It is quite amazing how reverence for the Easter Rising enables intelligent, well-informed men to marshal the facts, to analyse them carefully, and then come to the directly opposite conclusion to that the evidence indicates, writes Kevin Myers.
Take Barry Andrews TD - who clearly knows something of our history - who accused Joe Lynch, a writer to this newspaper, of belittling Fianna Fáil when he said that the party had "crushed traditional republicanism by harassment, draconian laws, imprisonment and executions". Belittle? Barry should have proudly accepted Joe Lynch's words. Not to be draconian in the face of armed fascism at a time of war is to be terminally frivolous.
Barry recalled the consequences of de Valera's clemency towards armed republicanism. Two IRA men, who had been released by the government in a gesture at reconciliation, promptly murdered two gardaí, no doubt as an eccentric way of saying thank you. Barry did not name any of the men. The two gardaí who were cut down with Thompson sub-machine gun fire at point-blank range were Detective Hyland and Sergeant McKeown. Their killers were Tommy Harte and Patrick McGrath, later shot by firing squad, who were only at liberty because of the good offices of de Valera; two of his good officers paid the price.
This might suggest that Barry Andrews was leading us round to the concept that political violence in Ireland is counter-productive, and that nothing whatever is gained by further glorification of an unmandated insurrection of 90 years ago, especially since it caused such calamitous loss of life. But no: he goes in the opposite direction. He defends the revival of celebrations to mark the 1916 Rising.
So why does he consider the murder of two armed gardaí in 1939 unacceptable, and the murder of two unarmed DMP in 1916, Constables Lahiff and O'Brien, acceptable? What part of the killing of these latter men is morally justified? The Easter Rising was not a mythic event. It was a real event in which hundreds of people died.
No vote was taken at any level that it should happen, outside a tiny coterie of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. How can democrats draw inspiration from such means, and such appalling consequences? The lesson from Irish history is that any appeasement of armed republicanism merely whets its appetite. The British allowed most of their captives after 1916 to go free, unconditionally (a rather different method of dealing with armed insurgents than would have been practised by the insurgents' gallant allies, one feels). Did this clemency soften republican aspirations? The very reverse. One of those released was Michael Collins.
The price the British paid for this folly was rather similar to that de Valera's government was to pay 20 years later.
Ed Moloney's Secret History of the IRA is easily the best account of the IRA's role in the most recent Troubles. One of the points which he raises - but sadly does not pursue - is that the primary reason for the revival of the IRA's fortunes after 1975 was not the oft-cited release of Gerry Adams from jail, but the unconditional ending of internment.
Before that, the IRA in Ardoyne was down to a couple of men. With internment ended, the IRA ranks rapidly refilled. So what was the point of ending internment? To be sure, this satisfied the demands of two constituencies, those of nationalist Ireland, north and south, and the liberal-left human rights lobby.
But neither faction then urged nationalists to support the RUC, by recruitment and information, as a quid pro quo. In other words, this was the kind of appeasement which the British had tried in 1919, as did de Valera (briefly) in 1939.
The result was the same: a steep increase in bloodshed.
Yet by 1975, there were no "innocent" internees, loyalist or republican.
All internees drilled and obeyed paramilitary orders. So who could possibly gain from their release? Only the movements to which they belonged, certainly not the causes of peace, harmony, civility, freedom and democracy.
The introduction of internment in August 1971 - brutal, one-sided, stupid - was a catastrophe. However, by 1975, internment had crippled the IRA over much of the North. But the British then opened the floodgates of the Maze and out poured hundreds of well-trained terrorists, back into the ranks of the IRA. Twenty years later - TWENTY YEARS - the same length of time between the British unconditionally and idiotically releasing their IRA prisoners and de Valera doing the same - the IRA went on ceasefire.
Now, this cannot be described as a successful management of a terrorist insurgency. Moreover, the luxury of hindsight reveals that the interweaving green and pink strands of Irish nationalism and the civil liberties lobby protected the rights of IRA terrorists, and wilfully, obscenely, and murderously ignored those of their hundreds of victims.
Many of the worst atrocities that were to come - most notably the La Mon massacre in which 12 Protestants were incinerated by IRA bombs - were perpetrated by former internees.
All of those prisoners pouring out of the Maze in the mid-1970s to report back for duty in the ranks of the IRA would have regarded the Easter Rising as the moral authorisation for what they were doing and were about to do, over the coming two decades of misery and bloodshed.
Only the selectively amnesiac would now seek to sanitise and acclaim the deeds which provided that moral authorisation.
The Easter Rising remains quite the worst and most undemocratic event in Irish history in the 20th century, and the very inspiration for so much heartbreak and suffering, then and ever since.