During this pre-Easter period I have been speaking at various American universities about aspects of Irish history and society and have been struck by the fact that it sometimes seems easier to evoke a sense of Irish history among those outside our island than among people at home.
We who live in Ireland are often so steeped in the present that we have difficulty in envisaging what our country was like at earlier stages of its development. Our experience of living in the Irish present is sometimes too vivid to allow us easily to think ourselves back in time, even to the world of our parents or grandparents.
This first came home to me several decades ago when, writing about 1916, I started to realise how difficult it was for people living in the later stages of the 20th century to understand or empathise with the world of 60 or 70 years earlier; a world in which hundreds of thousands of young men of the majority Catholic tradition in our island volunteered to fight in the British army during the first World War, although that war did not seem to raise profound moral issues as did the later war against Nazism.
I should, perhaps, add that recent generations have seemed to see the 1916 Rising as an inevitable nationalist sequel to a sequence of late 18th-century and 19th-century rebellions, whereas to those who organised the Rising it was a desperate, almost forlorn, attempt on the part of a very small minority to revive a nationalism that, in the light of the participation of so many young Irishmen in the British army, they saw as almost extinct.
I am also struck by the fact that very few people today seem able to understand or come to grips with the almost exclusively monarchical European world of the early 20th century, in which an Irish Rising that succeeded with German help could have had only one consequence: the post-war installation of a German monarch in Ireland.
Precedents for that had been set during the 19th century in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, and these precedents were to be followed by Germany, with less success, in Lithuania and Finland later in that same war.
Subsequent Irish generations seem to find it impossible to come to terms with the fact that Patrick Pearse who, despite suggestions to the contrary, was a realistic man of his time, is known to have contemplated with reasonable equanimity the likelihood of a post-war installation of a young Hohenzollern as king of Ireland. People today seem to prefer the romantic vision of an unrealistic Pearse deluding himself that a German victory would deliver an Irish Republic.
Still on this theme of Irish people's problems with historical reality, several years ago I attended, together with Michael McDowell and others, a debate in UCD about Eamon de Valera.
The audience reactions to some earlier speakers' remarks on de Valera demonstrated a hostility to him on the part of students that was founded, not on a rational analysis of his role in Irish life over many decades, but rather on a totally unhistoric dismissal of aspects of de Valera's views on society which had inevitably reflected some of the values of the time in which he lived.
Michael McDowell and myself, despite our own family backgrounds in Cumann na nGaedhal, were both spontaneously provoked by the unhistoric attitudes of many in the audience to mount strong defences of some positive aspects of de Valera's career, defences which I have to say were well received by the somewhat surprised students.
One aspect of life in relation to which one has to be conscious of fundamental changes in public attitudes during the latter half of the 20th century is political violence. Happily, recent generations, accustomed to democracy as the norm of political life here and throughout western Europe, instinctively reject the use of violence as a means of securing domestic political ends.
There are still some people for whom this penny has not yet dropped - most notably the IRA and many members of Sinn Féin - but for most people political violence is now anathema.
In historical terms, however, this is a recent development. An older person like myself has only to look back to childhood to realise how much has changed within a single lifetime. When I was young, stories of the War of Independence were part of our staple cultural diet.
True, my father had not himself been engaged on active service during that war for, after several jail sentences and service as a member of the GPO garrison, in mid-1919 he was placed in charge of the Dáil government's propaganda machine. This included the regular publication of an underground newspaper, the Bulletin, which was later seen as having won the war of words with the British government, through the subversive process of confining itself to the truth.
My father had very many stories of that period - all, as I recall it, with humorous elements, but also sometimes with accounts of violent incidents, which my brothers and I took in our stride, in a way that could not happen today.
We also particularly appreciated, and often sought repeat performances of, the story of the Battle of Ashbourne in 1916 told by a participant, Dick Hayes, a gentle doctor who later became our second film censor and who was a close friend of my parents.
The fatalities that were central features of that encounter did not seem to us to take away from the humorous character of much of Dick's story. Ours was a different world, the atmosphere of which it is almost impossible to explain to a modern audience.
That is why a sense of history is necessary, so that we may understand whence we have come, and how different - and at least in some respects better - is the world of today than even that of the recent past, let alone the world of earlier centuries.
That a Government a few years ago actually contemplated dropping history from the Junior Certificate, and that barely one student in five now takes it as Leaving Certificate subject, worries me.
Happily history remains a relatively popular choice at our universities. So Ireland of the 21st century will not be without people capable of understanding and, I hope, explaining our complex past.