Last weekend, Enda Kenny attended a special bash to celebrate the vision and the aspirations of those "constitutional republicans", Michael Collins and Arthur Griffiths.
The what? Michael Collins's claims to be a constitutional republican are as convincing as his claims to the throne of Albania.
Having left a trail of bodies behind him - mostly of unarmed men whose blood was on his hands, though his prints were on no triggers - he then attempted to subvert the very Treaty he personally had signed in London by launching an IRA assault on the new Northern Ireland government.
As for Arthur Griffiths, he wasn't a republican at all, but a dual-monarchist: he believed in kings within the empire. No doubt in time he would have sought thrones in all the British colonies, a pleasurable enough notion if only for the prospect having a King Singh in India.
Meanwhile, the veterans of the International Brigade in Spain were honoured by both the President and various lefty-dignitaries. The president of Ictu, David Begg, declared that what "was referred to as the Spanish Civil War was actually a fight against fascism". If you want to know how confusing that fight could be, many of the self-same people gathered the next day at the grave of Frank Ryan in Glasnevin. And what did this fine fellow do a couple of years after the Spanish Civil war but eagerly clamber aboard a U-boat along with Sean Russell on a Nazi mission to Ireland. Very anti-fascist indeed.
One could equally say that the Spanish Civil War was a fight against Stalinist Communism, a force which in its lifetime probably murdered at least three times as many people as Adolf and his chums. Just imagine what victorious Spanish Stalinists - and a triumph for the International Brigade would not have been a victory for its naïve, decent democrats, but for the servile and murderous comrades of+ Josef Djugashvili - would have done to Catholics, liberals, monarchists. If in doubt, take a look at the lands which Stalin conquered soon afterwards - the Balkan states and eastern Poland, hundreds of thousands of whose citizens were murdered between 1939 and 1941. The first mass trains to industrialised death camps in the east weren't Nazi; they were Soviet.
Who bothers to commemorate the opponents of communism who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War for their faith, their hearth and their freedom? Of course, their cause is deeply unfashionable these days, but they were, like most of the volunteers of the International Brigade, honourable dupes of tyrants. In all decency, we should honour the memory of both sets of volunteers.
I make an exception to this generalisation. Mick O'Riordan has been a lifelong defender of the Soviet Union - through all the purges, the massacres, the Hungarian uprising, the suppression of Czech freedom, the vast tyranny which governed the fettered and unfree of eastern Europe. He remained an unapologetic defender of one of the worst and bloodiest tyrannies in world history, and on Saturday he was a special guest of the President.
How lovely. Maybe we can now dig up some antique defender of Adolf for a trip to the Áras, where he can reminisce about the happy days when he fought communism in the service of merely the second-worst tyrant in the world. However, I somehow or other think the David Beggs of this world will not be present for that. Why? Who can say? Professional left-liberals get strangely inarticulate, as if some boiling hot apple-pie is napalming itself onto the roof their mouths, whenever they have to explain why die-hard totalitarian communists are still politically chic, but die-hard fascists are not.
Never fear! We Anguishians celebrate our past too! For the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Blessed Legion of Perpetual Purity and Virginity into Infinity, by the Scottish nun Blessed Mother Maria Boniface Much Anguish, also occurred last weekend. From early adulthood, she bound her thighs tightly together and her devotion to personal purity amongst her community was such that Anguishian nuns always donned cactus-lined steel armour before getting into the bath, which was usually of vinegar, except in Lent, when it was of liquid mustard gas. At bedtime, a select tribe of devoted dwarf Nubian eunuchs manacled the sisters' hands to the ceiling above their beds, then hosed their bodies down with iced acid throughout the night.
So, while some people gathered to commemorate Michael Collins, the constitutionalist, and Arthur Griffith, the republican, and the International Brigade, defenders of democracy, with similar historical veracity we latter-day Anguishians gathered to celebrate the life of Mother Maria . And just as Michael Collins knelt at the constitutional feet of Burke, and Griffith drank deep at the kingless well of Robespierre, and the International Brigade feasted on Magna Carta, we latter-day Anguishians toasted the blessed memory of Mother Maria.
In other words, we weave politically congenial modern nursery rhymes from the hideous bloodshed of history; which is just fine, so long as no one mistakes the resulting farrago for the truth.