The debate over ethics and the role it might or might not play in economic life sparked by recent comments from President Higgins could be informed by a study of the Irish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson, who posited an objective source for our feelings of right and wrong.

At times the Irish question in its final parliamentary phase resembles a vast deserted asylum whose last inhabitants are its historians, who begin to fear that having arrived as visitors they have become confined as inmates.

We are, somewhat unsurprisingly, where we are. But how did we get there? And does our constitution have anything to do with it? It can be argued that the 1937 assemblage of principles has served us well. But who exactly has it served well? The property-owners or the people?

In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.

An anthology of the most important Dáil debates of the last sixty years covers vital economic matters, Northern Ireland and the nation’s ongoing difficulties with matters of sexual morality and their consequences.

There are stirrings in Ulster Loyalist groupings which may, if they mature, disprove the old cliché that Northern Protestants have no culture other than the Orange Order and Rangers football club.

The 1970s was a transitional decade for Ireland in which new social movements emerged and the state acted decisively against movements which were prepared to use lethal violence within the jurisdiction.

Irish socialism was divided and weak in the early decades of the twentieth century, while the axis of trade union solidarity ran through Dublin and Merseyside, not Dublin, Belfast and Cork.

In a sense, most of the old guard never fully understood, and certainly never accepted the consequences of, the process they had initiated. If they had, they would have released control of the Workers Party with good grace to De Rossa and the new guard. By not only attempting to hold onto power but reactivating IRA structures in order to do so they ensured both sides lost out in the long term.

French Catholic culture offered a supplementary world, and in some cases a focus for unfulfilled longings, for those who found Free State culture insufficient or repetitive. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross can strike today’s reader as brilliantly eccentric, an anomaly; it should instead be regarded as the finest analytical product of a culture we have almost forgotten.