Historical Notes: Who is Patrick Pearse? What is Wolfe Tone?

HOW LITTLE we know about the Irish, yet how much they know about us.

It is mostly a matter of geography. We, on the mainland, are more central to the European land mass. Our connections, by plane, boat, or train, are south and east. If we go west it's right over the rainy little island, high up "across the pond". And if the Atlantic is the pond, what is Ireland?

Their connections, on the other hand, are generally through us - the hop to Stansted or Heathrow a necessary prelude to going on somewhere else. And a man who comes from Inishmore is likely to find better-paid work laying cat's-eyes on Home Counties highways than as a barman in Dublin.

Then there's the little matter of the media. Who, on the mainland, outside the expat Irish community, reads the Irish Times or Independent? Who knows of those celebrated columnists Fintan O'Toole, Mary Holland or Kevin Myers? Who watches, or has ever even heard of RTE, Fair City, The Late Late Show, Gay Byrne, Pat Kenny, or Charlie Bird? We know more about suburban Melbourne than we do about suburban Dublin.

Consider sport. Who over here knows of Galway's surprising triumph over Kildare in this year's football (Gaelic football, that is) or Offaly's "backdoor" victory over Kilkenny in the hurling? We're more likely to be following American football. Yet most Irishmen have a favourite English football team they follow.

Our contemporary ignorance of our sister island is deepened by our - in general - historical ignorance. Most educated people know the rough outline of the northern "Troubles". Burntollet, Bloody Sunday, Sunningdale, hunger strikes, Brighton bomb, Hillsborough Agreement, Enniskillen, first ceasefire, Canary Wharf, second ceasefire, Omagh. They can put a face and a voice to Trimble, Paisley, Hume, Adams; more recently perhaps to Seamus Mallon, Martin McGuinness and David Ervine. But how many really have a clue about the twisted roots of this ancient fight?

Few English friends knew the answers to the most elementary questions about Irish history. What happened in 1798? Wasn't that the French Revolution? said one. Was it the hunger strikes? said another. Who or what was Wolfe Tone? I asked. Another blank stare. It was a kind of Irish tweed, I elucidated. "Oh right." Parnell, generally, did ring a bell; O'Connell, surprisingly, didn't. The date 1916, yes, "but only through Yeats". Henry Grattan, Robert Emmet, Patrick Pearse, forget it. We were never taught that stuff, were we? And for a good reason.

Learning about the long-ignored grievances of Irish history first-hand, not just in the museums of the capital, but in the quirkier, often more passionate displays of Enniscorthy, Cashel or Derry, made me into a doubly foolish figure on my return to the glitzy European trendfest that is contemporary Dublin. This eye-opening history is stuff your fellow-drinkers grew up with and generally left well behind as adolescents. One well-known contemporary Dublin writer told me that she was made, as a child, to leave the table for saying that Patrick Pearse was "a poof". Nowadays she laughs as she remembers the reception she got for such a shockingly sacrilegious statement, just as the cycle couriers who snooze under the trees on St Stephen's Green happily nickname the statue of the great Wolfe Tone "Tone Henge".

No, the newness of my understanding of Irish matters was not so much shameful as utterly ridiculous. I'd have done better to shut up about it; bone up instead on Bono, Boyzone, B'witched or that now-somewhat-passe contemporary group, the Wolfe Tones. To the begrudging denizens of the flashy Dublin world known as "the Murphia", an openly apostate Englishman is as much a buffoon as the most preposterous stage Irishman is to us.

Mark McCrum is the author of 'The Craic' (Gollancz, pounds 11.99)