It is easy to blame long memories for Irish woes. History, and our capacity to recall it, causes us, we often think, to live in the past. But collective memory, like everything else, can be used or abused. It can be woven into a fabricated justification for contemporary prejudice and worn as a cloak for naked ignorance. Or it can evoke the sense of moral responsibility that allows people to face down prejudice and ignorance with courage and pride.
It can be used to say: "We have suffered, therefore we have a right to inflict suffering." Or to say: "We know what suffering is like, therefore we have no excuse for allowing it to be inflicted on others." This week in New York, I met a distinguished Irish-American who recently provided an object lesson in the proper use of Irish memory.
For 20 years until last month, Francis T. Murphy, a thin, elegant man, was presiding judge of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, effectively the most senior judge in the State. On reaching the age of 70, as he did recently, he was required to step down as presiding judge. But it is accepted practice that someone in this position remains as an ordinary judge of the Appellate Division for a further two years.
However, in a decision that the Association of the Bar of the City of New York describes as "unprecedented", the conservative Republican Governor of New York state, George Pataki, refused to reappoint Judge Murphy. Mr Pataki did not charge that Judge Murphy was incompetent or corrupt, but instead cited "extreme ideological differences" between himself and the judge. In effect, the judge was removed because he did not follow the governor's line.
The New York Times explained that Judge Murphy was thrown off the bench because he has "often been a lone dissenting voice in support of defendants' rights, and a caustic critic of prosecutors and the police. . ." His essential sin is that of taking civil liberties and the presumption of innocence too seriously. He has consistently and inconveniently stood out against the abuse of power in a city where justice is not always blind to race and riches.
THIS week's New York Law Journal carries an unusually stinging statement from the New York State Bar Association expressing its "grave concern to the Governor concerning the danger to judicial independence inherent in the use of ideological tests for the reappointment of a sitting judge."
Similar expressions of alarm have come from the New York City Bar Association and the New York County Lawyers' Association. But in an election year and in the context of America's largely unthinking backlash against anyone perceived as soft on crime, Mr Pataki knows that insulting even the most distinguished of liberal judges will do him no harm at all.
In the context of widespread indifference to callous executions (like that of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas this week), and to almost casual shootings by police of black men whose "guns" turn out to be chocolate bars or bunches of keys, judicial independence is not a subject that provokes much public consternation.
What's striking from an Irish point view, though, is Judge Murphy's own response to all of this, and the fact that it drew not, as might be expected, on American constitutional history, but on Irish collective memory.
Before Christmas, Judge Murphy gave a dignified, almost laconic farewell address to the New York County Lawyers' Association. His speech was pithy, almost cryptic. He chose not to talk directly about his dismissal or to justify his judicial record. Instead, he talked about being Irish. He started by pointing out that there was nothing innately special about being Irish: "I do not know whether the Irish are more brave than others; I doubt it. I do not know whether the Irish are more eloquent than others; I doubt it. I do not know whether the Irish are more kind, more merciful, more peaceful, than others; I doubt it."
What the Irish and Jews had, he said, was memory. "They remember mass starvation, and those who caused it. They remember bloody oppression, and those who caused it. They remember the fright of a knock on the door, and those who caused it."
And then he trained this evocation of Irish memory directly on the issue at hand - the independence of judges. "For the Irish who fled to this country, a judge who was not a coward, a judge who found the law and cleaved to it, a judge who took counsel only from his conscience, a judge who bent the knee to no one except his God, that judge was that Irishman's ideal of a nation free of tyranny.
"Of all who came before and after that Irishman, none foresaw judges fearful of speaking out because they might lose public office, or judges so passionate for governmental favour that they would dance to any tune a distant piper might play."
A judge, he concluded, is "an ordinary human being carrying the ordinary baggage of the good and the bad. His only hope for distinction is that, in the end, when he puts down that baggage and looks back, he will not see that his shadow is that of a coward or a hypocrite.
"He will see that though his robe has become worn, his oath is as strong as on the day that he first took it. Having had fear of no one, and having given favour to no one, he closes the courthouse door behind him, and, if he's Irish, walks up the avenue with a skip and a smile."
It's good to think that in an important struggle for democratic principles in one of the world's great cities, the word "Irish" can still stand as a metaphor for integrity, fair-mindedness and the courage to stand up for what is right against the cynical manipulation of prejudice.
It's heartening to find that a memory of Irish suffering can be, not an excuse for special privilege or fuel for old hatreds, but a reminder of a responsibility to preserve and protect the universal principles from which your own people have benefited.
Yet it's also good to be reminded that the meaning of the word "Irish" is as dependent on the present as it is on the past. People like Judge Murphy whose families made the journey from exile and poverty to prominence and status have special reasons to dread the shadow of hypocrisy. Contemporary Ireland is making a similar journey and ought to feel a similar dread.
If its name is to remain a synonym for respect for human rights, lack of prejudice and a preference for universal principles over cynical selfishness, then it has to remember "the fright of a knock on the door". How it treats those for whom such a memory is the stuff of everyday nightmares rather than ancestral recollection will determine its meaning for the wider world.