Commemoration will always involve exclusion, a discussion about the commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising heard.

“Who owns 2016” was the topic of a group discussion at the Dalkey Book Festival on Saturday.

The panel of Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, historian Diarmaid Ferriter and BBC Radio 4 journalist Andrea Catherwood was chaired by RTÉ presenter Olivia O’Leary.

O’Leary said there was a feeling among many people that the Rising belonged to certain people and not others.

“I still feel an ambiguity, particularly among people from a Fine Gael background about 1916. It relates to the pride in relation to those who took part in it and the slight worry about the connection with the violence of 1916, and what happened in Northern Ireland,” she said.

When asked by O’Leary how we should celebrate 1916, Fintan O’Toole said he did not think “celebrate” is the right word to use .

O’Toole recalled being in the Abbey Theatre in 1991 for the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

“Nobody was doing anything and it wasn’t being marked. There was a sense that it was shameful, that it’s toxic and we don’t talk about it. There’s a danger now of reacting against that now and saying we have to celebrate it,” he said.

“I worry about the idea of celebration because it was a violent event. What happened in 1916 was that a lot of people died. Most of those who died did not choose to do so. The vast majority of people who died in 1916 did not sacrifice themselves, they hadn’t any say in the matter.

“Its important we get away from the idea of celebration and talk about remembrance, acknowledgment, engagement with what happened but also about the future.”

Historian Diarmuid Ferriter said going back to 1966, the 50th year since the Rising, people were uncomfortable about celebrating “and they weren’t just Fine Gaelers.”

“Commemoration has always been about exclusion; there are people controlling the narrative and there are people who are squeezed out of it,” he said.

Ferriter said Sean Lemass, a Fianna Fail Taoiseach in 1966, was uncomfortable with the idea of celebrating the Rising.

“We know from the files in the national archives that Sean Lemass is trying to put breaks on what he described as the excesses of celebrating the Rising. He said ‘We have to forget the Ireland of the Sean Bhean Bhocht and think of the Ireland of the technological expert’ which is a typical Lemass quote.”

Catherwood said there was a “direct link” between 1916 Easter Rising and the Troubles.

“There’s an absolute clear and direct link between what was going on with the Home Rule Bill and the fact that the British Government eventually gave in to the Ulster Volunteers. It put off a problem which is still haunting Northern Ireland today.”

O’Toole said former Fine Gael Taoiseach John Bruton “vastly exaggerates the potential of Home Rule and the extent to which the Ireland of 1916 was a democratic society.”

Last year, Mr Bruton told an audience at the Irish Embassy to mark the centenary of the 1914 Home Rule Act, the battles fought in 1916 led directly to the violence of the War of Independence and Civil War that followed.

“If there hadn’t been the introduction of violence into nationalism in that demonstrably dramatic way in Easter week ... there wouldn’t have been a Civil War,” he said at the time.

“He also hugely exaggerates the notion that 1916 nationalists invented violence. This was a Europe that was saturated in blood. The level of barbarism into which Europe was sunk is not due to groups of Irish nationalists, its to do with the empires. The big powers and empires sent young men out to be slaughtered in enormous numbers with absolutely no compunction about it,” O’Toole said.

“The idea there was some legitimate democratic context in which this terrible violence took place just doesn’t hold water. Historians have done a great job of reconstructing for us the world in which this event happened.”

Ferriter said while there are official state events, commemoration of 1916 will “be driven on the ground.”

The point of commemoration is to close the gap between the mythological tales of violence and the actuality of it,” said Mr O’Toole.

Belfast born BBC Radio 4 journalist Andrea Catherwood said 40 per cent of the British Army were Irish in 1900 but there involvement has been airbrushed out of history.

“The scale of the Irish input into the first world war has been air brushed out of Irish history and was for a long time. When you have that vacuum or lack of history, someone will write it for you,” she said.

Catherwood said in Northern Ireland the First World War and the Somme are being claimed by a strong, loyalist minority there.

“1916 is considered to be on one side the UVF fighting in the Somme and on the other side the IRA fighting in Dublin in the rising. There were a lot more Irish Catholics fighting in the British army at that time, but that has been airbrushed out,” she said.

“In the North, what happened with Irish Catholics has virtually been written out of history and there is this idea that it is just the Ulster Protestants who fought and died in 1916 or between 1914-1918, and a lot of this has to do with the way it has been commemorated,” she said.