It is only now, 70 years after Fianna Fáil came to power for the first time, that the sheer scale of the party's historiographical achievement has become obvious, writes Kevin Myers
It was one of the most formidable intellectual projects ever undertaken by a democracy in western Europe: for it took the single fabled golden thread of rebellion, and turn it into the weft and the warp of the Irish past.
This should have been impossible. The numbers should have made it so: as, too, should the power of collective memory. Yet neither collective memory nor the numbers were enough. The self-confidence of the golden threaders, and the miserable self-doubts of the Fine Gael caste, which implicitly accepted Fianna Fáil's belief that the Warriors of Destiny were the true guardians of Irishness, enabled the realities of history to be turned on their head.
The current project at Belvedere to erect a memorial - finally, mark you: finally - to former pupils from the school who died in the conflicts of the 20th century tells a shocking story. For recognisably within the golden thread are Joseph Mary Plunkett, a signatory of the Easter proclamation, shot by firing squad; Kevin Barry, executed in 1920; and Cathal Brugha, killed in the Civil War in 1922.
In other words, three. But 48 old Belvedereans were killed in action with the British forces during the first World War. In the second World War, another 10 old Belvedereans were killed serving with the British, six of them in the RAF. In the nature of these things, they would at some time in their career probably have been trying to kill a former school colleague of theirs - Vincent Coyle, who was manager of a potash factory in Berlin, and who was indeed killed in 1942.
But what a marvellous piece of intellectual engineering it was to have created a narrative which up until recently any Belvederean could have told you of: that the school produced one of the heroes of 1916, one of the martyrs of the War of Independence, and one of the defenders of the Republic in the Civil War.
But of nearly 50 Belvedereans killed in the Great War, there was probably not a trace; nor yet of Staff Captain Frederick Lidwell, of the Free State Army, killed in 1922.
Stalin would have been proud of such a feat; and done without much physical violence. It was achieved instead through the insidious drip-drip of moral rectitude, and through a political life which was turned into a degrading competition as to who was more "Irish" and who was more "Catholic". Beneath those bullying behemoths of national piety, historical truths perished for more than two generations; and an ocean of pity and tragedy vanished underground like a turlough.
What did the sister of the O'Brien Butler brothers, all Belvedereans, make of the process? Appropriately, I do not know her name. She lost one brother in the Boer War. She lost another with the Irish Lancers early in the first war, followed shortly afterwards by her husband, also a Belvederean, with the Munsters. A third brother was killed with the Royal Irish Regiment in June 1917. How did she spend the rest of her widowhood years, as the emerging state turned its back on the unbearable sacrifice of her and her family, and turned the sacrifice of the minority into an official State-monopoly and a blood-cult? Belvedere was not unique. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ex-pupils of Catholic Irish schools became British army officers at this time: but in the decades which followed, a coercive amnesia spread through Irish life.
Protestant schools took to commemorating their war dead with the furtiveness of recusant Jews in Spain. Irish historians took up the golden thread, and wove a vast and ornamental quilt from it, beneath which all manner of truth was concealed.
Coercion became unspoken but real. The fear of the consequences of breaking the national consensus was enough. People spoke of the men of 1916, meaning the men in the GPO: not of the far greater number who were serving in the British forces at the time. Sacrifice became mono-dimensional: Belvedereans would have known of Plunkett, but they would not have known of Reginald Clery of their school, one of the unarmed and helpless "Georgius Rex Volunteer Training Corps", mercilessly massacred at Mount Street Bridge by the insurgents.
But these deaths were all faithfully reported in the magazine, The Old Belvederean, at the time. This pool of knowledge was then steadily drained down the years, and replaced with the mythologies of 1916. And for all that that the popular understanding of this period has in recent times broadened and become far more generous, the central narrative of Irish life remains recognisably that laid down by the educational commissars of Irish life from the 1930s onwards. They created the syllabus, not just for schools, and not just to teach citizens about their past, but to guide the Irish people towards a future of the commissars' devising.
Such projects cannot work in the longer term. The mountain range to be covered was too vast: the quilt could cover some of the peaks, but not all.
Too many people know of the existence of these historical Himalayas, and bit by bit, the quilt is being withdrawn, as it is in Belvedere. But much will be lost for ever unless it is rescued now. If you know anything whatever of any old Belverderean killed in any of the past century's wars, or serving with the UN, contact the organiser of the quite admirable Belvedere project, Oliver Murphy.