Myth and counter-myth are being spun already in Iraq: history for the past century is rewritten in Northern Ireland from day to day, with special reference to the past five years. Versions of the truth will clash with a vengeance next week, to mark the fifth anniversary of the agreement concluded at Stormont on April 10th, 1998.
Some would say Ireland is sodden with history. But in the part of the island where discordant memory sounds most harshly, it seems few are taught history, fewer read it, while considerable numbers write rough drafts with the maximum distortion.
Distance confers another kind of brass neck. Some reports in London papers, for example, have been praising the diplomatic skill of British troops in Iraq, by comparison with US forces: British street wisdom learned, allegedly, in Northern Ireland.
In the cause of maintaining readiness to fight and kill and die, perhaps armies need myths more than many institutions. One recent twist of the peace process had the IRA burying a young man as one of their own just south of the Armagh border, while denying - to general derision - that he was killed going about their business. Much stranger was the revelation that he joined the IRA only three years earlier, with the second cessation already three years old.
The face of Northern Ireland politics, like that of republicanism, has changed dramatically over a very few years. Folk memories, like those of individuals, have not always kept pace.
Not long ago the age-old schemozzle over the names Derry and Londonderry came up again, with a wrangle about aligning the formal name of the city to that of Derry City Council.
It prompted rare eloquence from a man in his late 40s, a Co Antrim Protestant visiting the small city for a meeting. Past time for Catholics to accept reality, he said. "They've always run the place, after all, so why don't they stop moaning about the name?" It emerged that he thought Sinn Féin, or rather "republicans of one kind or other" had coined the name Derry 10 years or so ago, and "chopped off the London". He had never heard the word "gerrymander". A Protestant minority governing a Catholic majority through unionist control of housing and the size of electoral wards? Shocking if so, but he refused to believe it had happened. He had learned no such history.
He was of unionist stock, as he called it, though he had broken with siblings and parents. Their nightly quarrels with television news and political commentators were not for him. He believed that a better future would arrive only if you forgot ancient wrongs, and he was well down the road to oblivion. When he heard unionist politicians demand that republicans choose between violence and democracy, he did not know that some of the same figures organised the 1986 Ulster Clubs as an umbrella for loyalist paramilitaries as well as mainstream politicians, nor that unionist party leaders planned the 1974 Loyalist Workers Strike in committee with the paramilitaries. In 1974, of course, this man was in his mid-teens.
Those at an age to cast their vote for the first time in the Assembly election rescheduled for the end of May were nine, at most 10, when the 1994 IRA ceasefire arrived. To republican families the "cessation" was a breakthrough, the most radical movement in a generation. Four days before the second cessation in July 1997, IRA gunmen shot dead two policemen in the centre of Lurgan. The immediate post-ceasefire mood wiped that, and much other IRA violence, from republican folk-memory.
In the places where Sinn Féin polls best, the betting is that new voters on May 29th will place their X beside a republican's name to support someone from the same tight-knit community as themselves, representing a party which perhaps was once associated with violence, but in the distant past. In 1997, the new voters of 2003 were 12-year-olds.
Belatedly, some in the Republic's main parties have begun to complain that the young are less than fully aware of Sinn Féin's history. A scholarly observer of the Troubles and peace process admits dismay on discovering that a much-loved niece voted Sinn Féin in the last Dáil election. But the young voter wanted only to vote for a new party. What about the corruption, she said, the tribunals that sat forever and changed nothing? The republican claim to have given up violence was as likely to be genuine, she thought, as commitment to reform by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
If recent history in the Republic gives rise to quarrels even without benefit of the mutually defensive myths the North so prizes, no wonder present-day Northern Ireland mystifies some of its inhabitants.