Perhaps the most striking aspect of President Mary McAleese's speech on 1916 last month was how old-fashioned it was.
Her talk of heroes and sacrifice sounded as if the past 30 years of critical historical analysis of the Easter Rising had never happened. In fact, her rhetoric was rooted firmly within the spirit of 1966.
That year marked the 50th anniversary of the Rising, and it was celebrated with an unholy glee. Military parades abounded. Politicians fell over themselves to be seen reviewing the troops. The Merry Ploughboy was top of the music charts. "I'm off to join the IRA," the nation sang with gusto, ". . . where the bayonets flash and the rifles crash, to the echo of a Thompson gun." Soldiers lined up on the roof of the GPO, dramatically silhouetted against the sky, pointing their rifles upwards as the four aircraft of the Air Corps flew low along O'Connell Street.
For anyone growing up at the time, it was heady stuff. There could be no greater glory than to die for Ireland. Favoured school children were selected to read the Proclamation to local gatherings all around the country. The really lucky ones got to participate in the enormous pageant at Croke Park.
Most dramatic of all was RTÉ's contribution. A bare four years old at the time, the station marked the occasion with its first big drama. Insurrection was broadcast in instalments on each night during Easter Week. It was an all-action series, full of blood, guts and gunfights, with little dialogue to interrupt the excitement. It would be hard to underestimate its impact on the nation.
Until then, television drama and movies had always been about other people - cowboys and Indians, Germans and the Allies, cops and robbers on the streets of foreign cities. Now, suddenly, we had our very own goodies and baddies. And in neighbourhoods all over Ireland, we put our toy guns to good use, slaughtering hordes of evil British soldiers in the name of Ireland.
Insurrection was an extraordinary construct when viewed from this distance. A device of reportage was used, with actors playing reporters holding microphones and speaking to camera in the middle of the GPO as bullets and bombs exploded around them. This presentation of drama as incontrovertible fact ruthlessly excluded any other interpretation of events.
It was history in black and white - and in more ways than one, as colour had not yet arrived to Irish television. In fact, so visceral was the portrayal of the Rising that I have a clear (but impossible) memory of some of the scenes being in vivid colour, particularly the dying Joe Lynch, shooting Brits while singing patriotic songs, his face covered in lurid blood.
What perhaps best sums up the spirit of the time is a scene from Insurrection in which a group of rebels, surrounded and believing themselves doomed, kneel to say a decade of the rosary in Irish. The camera zooms slowly into one young hero with a pistol in one hand and rosary beads in the other.
The historical adviser to Insurrection was Kevin B. Nowlan, professor of history at UCD. In 1991, on the 75th anniversary of the Rising, he expressed deep unease at the impact of the drama. He felt that it might have led some people to believe "that this kind of activity was good in itself, that it's the right way to proceed in the achievement of a national goal. That kind of effect is one that I would have been, and am still, worried about." There can be little doubt that the smug and wholly uncritical public glorification of violent nationalism in 1966 played a significant part in the emergence of the violence in Northern Ireland three years later.
While there are some important differences, the parallels between the 1916 rebels and the IRA of the 1970s and beyond were simply too uncomfortable to allow the Irish State to engage in any large-scale public commemoration of the Rising during the decades of the IRA campaign of violence in the North.
Both groups were unelected minorities whose lack of democratic mandate did not inhibit their claim to act on behalf of the Irish people. The impossibility of celebrating one while repudiating the other was self-evident. Thus there was no significant official marking of the 75th anniversary of the Rising, or indeed of the 80th.
Now, as the centenary looms, and with peace in our time, it seems that perhaps it is safe to get back in the water. President McAleese would have us rediscover our heroes, reignite our pride in their selfless sacrifice, and march off again to Dublin, in the green, in the green.
But it is not as simple as that. We have learned the hard way that commemorations have a habit of turning into uncritical orgies of celebration with potentially lethal consequences. Perhaps instead of a commemoration, we could more usefully mark significant anniversaries of the Rising with a National Day of Argument, thus ensuring that its messy and complicated legacy would never again become obscured by any sentimental longings for past certainties.
To be fair to Mary McAleese, all she was doing was engaging in that argument.