"History that challenges comfortable assumptions about the group is painful, but it is, as Michael Howard said, a mark of maturity. In recent years, Ireland has witnessed a major revision of its history in part because it is prosperous, successful, and self-confident, and the old stories of victimhood no longer have the resonance they once did. As a result, the old, simple picture of Catholic Irish nationalists versus the Ulster Protestants and their English supporters and the two separate histories that each had is now being amended to show a more complex history, and some cherished myths are being destroyed. In World War I, it used to be believed, only the Protestants fought. The nationalists were engaged, depending on which way you looked at it, either in treason or in a struggle for liberty. In fact, 210,000 volunteers from Ireland, a majority of them Catholics and Irish nationalists, fought for the British against the Germans. The Easter rising was not the unified movement of all Irish patriots of nationalist myth but the result, at least in part, of internal power struggles. As the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, said in a recent lecture in London, “Where previously our history has been characterized by a plundering of the past for things to separate and differentiate us from one the other, our future now holds the optimistic possibility that Ireland will become a better place, where we will not only develop new relationships but will more comfortably revisit the past and find there ... elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately overlooked.”"