The last time I related this story, Ireland was a different country. It relates to 1916, to 1994 and, perhaps more importantly, to 2016 and to how we might mark the 1916 centenary in 10 years time.
Back in 1994, before the ceasefires, the Famine commemorations and the Celtic Tiger, during the rehearsals for my first play, Long Black Coat, we encountered a dilemma. The play was set vaguely in the future - sometime around 2020, though exactitude was not crucial. The problem had to do with costumes. How could we convey a coherent concept of moderately futuristic fashion without making too much of it?
I thought it would be fun to dress one of the characters, Jody, a man born around the mid-90s, in a white T-shirt bearing the iconic profile of Pádraig Pearse and the legend "1916-2016". The idea was to suggest a sea change in public thought between 1994 and the time of the play, insinuating that the centenary of 2016 had passed uncontroversially, accepted by the young for no more and no less than what it was. By communicating a sense that the memory of 1916 might have been neutralised, normalised, I also hoped to deliver a gentle, ironic poke to the mindset of Ireland 1994.
It wasn't supposed to be part of the play: Jody would just wear the T-shirt and no one would make any reference to it. But the meanings of the time won hands down. The audience became determined to discover the allegorical dimensions to which they imagined the T-shirt must relate. The critics, with their unerring eye for superficialities, drew all sorts of conclusions. The shirt became such a distraction that we dropped it after a couple of performances. Strangely, a dozen years later, the idea behind it seems about to be rehabilitated.
In the past week or so, it has become clearer that we may be awakening from the sleep of unreason that rendered us unconscious for a generation.
There were, of course, some good and understandable reasons why 1916 became discredited. Its appropriation and dishonouring by the Provisional IRA made it difficult to defend. But the necessary task of repudiation was taken too far when revisionists sought to convince us that the dream of 1916 was narrow-minded, insular, even racist - precisely the opposite of its true essence.
A core tenet of the ideology of modernity is that progress is always linear: every day in every way, things are getting better and better. In the last three decades of the 20th century, there was loose in this society a deeply damaging idea: that the past was backward and the present self-evidently enlightened. We had moved from darkness to light and must guard ourselves against slipping back.
But now we have a sense of a different chronology, not darkness followed by light, but light followed by darkness followed by the glimmer of a new dawn. In observing the other day that we owe the freedoms and prosperity of the present to the sacrifices of the 1916 patriots, President McAleese did not quite succeed in articulating what she must surely have been trying to say. She might have gone on to say that the emerging Ireland, with its multiplicity of people, faiths, colours and cultures, is a precise flowering of the promises of the Proclamation. For what we see with increasing clarity is that Easter 1916, so long diminished and condemned as reactionary and counterproductive, sowed the imaginative seeds of the multicultural society on the cusp of which we now stand. It is clear from what the 1916 leaders wrote and said that they hoped their gesture would mark the beginnings of a pluralist Ireland. For Pearse and the others, Irish nationhood excluded no one who wished to bear allegiance to the Irish nation, although this did not mean that Ireland was simply the postmodern sum of the influences thrown together on the island.
Throughout his writings, Pearse acknowledged the contradictory nature of nationhood: on the one hand it requires to be rooted in something pre-existing; on the other, it depends for its life and health on interaction and cross-fertilisation.
He quoted with approval Thomas Davis: "He who fancies some intrinsic objection to our nationality to lie in the co-existence of two languages, three or four great sects, and a dozen different races in Ireland, will learn that in Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium and America, different languages, creeds and races flourish kindly side by side."
For a generation it has been impossible to defend Pearse or draw attention to what he actually wrote and said. But a change is on the way and now we begin to see precisely who the reactionaries were.
Looking back in the clearing light of 2006, we observe a direct line from the Proclamation to the present, with those years of peevish self-hatred emerging as the true aberration. We embark upon the short 10-year journey to the centenary of our liberation with a new curiosity and a new attitude.