We Irish people have suffered 800 years of British oppression so we know what it is like to have oppressors in your country – so writes an anonymous correspondent to the al-Jazeera website this week, apparently in support of British hostage Ken Bigley.
This strikes me as highly unlikely. With an average life expectancy of 76 years an Irish person would need to be spectacularly unlucky to experience one 10th as long a period of oppression and even then it would only be oppression of a type Iraqis would hardly rate above an inconvenience.
Sadly the writer is not alone among his compatriots in a pathetic need to take the past personally.
One can only wonder how African UN delegates feel when yet another representative of the world's second-fattest country stands up to empathise over the horrors of famine, or how Tony Blair managed to keep a straight face while apologising for something which happened a century before anyone alive in Britain or Ireland today was born.
Nor is such underdog-one-upmanship a uniquely Irish failing, as the al-Jazeera website itself demonstrates.
Both columnists and contributors to this 21st century media platform are still bleating on about the crusades as if they happened yesterday when they happened more than 900 years ago and in any case were hardly an unprecedented intrusion upon the three small patches of Syria briefly afflicted.
Yet, so pickled with the vinegar of bitterness has this chip on Islam's shoulder become that four years ago the Pope felt obliged to issue a back-dated apology on behalf of his predecessors.
During a 'Day of Pardon' Mass the Pontiff politely glossed over some awkward details, such as the wilful misinterpretation of papal edicts used by land-hungry Norman noblemen to justify the first crusades or the heroic efforts of subsequent popes to rein in the rampaging faithful or the key role played by the Byzantine popes in stopping most crusaders at the Bosphorus and neutralising the handful who made it any further. This was because the Pope's apology, like Tony Blair's 1997 potato famine apology, was not offered in the hope of reconciliation through better understanding of historical differences.
Such apologies are offered in the hope that, by telling the self-righteously resentful exactly what they want to hear, they might finally shut up for long enough to focus on addressing present differences instead.
There is little evidence to suggest that this strategy works.
Nobody who complained about the crusades before the papal apology stopped complaining about them afterwards, although the Israelis did start complaining about the apology.
Seven years after Tony Blair expressed regret for the death of a million people who would all be long dead by now anyway, Ireland's armchair republicans seem angrier than ever.
So it is depressing to learn that Irish unionism has embarked upon a similar search for 'sorry'.
The pro-union Reform Movement, currently making headlines and attracting prominent supporters in Dublin, proposes radical and in some cases reasonable changes to the Republic's constitution, culture and relationship with the United Kingdom.
But it has also been unable to resist a trip in the tribal time machine.
At the Reform Movement's annual conference last week well known speakers made reference to the ethnic cleansing of Protestants from west Cork during the 1920s, the boycott of protestant businesses after partition, the persecution of Protestants in mixed marriages during the 1950s and other grudges from beyond the grave.
Former taoiseach John Bruton even managed a detour to a parallel universe where the 1916 rising never happened and everything all worked out much better in the end.
Such speculation always reminds me of a T-shirt I once saw for sale – 'Archduke Ferdinand found alive' it read. 'Twentieth century a mistake'.
Reform Movement member Bruce Arnold has since described public reaction to the conference as "snide, antagonistic and negative". In fact, apart from a tiresomely predictable republican letter-writing campaign, the Irish public and most of the Irish establishment have responded to the Reform Movement with patient resignation.
After all, this is how every political group positions itself for debate today, casting back to whatever yesterday will confer upon it the sacred mantle of victimhood.
But once everyone has apologised to everybody for everything that has ever happened, then what?
There are three levels of historical awareness.
Level one is blissful ignorance.
We would all be much happier, or at least equally miserable for better reasons, if a magnet could be waved over our heads erasing everything we know about why we must hate our neighbours for things they did to us before we or they were born.
But no such magic magnet exists and so most people are stuck at level two, with just enough historical awareness to flatter their accident-of-birth agenda but not quite enough to question it.
Finally, there is level three, the black belt of historical awareness, possessed by those who realise that every useful acre of the earth's surface has been won and lost 100 times over since the dawn of mankind... so analysing the last few rolls of the dice for some moral victory in the here and now is pointless.
The Reform Movement thinks it is a level three exercise but it is in serious danger of becoming just another level two exercise – an intellectual cousin to the Ulster-Scots farce, countering republican history with unionist history.
A universal and perfect understanding of the past would be a wonderful thing.
But in the real world, the best way to get on with it is surely for all of us, British and Irish, to simply get over it.
