Eighty years on, the poignancy of the Battle of the Somme has not lost its evocative power. Politics, culture and society have changed so radically that it is barely possible to envisage the mixture of heroism and intimidation, class structures and social solidarity that made possible a war of utter degradation in the trenches, punctuated by bouts of ritual slaughter. Consequently it is difficult to make value judgments based on entirely different ideas of order and rights, though the image of an essentially innocent generation immolating itself on the battlefields of France is still the stuff of epic tragedy.
It is a different matter where politics is concerned. Many hundreds of thousands of Irishmen from both sides of what is now the Border served in the British forces, and the grandfathers and great grandfathers of a large proportion of the present population of this island were among those who scrambled over the parapets on the Somme 80 years ago this week, or took part in other battles during the four years of war. No doubt most were remembered privately by their relatives over the years, and in some families without connections with the Anglo Irish ascendancy, a tradition of joining the British army has been continuous since before the foundation of the State. But it is only in the North, and there largely because it fitted in with the local political myth, that the memory of the blood sacrifice has been perpetuated. For similar reasons, nationalists found it convenient to forget, or worse still to denigrate.
In the last few years, there has been a change, encouraged by a greater self confidence in Irish society, that makes it possible to see history as events in the past, arising out of circumstances that have changed, rather than as a continuum of political confrontation. President Robinson and the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, have led the way in breaking the taboo by explicitly acknowledging the role of Irish men and women in the British forces during two World Wars, instead of adopting the formula of commemorating all who died in conflict of whatever kind. It is psychologically important to confront reality, historical and otherwise, and acknowledgment is part of a healing process.
This generation has begun to make amends. But the view of history that was allowed to grow up was a kind of ethnic cleansing whose focus was less often on physical expulsion than on elimination from the mind. It has helped to nourish an inflexible view of politics whose perverse and damaging influence is a part of the current political reality. Attempts to negotiate political change have always fallen foul of the refusal to question or give up the inherited myth which inevitably contains only a small and selective part of history.
The current peace process has illustrated that fact once again. The men of the Somme may not be a major element in the vast array of history that needs to be put in order, but rejecting them on the one hand and deifying them on the other, are symptoms of a mutual exclusion that must be dissolved. Seeing them as they were tragic victims of one of humanity's greatest collective tragedies - is the beginning of hope.