Inside Politics: The President's speech extolling the leaders of the 1916 Rising has raised uncomfortable questions about the nature of Irish democracy.
The political establishment has put itself in the paradoxical position of trying to reclaim the legacy of 1916 from Sinn Féin, while simultaneously attempting to pressurise it and the IRA into accepting that the resort to arms practised by the 1916 leaders is utterly unacceptable in today's Ireland.
It was ironic that within days of Mrs McAleese's intervention, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA had not, after all, gone away. The report's significance was not so much the reference to the IRA's continuing low-level criminal activity but the disclosure that targeting, training and intelligence gathering continues with the leadership's sanction. It means that the implementation of the Belfast Agreement will continue to remain on hold.
By deciding to elevate the 1916 Rising above all other historical events as the key episode in the creation of the modern Irish State, the Government is in danger of undermining its own case in the politics of the present.
Far from taking a weapon away from Sinn Féin in the run-up to the next general election, the Government runs the risk of handing the republican movement a justification for continuing some of the activities it has engaged in over the past 35 years.
As the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising approaches, President McAleese has initiated a debate on its role in the development of the modern Irish State. Last weekend's speech, which had to have Government approval, was not as one-sided as some of her critics have claimed, but it was certainly selective.
The Rising's importance in the drive for Irish independence is incontrovertible but, taken in isolation, it leaves much of 20th-century Irish history unexplained. Its striking feature was that its leaders defied democratic norms. They rejected not only John Redmond and his parliamentary party at Westminister but they conspired against their own leader, Eoin MacNeill, and defied his authority as leader of the Irish Volunteers to stage a violent revolutionary act.
Yet the most notable feature of the independent Ireland that later emerged was that it remained a parliamentary democracy during a period when almost all of Europe succumbed to dictatorship, whether of the right or the left. That Ireland is the fourth-oldest continuous democracy in Europe clearly owes more to the century-long political tradition of Daniel O'Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond than to the cult of blood sacrifice promulgated by the 1916 leaders.
The political backdrop of the early 20th century is also essential to an understanding of the Rising itself. The resort to arms by Irish nationalists was a direct response to the establishment of the UVF, which was set up to block the implementation of the Home Rule Act.
It was the failure of politics to deliver the democratic will of the majority of Irish people that created the opportunity for the Rising. The executions that followed and the botched attempt of the British to introduce conscription led to Sinn Féin's political triumph in the 1918 election.
By turning the 1916 leaders into "our idealistic and heroic founding fathers and mothers, our Davids to their Goliaths", the President conveyed a one-sided view of 1916. The Rising was not just a challenge to the authority of the British Goliath; it was also a challenge to a broad spectrum of Irish nationalist opinion that did not see violent revolution as the way to achieve independence. Subsequent events catapulted the surviving leaders into power but only after they had received a democratic mandate.
A good number of those who fought in 1916 refused to accept the democratic decision of the Irish people to accept the Treaty in 1922. Irish democracy survived because the Free State government in 1922 suppressed those in the IRA who held out for the Holy Grail of the Republic declared in 1916.
In time, members of the defeated faction of 1922 became Fianna Fáil and, once in power, they too suppressed the anti-democratic remnants of the IRA. And so it went, to the present day.
Some small details of the President's speech, such as the claim that Ireland in the years before 1916 was being run by a clique in the Kildare Street Club, were misleading as well as pejorative. The Kildare Street Club in the first decades of the 20th century was the haunt of the declining Protestant landlord class which had long lost political power.
From 1906 until 1916, Ireland was actually run by the Liberal chief secretary, Augustine Birrell, who saw it as his job to prepare the way for Home Rule.
He relied largely on the advice of his political allies in the Irish Party, particularly John Dillon, for his policy of administering the country. The Rising would probably never have happened had Birrell not been so tolerant of the Volunteers and other nationalist organisations on the advice of Redmond and Dillon.
By ignoring the complexity of the Rising and simplifying it to a David and Goliath confrontation between Ireland and Britain, the President, on the advice of the Government, has actually accepted the Sinn Féin version of Irish history.
That acceptance ill-equips the current leaders of democratic Ireland to win the argument about what should be done in present circumstances.
The important thing about the Belfast Agreement is that it accepts the full complexity of the political problem that has soured relations between the two communities in the North, between North and South and between Ireland and England for over 200 years.
There has been a lot of progress in dealing with all of those relationships and it would be a pity if a narrow and distorted interpretation of 1916 was to put an unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full resolution.