We have in Ireland now a very strange attitude to the past. On the one hand, there is an acute interest in history. On the other, there is a mixture of amnesia and ambivalence. The place has changed so much so quickly that even the decade since Charles Haughey resigned and Bishop Eamonn Casey was disgraced can seem like an unbridgeable gulf of time, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Meanwhile, the deadly consequences of the flagrant abuse of history by both unionist and nationalist orthodoxies has made the past radioactive. Pulled in every direction at once, we are left, in a time of rapid physical development, with a sort of impotence.
Most of the attempts to commemorate what is arguably the single most important sequence of events in the creation of modern Ireland - the Great Famine - were characterised by an awkwardness and lack of clarity of which the fiasco of the replica famine ship the Jeannie Johnston is merely the sad epitome.
Two running stories among many possible examples illustrate the concrete local effects of this general uncertainty. Most educated Irish people will be aware of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire ("The Lament for Art O'Laoghaire"), described by Peter Levi in his inaugural address as professor of poetry at Oxford in 1984 as "the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole 18th century". Written in 1773 in the voice of Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, though incorporating the collective work of the keening women of Macroom, it is an astonishing fusion of a very old Gaelic tradition with a recognisably modern love story.
Its continuing power is such that the late James Simmons could use it as the template for a lament on a murdered RUC man, while Dermot Bolger used it to evoke the consequences of exile for a working-class Dubliner in the 1980s. If there is a touchstone for the importance of Gaelic tradition in contemporary Ireland, Caoineadh Art Uí Laoghaire is it.
VERY few people know, however, that the house from which Art Uí Laoghaire set off to his death, and to which, in one of the poem's most haunting images, the bay mare given to him by the Empress Marie Therese of Austria returned with blood on the saddle, is still standing.
Raleigh House, two miles from Macroom on the main Cork-to-Killarney road, is in fact beautifully preserved. The great bronze eagle, also a gift from Marie Therese, still overlooks the cobbled yard. The survival of the house and grounds, thanks in large measure to the current owner Edward Vaughan, is a small miracle of history, as significant in Irish terms as the survival of Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre would have been in England.
And yet, though the house has been on the market for many months now, the State has made no effort to buy it. The cost would be a tiny fraction of what the Government spent on the vastly less important Farmleigh House in Dublin. The location makes it ideal as a point of reference for both Irish and foreign visitors to make contact with Gaelic culture, women's literature and the shifting realities of 18th-century Ireland. But for all the talk of "heritage", the State is still oddly careless of such things.
The other local saga that has caught my eye recently suggests why this awkwardness persists. It concerns a Famine graveyard next to the old workhouse in Killala, Co Mayo. Because its harbour was one point of departure for the coffin ships, Killala attracted large numbers of refugees, many of whom died and were buried anonymously in and around the workhouse.
In the early 1990s, as the approach of the 150th anniversary focused attention on the Famine, the quite proper idea of commemorating these people came to the fore.
What has happened since is a perfect illustration of the two forces that make us so bad at dealing with the past: propaganda on the one side, amnesia on the other.
FIRST, a local group erected an engraved marble plaque on the roadside next to the plot, referring to the refugees as victims of "a holocaust" caused by "a foreign alien government". This angered other local people, who considered it crude and offensive to English visitors. After various ructions, the plaque was removed by Mayo County Council. Attempts to broker an agreement on appropriate wording eventually collapsed, partly because the only alternative to "holocaust" which was acceptable to the original movers was "genocide".
Last month, however, Mayo County Council came up with the other classic way of failing to cope with the past: ignoring it. It granted outline planning permission for the erection of 20 houses on part of the graveyard site.
The memory of the people buried there is thus caught between the devil of reducing the past to a futile sense of grievance and the deep blue sea of total amnesia.
It is surely not a lot to expect that the State might take the initiative in finding ways to remember without rancour, to acknowledge the past without wallowing in it. Buying Raleigh House and coming up with an appropriate way to honour the Famine dead of Killala would be worth doing for their own sakes. But it should also be obvious that in this country there is no such thing as an unclaimed past. If the State can't find a way to both recognise and contain the power of history, someone else will always wield it as a weapon.