SOME months ago I was disconcerted by being asked to comment on what was presented to me as a notable failure by the Government to celebrate this year the 80th anniversary of the Rising.
As I did not recall any other public celebration of an 80th anniversary, it seemed to me that this reflected a somewhat contrived political manoeuvre, and I was correspondingly dismissive of it.
What I had earlier found disturbing, however, was the absence of any serious effort to commemorate the 75th anniversary in 1991 of that seminal event - the 25th anniversary celebration of which I had viewed with my mother from the first floor of the GPO in the company of the families of the Fianna Fail cabinet of that time.
Indeed, just five years ago I was moved by my concern at this omission to deliver an extended summer school paper on the Rising in the autumn of that year.
This was then published in the form of a series of articles in The Irish Times, just before I resumed this weekly column somewhat belatedly because of the time absorbed by writing an autobiography in the years immediately after leaving office in 1987.
(On my appointment as Minister for Foreign Affairs in March 1973 I had to abandon the weekly column I had been contributing since the 1950s).
In that paper I put forward a case for the necessity and opportuneness of the Rising. Of course, I am well aware that there is a case to be made for the opposite thesis: that events might have turned out better for Ireland if the Rising had not happened and Home Rule had been allowed to take its course, as a stage in the process of a movement to an independent Irish State that might conceivably, if improbably, in time have included Northern Ireland.
I had, indeed, adverted to this alternative view when writing in The Irish Times on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in 1966, at a time when such a reflection was regarded as heretical.
But by 1991 it almost seemed as if it was the positive view of 1916 that had in turn become heretical, its commemoration being left most dangerously in my view almost exclusively to the Provisional IRA and its hangers on and sympathisers.
DANGEROUS, and also unhistorical. For the reluctance to commemorate the Rising five years ago was clearly based on a retrospective view that was determined by current events in 1991, rather than by an understanding of the totally different context in which the Rising took place.
This failure to see events in their historic context demonstrates the importance of the teaching of history in the schools - genuine history, not the kind of dangerous nationalist mythology that passed for history during the first half century of independence.
By genuine history I mean history from which we can learn to understand how and why people at earlier periods felt, thought and acted in ways quite different from the way we feel, think and act today. Empathy with peoples of other times and other lands, and a sense of perspective, are what we can take from the study of history.
It was because of my alarm at the dangers of depriving young teenagers of this resource that, some months ago, I attacked in this column the extraordinary proposal to abandon the teaching of history as an integral part of the secondary junior cycle course.
I was frankly astonished that the events of 1991 should have failed to alert both politicians and their Civil Service advisers in the Department of Education to the crucial importance of the study of history in our society.
For if our political leadership were so fearful that false and unhistorical analogies might be drawn between the events of 1916 and the current activities of the IRA as to have felt it necessary effectively to abandon the commemoration of the Rising in 1991, then one would have expected politicians and civil servants to have seen the need for more rather than less teaching of history - as history is now taught, viz professionally rather than mythologically.
Tied in with this affair is the whole confused controversy over what is called "revisionism in Irish history, a term that has been used to confuse two quite different phenomena.
The first of these is the writing of Irish history by professional historians, drawing on fresh sources of information as these become available from public archives and collections of private papers of historical figures inevitably this work occasionally disturbs cherished nationalist myths.
But the second phenomenon to which the term "revisionism" has been applied is the pursuit by some Writers' and journalists of their own political agendas through the abuse and distortion of historical material.
THE first of these activities is enormously important and very valuable; the is, to say the least, highly dubious. By attacking both in the same breath, so to speak, some "republicans" seek to mobilise legitimate and widespread unhappiness with journalistic excesses in order to undermine the work of professional historians, whose recovery of the past does not suit the republican political agenda.
Like everyone else, I suppose, I come to these issues bringing my own baggage with me. I was brought up to respect and admire the courage and self sacrifice of the 1916 leaders, which both my parents had observed at first hang in the GPO during that traumatic week.
In the fragment of autobiography that my father wrote in the early 1940s, covering the three years from April 1913 to April 1916, he showed his respect by unself consciously referring to the leaders as Mr Pearse and Mr Connolly. There he recorded also the self doubts of Pearse and Plunkett in their discussions with him about the morality of a Rising that had little or no hope of success.
He also wrote of their forlorn hope that even at that stage German help might turn the tide, and, of their realistic recognition, following Plunkett's visit to Germany a year earlier, that if there were a German victory it would inevitably - given the international customs of that time - involve the replacement of the Republic they had just declared in noble terms by an Irish Hohenzollern monarchy, which Pearse believed and hoped would lead the way to an Irish speaking Ireland.
And from my mother I learnt of how - after she had returned from an abortive mission to bring an inadequately wrapped Tricolour to be flown over a Dublin Castle falsely rumoured to have been captured by the Volunteers - Pearse insisted that she return home to look after my two eldest brothers, so that they might not become orphans of the Rising.
Reared on such tales, and on the later history of the War of Independence - usually laced with humorous anecdotes, for revolutions, too, have their funny sides - I make no claim to objectivity about these events.
What I do believe, however, is that, if judgments, are to be made on them - and I'm not sure why we have to be judgmental about history - such judgments should be made in terms of the ideas and standards of the time they happened, and not as a means of justifying or condemning contemporary events.
That is why we must ensure that each new generation learns about the past of our country, of Europe, and of the wider world; in terms that will help the young to understand how we come to be where we are, and how the ideas and values of today have evolved over many centuries of human experience.