In 1905, Albert Einstein revolutionised our comprehension of the universe by "squeezing out" the idea of an ether postulated to explain physical phenomena. He thus replaced this "hold-all" ether, supposedly permeating space and time, by that of space-time. Thus was the theory of the relativity of all phenomena reinforced, including that of Man vis-a-vis his environment.

An analogous hold-all or "ethereal view" was the "Faith of our Fathers" interpretation of Irish history, the struggle for the Catholic faith through which all historical movement was supposed to be intelligible. The inertia of this view has persisted despite the extraordinary anomaly of the Battle of the Boyne.

In brief, as James Connolly laid bare, William of Orange, through the League of Augsburg (1686), had the financial and military support of two popes in succession, Innocent XI and Alexander VIII. The for ces of this league were directed against those of Louis XIV of France, the "Sun King", who according to G.D.H. Cole and consistent with Connolly's view, had grown too much like Henry VIII of England in his pretensions. The alliance of Augsburg included indiscriminately both Catholic and Protestant monarchist powers of Europe.

William, however, was singularly not a Dutchman. He was, in fact, simultaneously third Duke William of Nassau in West Germany and Prince of the Principality of Orange in the South of France. For the role of his forebears in liberating Holland from Spain in 1609, he had retained the hereditary title of Stadtholder or commander in chief of the army and navy of the Dutch Republic.

He was the son of William II of Nassau Orange and of the daughter of Charles I, whom Cromwell had decapitated. His wife was Mary, daughter of Charles II. In accordance with the peculiarly incestuous nepotism of royalty, his uncle and father-in-law was James II, whom he deposed from the English throne in an 11-day military campaign. He thereupon immediately dispatched his now English army to the continent to relieve the siege of Holland by the French.

The only "English" red-coated army at the Battle of the Boyne, thus, consisted of Irish Catholics led by a commissioned officer in the English Lifeguards regiment, namely Patrick Sarsfield. William's army consisted, inter-alia, of 30 per cent of continental Catholics. This army was backed by Irish Protestants and Irish Dissenters allied thus simultaneously on the side of the Vatican and the Dutch Republic.

Holland remained a republic and, allied with Napoleon, in fact attempted to send military aid to the United Irishmen in the 1790s. With the demise of Napoleon, an Orange faction subverted the Dutch Republic and established the still extant monarchy.

Following the flight of the "Wild Geese", still in their English army redcoats, a "Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" was set up in Dublin. This 18thcentury Dublin parliament represented thus only Episcopalian or Protestant Churches of England and Ireland, that is to say the dominion of 10 per cent of the population over the 90 per cent constituted by 20 per cent Dissenters and 70 per cent Catholics.

These Episcopalians not only discriminated against the Catholics with the Penal Laws, but also against their late allies the Dissenters, thus reinstating the contentions of the English Republican Revolution (1642-1659). Many of the Dissenters were thus forced to flee to America, where their scions were foremost in support of the American Revolution. Dissenters and Catholics found a common cause for an Irish Republic influenced by the Great French Revolution of 1789.

However, both the Episcopalian Orange Order and Catholic seminary at Maynooth, both contemporaneously founded in 1795 (although in post-Reformation contention), received the benediction of the English government (in the latter case financial), for their opposition to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.

It was Maynooth, the Catholic Hierarchy and the new "aristocratic" descendants of the Clan chiefs who called for loyalty to their sovereign lord, the mad King George III, when the French were "on the sea" at Bantry in 1796 and Killala in 1798. It was, moreover, the Catholic Hierarchy, in the persons of Archbishop Troy of Dublin and Bishop Lanigan of Kilkenny, who conspired with the murderous viceroy Castlereagh, for the Act of Union in 1801, in defiance of the opposition thereto, including that of 32 Orange Lodges.

The recreant clan chiefs were the descendants of those who, fleeing the Elizabethan-Cromwellian conquest, sought education in the schools of continental Catholic despots, thereafter to ally with Sarsfield. They returned, as Connolly recorded, imbued with "a fanatical belief in royal and feudal prerogatives, as foreign to the genius of the Gael as English Rule to Irish soil".

That genius had been the principle of life or soul of the Irish nation. It was now dead. A new national rejuvenating principle had to emerge. That principle was republicanism and emerge it now did, not from a ro mantic hearkening back to Ireland's Golden age, as Connolly partially entertained to redress the conquest, but from the scions of the Cromwellian invaders whose political ethos it represented.

Encumbered by the customary "Curse of Cromwell" apprehension of Ireland's fall, Connolly could not but fail to grasp this supreme significance of the English Revolution nor was he aware that the first battle for an Irish republic and its first martyrs were Englishmen from the five regiments of Cromwell's New Model Army which mutinied at Burford in May 1649 against his proposed invasion of Ireland. They demanded the same freedom for the Irish for which they had shed their blood in overthrowing the monarchy.

All this and the subsequent story of how Daniel O'Connell, the so-called Liberator, in collusion with Maynooth, in the service of the ultra-montanist pretensions of the Vatican, conspired to obliterate Irish as the spo ken tongue with the alienation of the Dissenters, is delineated in the writer's recent book Home Rule as Rome Rule.

This sees national disunity on both sides of the sectarian divide, as arising from their forcible homogenisation, as of oil with water of conflicting viewpoints:

"On the Catholic side this had been represented by the harmonisation of Jacobite Monarchism with Jacobin Republicanism. On the Irish Protestant-Dissenter side the attempt has been made to harmonise the political ideologies of the mainly Tudor Stuart dynasties from Henry VIII (1509-1547) to Charles 11 (1660-1680) with the Republicanism of the Parliamentarian and New Model Army Dissenter traditions of the mid-17th century".

The death knell, moreover, for any "Faith of our Fathers" interpretation of Irish history had been sounded from the outset when Pope Adrian IV sanctioned the invasion of Ireland in 1171 by Henry II, Norman King of England, to "civilise" us. This was in the wake of Ireland's Golden Age of sanctity, scholarship and international civilising evangelism, saving western civilisation from Germanic barbarism and only a year after Henry's instigation of the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

In the subsequent three centuries thereafter, when English rule was Rome rule, the fate of Irish "rebels" was not suffered by the worst criminals of the Holy Roman Empire, both physically and morally, including the denial of church sanctuary and the infliction of papal excommunication. The Elizabethan-Cromwellian conquest was but the extension of the predatory role of the Holy Roman Empire depredations in Ireland.

Peace is achievable only by the resolution of the politico-historical problem. It is endangered by religious fundamentalism and pragmatism, including pseudoecumenical posturings. Tony Blair's apology for the Famine was unfortunately couched in terms inimical to this essential resolution by citing the Irish as British as "Our People"! So far, only the Englishman Jack Charlton, by res toring to us some measure of our well justified mortascine, has made historical sense.