It has been said that we Irish are prisoners of our history, an expression usually employed to explain those acts of barbarism performed in the name of distorted nationalism on one side or perverse loyalism on the other.
In fact, it goes much deeper than that. We are children of an ancient culture. There are well-preserved Irish archaeological sites which date back more than 6000 years. Ornate jewellery and weaponry from the Iron Age tell of a civilisation which pre-dates the Christian era.
When St Patrick challenged the pagan tribes of the fifth century, he was dealing with a disparate grouping who had a common language, a common code of law (the Brehon law) and who referred to themselves as 'men of Ireland'. When the Dark Ages descended on Europe, the lamp of learning was kept alive in Irish monasteries.
This is the heritage which today's Irish claim. It has more importance than the bloody and mostly futile attempts at self determination which followed the Viking and Norman and finally the English occupations. We are prisoners of our history, but that history goes back much farther than 1916 or the Great Famine or the Battle of the Boyne.
Many people today insist on seeing in the Irish, traits which owe more to wishful fancy than to mundane fact. They like to paint us as quaint, amusing, perhaps more than a little irrational; harmless enough characteristics. And can you blame us if we play to the gallery? After all, they paid their money to kiss the Blarney Stone and to buy the shillelaghs and to savour the cream-topped pint that has made a feature of its unattractiveness.
There will be parades in cities all over the world this week to honour the Welsh-born missionary who brought Christianity to Ireland more than 1500 years ago. That these parades are allowed, with their attendant disruption of commerce and trade, is a tribute to subtle Irish colonialism.
It is a colonialism not characterised by greed or rapine, armies or plunder, but by good humour, good company and what the Irish called, long before the word achieved a sinister meaning, good craic.
It is a colonialism found in the imagery of a Heaney poem, celebrated in the dancing feet of a Riverdance troupe, voiced in the soft dialogue of a Friel play, personified in the charm and erudition of the