Most politically aware people in the Republic will agree with the Dictionary of National Biography's description of Frank Aiken: northern leader of the IRA, a founder member of Fianna Fail, later Minister for External Affairs - when Ireland was said to bestride the world like a Colossus - and ultimately Tanaiste under Jack Lynch.
Northern unionists know a rather different figure. That Frank Aitken specialised in shooting ex-soldiers in South Armagh, part of a nationwide campaign which mysteriously has never appeared in nationalist history books about the period. And after loyalists retaliated to IRA violence by murdering Catholics, Aiken embarked upon a policy of counter-counter-terror.
South Armagh
After ambushing and killing a B-Special, Aiken's IRA men sealed off the Altnaveigh area in South Armagh. Protestant-owned houses were set on fire, the menfolk murdered. When one woman, Elizabeth Crozier, said to the man who had just murdered her elderly husband, "I didn't expect that of you, Willie," she was shot in front of her young family. Her last words were to them were, "Keep together and look after the little child."
To ensure the surviving young Croziers understood the message, Aiken's men then destroyed their home with a bomb, before moving to other Protestants nearby. John Heslip and his son Robert were taken out and shot dead. The Gray household was set on fire, and the father of the family, John, murdered. Mrs Lockhart protested when her husband and son were being taken from her. Her son turned to speak to her and he too was shot, dying at his mother's feet.
To choose your loyalty, and you choose your narrative accordingly.
The Protestants of South Armagh know all about Frank Aiken's role in the massacre at Altnaveigh and nothing of his reputation within Fianna Fail as a world statesman. The successful creation of a narrative, and the rigid exclusion of detail which disturbs the smooth flow of that narrative, is one of the vital engines in the formation of identity and the acclamation of heroes.
At this momentous juncture in our history, how capable are we of dismantling the narratives which are the moral underpinning of our mutually intolerant political loyalies? At one level, we can say, very capable. Are not RUC officers being trained in peacekeeping operations at the Garda depot at Templemore? Is not Sir Ronnie Flanagan today being awarded a scroll declaring him a gentleman - a sentiment with which I utterly concur? - by the pupils of St Benildus De La Salle School in Stillorgan, with a £200 cheque for the RUC Benevolent Fund? And, most momentous of all, is not Sinn Fein standing on the doormat of power-sharing government in Northern Ireland?
Allowing other people to move is one thing; moving yourself is quite another. Is it still quite beyond the stomach of Fianna Fail to have any of its senior people at the annual Service of Remembrance at St Patrick's Cathedral, as was yet again the case last Sunday?
Tribal shibboleths
Ben Briscoe was there, of course, but then his Jewishness presumably confers a dispensation from observing the more arcane tribal shibboleths of the Fianna Fail identity. How long would any traditional Fianna Failer who was seen in St Patrick's hobnobbing with the crowd from the British Legion survive in South Kerry or Sligo-Leitrim?
Was fear of such vigilant tribal guardianship the reason why RTE did not broadcast the service live? And was the irony of RTE broadcasting instead that great celebration of British stiff-upper lippery, The Riddle of the Sands, lost on the decision-makers? For the author of that particular tale, Erskine Childers, exemplified the perils of mixing your tribal narratives.
Childers, who had successively been an English patriot, a British war hero, an Irish Free Stater and an Irish Republican, was shot by a Free State firing squad. Having been true to so many tribes, he was accordingly reviled by all.
So: if attending an ecumenical ceremony to commemorate the Irish dead of two world wars is too much for the largely constitutional individuals of Fianna Fail, how much real tribal elasticity exists within paramilitary political life? How far can anyone stray from the narrative tribal core without the elastic either breaking, or snapping us back to the centre? And what do we do in the examination of our history? What kind of text can Sinn Fein, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, the PUP, et alii agree on to describe their, our, history? And where do the likes of Frank Aiken stand in that text?
Nationalist narrative
And is it important? Yes. Already, just as the murders of Protestants and ex-servicemen were elided from nationalist narrative after 1922 - though the murders of the Catholic McMahon family in Belfast were emblematically cherished as being unique to Irish nationalists - the recruiting sergeants of the Real IRA are busy on the campuses of Ireland, spinning a narrative which tells of Bloody Sunday, Internment Day and Pat Finucane, not Bloody Friday, Whitecross, Donegall Street, Coleraine or The Disappeared. Republican revisonists are already rewriting the fascist IRA war against unionism from 1970 onwards, transforming it into a human rights struggle.
We told lies about violence in the past; and our reward was more violence. Are we capable of telling the truth now? Or will we comfort ourselves yet again with agreeable tribal falsehoods, idly hoeing today the seedbed of conflict tomorrow?