did not realise it at the time, but what had happened was not that Sinn Fein had captured Ireland, but that the politicians in Ireland, all the elements which had sniffed at Sinn Fein and libelled it, which had upheld corruption and jobbery, had realised that Sinn Fein was going to win and had come over to it en masse."

He points to the intellectual poverty of the political leadership which emerged from the independence struggle. "The second Dail was like the first - a collection of mediocrities in the grip of a machine and . . . never encouraged to think".

He says openly that in the period after the 1916 Rising - which he supported - "the gunman became supreme" and "it was open to any volunteer commandant to order the shooting of any civilian and to cover himself with the laconic legend `spy' on the dead man's breast".

All of this casts a bright but harsh light on the subsequent history of both the Republic and republicanism. However, the most important aspect of O'Hegarty's book is his description of the cultural and spiritual disillusionment created by the Civil War.

For him, the savage violence of the war shattered the belief that there was something special about the Irish. As a Free Stater, O'Hegarty puts all the blame on the republican side and goes easy on the Free State's atrocities, but what he writes can be extended to both sides. "They demonstrated to us that our deep-rooted belief that there was something in us finer than, more spiritual than, anything in any other people was sheer illusion and that we were really an uncivilised people with savage instincts.

"And the shock of that plunge from the heights to the depths staggered the whole nation. The `Island of Saints and Scholars' is burst, like Humpty Dumpty, and we do not quite know yet what we are going to get in its place."

There are two ways in which a society which thinks it is special can react to the sudden and traumatic discovery that it is just another savage people. It can pretend that nothing has happened and take refuge in a fantasy of spiritual purity. Or it can become petty and cynical, taking corruption as read, and resenting only the fact that its benefits are confined to a small circle.

And it seems to me that what has given Irish society its particular flavour is that after the Civil War it did both of these things at the same time.

It adopted an exaggerated public piety. It took refuge from political disillusionment in ostentatious religiosity, reinventing the claim to some kind of national distinctiveness as a claim to a superior place in the Catholic world. And, at the same time, it adopted a widespread personal cynicism, compounded of equal parts of begrudgery and corruption.

If you think of the combination of pious rhetoric and opportunism in the career of Charles Haughey, you can sum up all of this in a single personality. The inflated guff about the spirit of the nation and the brazen desire to enrich himself. The high moral tone on contraception and divorce and the low cunning of the Ansbacher accounts. The Blasket Islands and the Cayman Islands.

In that sense, the Civil War is unfinished. The damage it did to any broad sense of common aspiration has never been undone because we have had no idea what to put in the place of a shattered illusion. And because the ghosts of the Civil War - irredentist republicanism, the consequences of partition, a distorted political system - have continued to walk abroad, we haven't been able to imagine that alternative.