Ireland "could have achieved independence without 1916", former taoiseach Mr John Bruton claimed at the weekend, Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, reports.
The EU ambassador-designate to the US said it was "very much open to argument whether all that was achieved could have been achieved without a single shot".
"It is why I am not ashamed to say I am a Home Ruler. As I depart Irish politics it is why I am proud my roots are in the Irish Parliamentary Party," he said.
Mr Bruton said Prince Charles's visit to Ireland in 1995 while he was Taoiseach was his "proudest moment".
He said those who had used violence (in Ireland) over recent decades felt "they were drawing on respectable traditions" and he wanted to challenge those assumptions.
Mr Bruton was delivering the opening address at a conference in Dublin's Mansion House on Saturday, on the theme "Re-Forming Ireland: Towards Pluralism". It was organised by the Reform Movement which proposes rejoining the Commonwealth and promotes a more inclusive Ireland where there is "recognition and parity of esteem for all Irish identities".
Mr Bruton said partition would probably have been inevitable under Home Rule but the condition of Northern Catholics would have been much better. With Southern MPs still in London exercising the balance of power in British politics, "I do not believe Stormont would have got away with the appalling things it did for years", he said.
The Treaty secured control of the military, police, and foreign policy. It meant Ireland could be neutral in the second World War which, unlike the first World War, he believed to be "entirely justified in moral, political, and strategic terms".
Remarking that 49,000 Irishmen had died in the first World War, he said: "I believe the Great War was not\a great cause". He added that Redmond had "no choice" but to support the war. "He was obliged to support Imperial policy."
The only real concession the Treaty had won, he felt, was "tariff autonomy", which most economists now saw as "highly questionable [as to\] whether it did us any good".
He said the Economic War, applied along the Border, "deepened partition".
He recalled Michael Collins's description of the Treaty as a "stepping stone", and said de Valera's use of that "stepping stone" was a "great achievement, which ought to be acknowledged". But "why could Home Rule not also be a stepping stone?" he asked.
His pride in his Irish Parliamentary Party roots was why "I do not resile from the comment I made during Prince Charles's visit [in 1995\] when I said it was my proudest moment".
He said this was "not just because Charles is a very nice guy, which he is, if I am any judge of character. I said so as I believe that it symbolised at last the regularisation, the normalisation of relations between these two nations".
He observed that in Ireland you see American, French, Portuguese, German flags etcetera, "but there is some queasiness about putting up the Union Jack, the flag of our neighbouring island with which this State enjoys good relations. Britain has no hold over us, yet we have a problem putting its flag up."
Prince Charles's visit had "a symbolic and permissive force" allowing people to do so, he felt.
On the conference theme, he said "the tragic experience of the outworking of nationalism in two world wars" had taught most Europeans "that the singular version of identity was both inaccurate and dangerous".
People "should be encouraged to celebrate their different identities here in Ireland - whether that be an African identity, a Lithuanian one or an Orange identity".
He regretted that a proposed Orange parade in Dublin some years ago had not taken place. "It would have made a useful point in an entirely non-threatening way," he said.