Rite and Reason: The challenge for the two nations on this island is to overcome identities which see their own legitimacy and security as grounded in the disappearance or destruction of the other, writes Irene Whelan.
The approach of St Patrick's Day with its attendant focus on national identity has rarely been preceded by such a chorus of opinions on what it means to be Irish these days.
Fallout from clerical scandals and the exposure of abuse in Catholic-run institutions has shattered, if not destroyed, the almost organic connection between being Irish and Catholic that dominated the national consciousness for so long.
The term "post-Catholic" thus gained vogue as a trendy description of contemporary Irish society in the last decade. Recent stinging criticism of President Mary McAleese's interpretation of 1916 also suggests that it may soon be joined by "post-nationalist". But how much of this is superficial glossing over of subjects that are at the heart of who we are as a collective?
As we loosen our moorings from the traditional sanctities of faith and fatherland, on what terms are we going to define a new identity, especially if it is one that embraces the other tradition on the island?
Does the jettisoning of traditional Catholicism mean that we are now to embrace the antithesis of Rome as the root of all evil and the Pope as the Antichrist? Will overturning the sanctity of 1916 in the national canon mean that we are now to see Patrick Pearse as a fellow traveller of Adolf Hitler or other fascists? This is a prospect that is not without its risks.
The recent challenge of the "Love Ulster" march on February 25th was a transparent embarrassment to those who anticipated the event with indifference and nonchalance, as if it was nothing more than an American high school band over for St Patrick's Day.
The manner in which reality blew up in their faces brought home to serious observers the difficult path that lies ahead for any effort at reconciliation.
If I may be permitted to paraphrase George Orwell, reconciliation in the present and future will most certainly be contingent upon reconciliation of the past - a daunting challenge in a country with a history such as ours.
Wise grandmothers and socially aware politicians have always counselled that the interests of civil discourse and good manners are best served when religion and politics are left out of polite conversation. The reality of Irish history, unfortunately, does not allow this luxury.
The overpowering reality of our troubled past is that political life in Ireland has always been dominated by religion. The conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries was occasioned and justified by England's fear of domination by Catholic Europe.
The architects of the Penal Laws had no trouble vindicating their harsh treatment of Catholics when they could point to Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) that sent Huguenot refugees flooding into every country (including Ireland) that would receive them.
In the aftermath of the 1790s religion came powering back in answer to the destabilisation and upheaval unleashed by the "infidelity" of the revolutionary period. What emerged in Ireland, against the backdrop of the Catholic campaign for political freedom and Protestant resistance to it, were two rival nations with oppositional identities, the legitimacy and future security of the one being necessarily grounded in the anticipated disappearance or destruction of the other.
Those with faith in the Union convinced themselves that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom and that its character could be changed through a cultural revolution in which the blessings of Protestantism and membership in the "moral empire" would transform the country.
But (and herein lies an example that the promoters of western-style freedoms and democracy in the contemporary Middle East would do well to heed) what this attempt at imposing moral and cultural hegemony actually succeeded in doing was to cement the already powerful bond between priests and people, and to provide the Catholic clergy with a position of political leadership that they might otherwise never have aspired to.
This ideological division, already securely in place by the 1840s, guaranteed the political division of the country regardless of whether a home government would be realised through Home Rule or a Republic. It has never successfully been transcended.
As the dust settles after the upheavals of the last 30 years, the debate of how such transcendence might be achieved will no doubt become more urgent.
If there is any lesson that can be garnered from our troubled history, it is that any such debate should begin by removing itself from the polemics and bitterness that created much of the division in the first place. In other words it should take place in the kind of civil and polite manner of which grandmothers might approve.
Irene Whelan is the author of The Bible War in Ireland - the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-40 (Lilliput Press, Dublin, and the University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). She teaches history at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.