So maybe Bertie Ahern was right to give a State funeral for Kevin Barry and the other nine IRA volunteers after all. Maybe that act is another drawing down of the historical curtain over the physical force tradition, for all time. And maybe the worldwide political forces unleashed by the abominable attack on the twin towers in New York City have, with an uncanny synchronicity, served to foreclose on that tradition from elsewhere.
It is appropriate that the nearest thing we have known to a world war for nearly 60 years should be the occasion for the final obsequies over the physical force tradition - if that is in fact what we are watching. For it was in a world war, though unnamed as such, that the physical force tradition first emerged. The French Revolution produced the first true world war, spreading to the Americas to Moscow, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Unlike any other previous international war, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars drew on largely novel notions of nationalism and the power of the state.
Contradictory concepts
Simply put, these ran as follows: seize the apparatus of the state, and you can impose your vision of society upon all its inhabitants, and call it liberty, equality, fraternity. No matter that these are mutually contradictory concepts, for freedom is the enemy of equality, and compulsory brotherhood is no form of liberty at all. But logic is irrelevant to the revolutionary mind; intoxication is all.
And so the intoxication spread to poor, unfortunate Ireland, with results that were far more dreadful than the conditions which the revolutionaries were attempting to overthrow. But failure notwithstanding, the notion of the revolutionary cabal was sown, though it remained largely dormant until another great war over a century later; and in the tumult, just as the ancient poppy seeds of Flanders were churned up by shellfire to bloom on the battlefields, so too armed republicanism was brought by the conflict to a dismal and bloody flowering.
Many people in this country - perhaps the majority - look upon that flowering as an ennobling and liberating thing. I do not. I regard it as a catastrophic and utterly counter-productive tradition in which self-defeating means become confused with aims.
To kill, to die: these are the glorious virtues, to be lauded above patient pragmatism, humane caution and evolutionary politics. There is little or no common ground between those who revere 1916 and those who deplore it.
Yet most countries have such schisms. France was divided for over a century between Catholic royalist and republican Bonapartist, and often violently. Much of the hatred between Whig and Tory in England had its roots in the English Civil War. The US took a full century or more before it could come to terms with the legacy of its civil war. Indeed, it might well be the case that a disagreement over some historical event is one of the binding and defining features of a cohesive society.
Purposeless war
This doesn't mean those who differ over the past can't get on in the present. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness will never admit that they have waged a purposeless, evil war, and only a bigot or a pathological warmonger would refuse reconciliation until they did. And only an utter cretin would deny now that what they have done, finally, to bring about the decommissioning of some IRA weaponry has taken immense skill, courage and determination.
I doubt if this could have happened without the context that was provided by the World Trade Centre bombing, any more than the Easter Rising could have taken place without the context of the Great War, or the 1798 Rising without the war by the French Directory against the United Kingdom. Moreover, I am absolutely sure it would not have happened unless democrats, including the Taoiseach and David Trimble, had insisted steadily and unremittingly that guns and government are incompatible.
Others before them have made the journey which Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have made, and always left behind them a rump of irreconcileables who minded the republican flame. And it was in the US that Irish republican rejectionists have traditionally found the warmest home, for the further they were from the struggle, the more clearly they could see its resolution.
Distant heartland
So: what greeting will in future be given those who rattle collection boxes under the noses of Irish-American police officers and firemen in New York bars, in order to raise money to kill British soldiers? Are not British soldiers preparing to fight alongside Americans in Afghanistan, and did not British rock stars organise and lead the benefit concert for the families of dead New York rescuers last weekend? The days of an American home for Irish exiles concocting yet more violent schemes by which to achieve the true republic are well and truly over. Without that distant heartland to give the republican culture the moral and financial boost it needs, no enduring war is possible. Henceforward, there will be no America to turn to spiritually, no America to hide escaped prisoners in, no America to seek the dollars from.
Not just because Irish America will want it that way, but also because the US authorities will insist. There is nothing on earth to compare with US political will - the force which put man on the Moon, satellites in the heavens, nuclear submarines on the seabed, and the Internet in our homes.
The US is closed territory for terrorists for ever more; so maybe, just maybe, we can start our history anew.