In 1923, shortly after it had won the civil war, the Free State government had a 40-foot-high Celtic Cross erected on Leinster Lawn, between Merrion Square and Leinster House. It was the official monument to the two founders of the State, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, who had died during the war.
From a distance, it looked ugly but impressive. Close up, though, its shoddiness was obvious. What looked like stone was in fact wood and plaster covered in cement. The apparently bronze medallions, showing profiles of the dead heroes, were really just painted plaster.
Even by the end of 1923, the Free State's Director of Publicity, Seán Lester, was complaining that "the gilding is coming off in large patches with the result that a shabby effect is produced".
Moderates are not very good at commemoration. In the Irish nationalist tradition, compromise and democracy are barely worth remembering. As the historian Anne Dolan shows in her brilliant book Commemorating the Irish Civil War, the Free State was astonishingly bad at memorialising its martyrs. The Cross which marks the area where Collins was killed at Béalnabláth was originally donated by an anonymous female admirer to mark his grave in Glasnevin Cemetery, and hastily erected in west Cork because the State did not want to pay for a monument there. Meanwhile, Collins's grave in Glasnevin was left unmarked until 1939, when his brother was grudgingly allowed to erect a simple stone. Likewise, the State even failed to bear the cost of burying Arthur Griffith and left his grave unmarked until his widow eventually erected a stone at her own expense.
If all of this was horribly shabby, it was also indicative of an attitude that is not entirely disreputable. In Ireland, political compromise has been about breaking free from the glorious dead. It has required a determination to close one's ears to the demands of the dead generations for revenge and vindication. It has been an exercise in forgetting what has happened and moving on. The past is not confronted or analysed. It is coldly and sometimes brutally forgotten.
The extremist tradition, on the other hand, has always kept in mind Patrick Pearse's injunction at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa - that its own "life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women". It knows that what matters is not what happened but how it is remembered. And that, precisely, is what the IRA is now fighting for. Its struggle is for control of the memory of the Northern Ireland conflict. Its weapons are lies, evasions and strategic ambiguities. Its aim is to reshape the memory of a vicious and sordidly sectarian campaign of mass murder into the afterglow of a glorious struggle for liberation.
This is not an abstract quest. Sinn Féin and the IRA understand that their future will be shaped by the interpretation of their past. To achieve their ultimate aim of power on both sides of the Border, they need to do what they have already done in the North - to become the mainstream of Irish nationalism. This is why they will brazenly claim the hundredth anniversary of Griffith's foundation of Sinn Féin for themselves, as Gerry Adams had already begun to do in his ardfheis speech last year.
This is also why they will continue to insist that the IRA had nothing to do with the Northern Bank robbery. And it is why the democratic parties on this island have to wake up and stop treating the recent past as the property of Sinn Féin and the IRA. The long moderate tradition of forgetting the past has become a barrier to peace. In the Sinn Féin shop, you can still buy tee-shirts with the slogan "IRA Undefeated Army", described in the catalogue as "A tribute to the men and women who led the struggle against British occupation of Ireland". That sums up the version of the past that the movement wants to sanctify. Thus the extreme sensitivity to the perfectly sensible suggestion that the destruction of IRA weaponry be photographed. Thus the refusal of the IRA to sign up even to the bland commitment demanded by the British and Irish governments that it commit itself "not to endanger anyone's personal rights and safety". Thus the mock-outrage of Sinn Féin leaders at any suggestion that the IRA might have engaged in a criminal act.
Undefeated armies are not criminals. They don't have to promise anything. And they don't make deals. As the IRA itself reminded us in April 2003, "the Irish Republican Army is not a party to the Good Friday agreement".
Democratic parties have tolerated this stuff for the sake of peace. But that tolerance has now become a problem for the peace process. It is clear now that the IRA has taken the holding of tongues as tacit assent. It believes not merely that it can get away with almost anything, but that it is winning the memory wars by forcing everyone else to grant it political legitimacy as a partner in the process. It is time democrats began to call the IRA what it is: a bunch of self-appointed thugs who have never sought a political mandate, who have committed appalling atrocities, and who have just one remaining purpose - to go away.