How fragile Irish history seems as it is rolled, like a precious egg, from one nest to another, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
If you were listening to RTÉ Radio 1's Livelineprogramme on Monday or Tuesday of this week you would imagine that Protestant farmers Richard and Abraham Pearson had been murdered at their home in Offaly last weekend.
The passions that were unleashed - snorts of derision, a phone call terminated when someone hung up in exasperation, the hesitancy in the voices of people talking about ancient family history, the confident certainties that streamed from all sides - were shockingly fresh. These passions and this energy surprised even the makers of Liveline, who are used to the Irish public in full cry.
Yet Richard and Abraham Pearson did not die last weekend. They died 86 years ago, in June 1921.
Now you would think that the deaths of two young men - Richard was 24 and his brother Abraham was 19 - so long ago would be easily dealt with by citizens of a modern society which was born out of a violent past.
The two brothers were approached while out saving hay on their farm by a party of up to 30 IRA men. They were taken back to the farmhouse where they were shot and died much later, in front of their mother and sisters and one younger brother. Their father and a fourth brother were away from the farm on that day.
The reaction of normal people to this sorry story will naturally be one of regret - that the shootings of the Pearsons was a terrible thing, even by the standards of that terrible time, and should never have happened.
But most would also agree that it happened a long time ago and now the best thing to do is to acknowledge the tragedy and let them rest in peace.
In fact, this does seem to be the reaction of most people who have heard about the Pearson killings, which have now become the subject of a book, a television programme, of debate in the letters column of this newspaper and now on Liveline.
But Irish history is so fragile to some, and so sacred, that they confidently assert that the Pearson brothers must have been British spies, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, not pacifists at all but given to taking pot shots at IRA men, arrogant towards their Catholic neighbours - in other words, asking for it.
It appears impossible for these people, standing guard over Irish history, even to countenance the possibility that the Pearsons were innocent men.
And so we had the strange sound of Joe Duffy speculating on the question of whether you can have a court martial without the defendants (that would be the Pearson brothers) being present, and whether members of the Cooneyite sect - to which the Pearsons belonged - would have even owned a shotgun, considering that the Cooneyites were widely believed to have been pacifist.
All this on a radio programme going out live on a busy weekday in November 2007. This group of people - which seems to be quite small - seems happy to talk and argue tirelessly on the most minor details of the Pearson killings in their efforts to justify them.
The invaluable service that they are providing is that they are so annoying, so patronising and so irrational that they are succeeding where 86 long years of silence have failed: they are making modern Protestants so furious that they are ready - almost, almost ready - to come out and talk about their families' experiences in the War of Independence and the Civil War.
These are not the stories of the Big House burning, with the paintings and the piano on the lawn. These are the stories of quite ordinary people - I imagine mostly rural people, but this might not be correct - who were pushed out of the new State.
Thousands of us enjoyed the Hidden Historytelevision documentary about the Pearson killings simply because we had never heard about them before.
It aroused the suspicion in us that there are other stories like it - and we have no way of knowing how many, or how few, there might be - burning underground, stories that live on in the families of those who suffered, passed on in the deep privacy of family life so that, as one man told me last week: "It's as if it would be disloyal to talk about it."
He meant that it was as if it would be disloyal to talk about it in public. Within his family such matters were not discussed routinely, but only when he and his father were feeling particularly close to each other.
They became a family secret, in a country too full of family secrets. And so these stories, these whispers, are lost to the larger, Catholic population - perhaps forever.
It might be time now for the larger, Catholic population to ask itself: are we happy about this? Would we like to look at this small slice of our history, not in order to condemn men and women long dead, but because it is interesting and true?