A former colleague now working in the real world has written, in response to recent articles of mine on the subject of Irish unity, to ask: why? "It is interesting that you and others still value the `national unity' aspiration," writes Joe Foyle of Dublin 6. "We want such unity, but do we need it? We never needed political independence, in the sense of needing it for our mental and physical wellbeing, judged even in secular terms; we certainly never did, nor do, need it to be fit for heaven when we die."
This is a good question and a good way of putting it, embracing the practical considerations which feature in conventional "modern" objections to concepts of nationhood, and also acknowledging the presence of a possible spiritual dimension. It is, too, a good time to ask these questions. For three decades we have been in the dark tunnel of conflict and have been unable to do so. Now, in a number of senses, we are free, but freedom is a much bigger idea than simply the liberation of territory and tongues.
One of the consequences of the war just ending has been the obfuscation of the core truth that the most important form of unity is not of land or even people, but of collective imagination, which is to say the spirit of a people.
Anti-nationalism is parasitic. It purports to advocate a "modern" alternative to ancient pieties, but in reality is a reactive and destructive non-philosophy rooted in neurosis and self-hatred. In the past generation, the revisionist ideas promoted as the cutting edge of modernity were really a cancer feeding off the healthy flesh of the Irish nation, which by its very resilience gave succour to those seeking to destroy it.
Like bungling lumberjacks sawing off the branches on which they were sitting, a minor mob of so-called intellectuals created their reputations by undermining the spirit of their own people. For them to say, after a few decades of demonising Irish nationalism, that we no longer needed our nationhood, was like arguing after a day's fast that it is possible to survive permanently without food.
The past 30 years of conflict resulted in the dying off in the Irish mind of values which were not, in fact, expendable. For a quarter of a century now, the public imagination of this Republic has been acting in a manner inimical to its own survival, collaborating in the dismantling of the integrity of our culture and society.
Much of the recent talk about national territory in the context of Articles 2 and 3 has focused on questions of the nature of the Irish State in its legal and territorial dimensions, but what was really at stake was the disjunction between the reality of Ireland and its imagined ideal - a far more profound notion.
The difference might be compared to the difference between clothing and a living being. The State is a suit of clothes, a designed and tailored artifice in which to present ourselves respectably to the world, but the nation is the very soul and lifeblood of our collective existence.
If nationhood were simply a matter of economic and political organisation, it would be possible to argue its merits on the basis of practicalities. Issues of geography, borders, institutions, structures etc would then be the paramount considerations, but it is more than that.
In his essay Ghosts, Padraig Pearse wrote: "The untruth that nationality is corporeal, a thing defined by statutes and guaranteed by mutual interests, is at the base of the untruth that freedom, which is the condition of a hale nationality, is a status to be conceded rather than a glory to be achieved".
It could never be justifiable, he wrote, to believe that it could ever be lawful, "in the interest of empire, in the interest of wealth, in the interest of quiet living, to forgo the right to freedom. The contrary is the truth. Freedom, being a spiritual necessity, transcends all corporeal necessities and, when freedom is being considered, interests should not be spoken of. Or, if the terms of the counting house be the ones that are best understood, let us put it that it is the highest interest of a nation to be free."
It is easy for us in our modern-day hubris to misunderstand what Pearse meant by "spiritual necessity". He was not talking about the propagation of collective pieties to hold a people together. What he was getting at was the idea that spirituality is primarily a collective phenomenon, which has individual expression but only in a specific, limited sense.
A human being's capacity to speak might be deemed an individual resource, but its purpose is to do with communication, a function of the collective. Similarly with nationhood. Each individual member of a nation has a sense of personal belonging, but the purpose has to do with operating in a social capacity. It is for this reason that principles of simple democracy cannot be applied to issues of nationhood. At all times, the living membership of a nation must be conscious of the thoughts and deeds of those who have departed and those who have not yet come.
One of the mistakes we make when considering questions of identity is to assume that what may be true of one individual operating within an existing norm can be extended to whole societies and even the generality of humanity. People often query the relevance of issues of identity by pointing out that it is not a matter which greatly concerns or discommodes themselves.
Proclaiming their separation from the common herd, they profess to be puzzled as to why others cannot function in the same autonomous way, but the only reason they can do this is that the herd exists in the first place. In a sense, they are even more dependent on it than are those who give it full allegiance.
The idea of everyone being able to create autonomous identities by dint of conflict with a non-existent herd is obviously absurd. Dissenting models of self-definition are only possible by reference to that from which they dissent.
Although most of those who know his views would regard Joe as a fairly "traditional" Catholic thinker, his argument here leans more to Protestant notions of individual salvation. In terms of conventional, highly prejudiced concepts of Irish nationalism, forged in the revisionist backlash, the connection which is often made between Irish nationalism and Catholicism is fatuous, a disingenuous twinning for the purposes of easier demolition. At this deeper level, however, there is indeed a compatibility between the Catholic idea of collective salvation and the necessary communality of nationalist forms of belonging.
It is not that membership of one requires adherence to the other, but that both depend on awareness of the fourth dimension of existence. Successful membership of any unit of two or more people is often experienced as a spiritual condition. Active participation in one's nation, therefore, offers one of the most potent opportunities for spiritual experience.