It was intended as a symbol of national resurrection but also to say to my generation and those that followed that we belonged to an unbroken line stretching back into a glorious Celtic past.

 

Our leader stressed our difference to the departed British. The idea of an ancient people of one faith was central to our identity. The real Irish were Gaelic and Catholic. 

 

In the Ireland of the mid 1960s, I knew little of an outside world or of the Ulster Protestants with their British identity. They seemed to me an alien tribe, marching to what the poet Louis MacNeice called “the voodoo of the Orange drums”. But a decade later, in the mid 1970s, the story of Ireland I was being taught had changed. School was no longer an echo chamber of the like-minded. In the shadow of the northern Troubles, the old certainties would not do. We were being asked to imagine a more complex set of Irish identities. 

 

-The idea of Irishness, of what it meant to be an Irishman that you grew up with and that I grew up with was pretty simple, wasn't it?

 

-I suppose it was a standard version. It was a republican tradition. And you didn't see outside that. We all marched to that song and to that drum, you know. It took a long time to change it.

 

-When you came in here to teach people like me, did you have a sense, a feeling that you had to broaden our minds?

 

-I suppose what I was trying to do was to show that there were other ways of looking at maybe the same thing. I always remember giving an essay, you know,  “Carson, Irish Patriot”.

 

-The great Unionist loyalist leader in the North?

 

-I left it at that.