Did it really have to take 30 years of cretinous and barbarous warfare for us to discover a broader, more generous understanding of our history? Or would it have come through time, and the steady erosion of granite falsehood by the remorseless drip of truth?
If it is the former, it is a melancholy reflection upon human nature; but then the failure to grasp the realities of history is not a uniquely Irish failing - indeed, it is probably a shared misunderstanding of history which helps bind nation states.
Whatever the reason, the unthinkable is now being thought, everywhere.
Unionists who cherished their monolithic myths about sacrifice and duty in two world wars have broadened their embrace to include what nationalists did and suffered on the fields of Europe, and further abroad.
Certainly, the notion of a Sinn Féin lord mayor of Belfast laying a wreath for the dead of the 36th Division is the most spectacular proof of how, in at least the matter of coming out of our mutually exclusive historical air-raid shelters, astonishing changes have been wrought. No less significant is the publication by the nationalist-dominated Newry and Mourne Council of the magnificent Newry's War Dead, edited by Colin Moffett.
His frontispiece quotes TS Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploration
Will be to arrive where we have started
And know the place for the first time.
So from the pages of his splendid volume rise the legions of forgotten.
And whatever one's doubts about the first World War, there can be none about the second. It was a necessary war against the cruellest of foes and the most barbarous of causes; and no man from the island of Ireland served in it under the duress of conscription.
Does the religion of the dead matter? Well, did it matter to Elizabeth Wiltshire, of Castle Street, Newry, whose husband Cyril was killed in action in Normandy on July 21st 1944, or to Patrick Campbell, a widowed neighbour on Castle Street who lost his son, also named Patrick, serving with the merchant marine at Normandy five days later? Did grief not gather with equal measure in either home? For we can make the distinctions of religion too easily, which is what we have done throughout our past, bloody history. And I have not been quite honest with you: for despite his name, Cyril Wiltshire was a Catholic also.
"And you may be absolutely certain that our Blessed Lord and His Divine Mother will fill that great void which is in your heart," wrote his regimental Catholic chaplain to his widow.
But what could possibly have filled the hearts of the parents of the brothers Michael and Hugh Murphy, of High Street, Newry, killed in action in 1915 and 1916? And what became of the popular memory of those two brothers as partition came down in the island, and in people's hearts, and we decided to divide our history how we may?
All we can do now is to be as honest as we possibly can, for well or ill; and devotion to truth must sooner or later undo the perjuries and the amnesias of all our tribes. So one can only cheer the meticulous scrupulousness and steadfast honesty of Timothy Bowman's Irish Regiments in the Great War, (Manchester University Press). Though neither surplanting nor adding to the essential military details provided by Myles Dungan, Tom Johnston and Terence Denman in their ground-breaking works in this field, it does provide brilliantly fresh and indispensable insights into the problems of morale and discipline of Irish troops in the first World War.
As have all scholars who have gone before, the author finds little evidence of republican subversion or disloyalty to their military duty among Irish nationalist soldiers, though there were of course problems of morale - most particularly after the shameful despatch of the 16th and 36th Divisions into the morass of Frezenberg ridge during the battle Langemarke in August 1917.
Ahead of the 16th Division lay the ignominy of disbandment, in April 1918, almost certainly to rid the British army of such a strongly Irish nationalist unit. This prompted a mutiny, one of the largest in that army during the first World War: and tragically, the transcripts for the courts martial which followed haven't survived.
Timothy Bowman embarks upon what he admits is the peculiar and imprecise Northern Irish activity of trying to ascertain the tribal background of the mutineers by name; but poor dead Cyril Winter, killed a short generation later, is proof of how vain that quest is. More recently, Alex Maskey, Gerry Adams, Lenny Murphy, John Hume, Gerry Fitt, Terence O'Neill, the Price sisters and Colonel Tim Collins have provided a similar service.
Once upon a time - and a fairly recent time at that - to have written of the Newry and Bowman books in this column would have been rather like writing a letter to a few close friends, for an interest in the history of Irish soldiers in the 20th century was seen to be the preserve of sad, demented pro-British anoraks. But since President McAleese opened the Memorial Park at Messines Ridge, this has changed dramatically. All over Ireland, local history groups are dredging the deep of communal memory and parish archive to restore to the dead of Ireland to their proper place.
But there is another, larger question: are these lost men being discovered at the very moment that all popular sense of our history is fading from Irish life?