The world we have known is being upended

History was my favourite subject in school. As a child, if you left a history book on the ground anywhere near me, it wouldn’t be there long.

When people tell me they find history boring I can’t get my head around it. Reading history is a more interesting form of travel. You get to visit all sorts of worlds that look a lot different and are very exotic. Still full of humans, though. While the backdrop and the technology may change, the human themes are all there. Greed, power, jealousy, heroism, struggle, cowardice, betrayal, leadership – it’s all there in a history book.

So in my youth, I would read any history book you give me. Any time, any place, you might say, and that was exactly what fascinated me. The characters, the battles, the struggles, the ideas, all the drama – both the details and the grand sweep of different eras and different times.

And when I was a boy, history as a subject was taught in terms of eras. The Classical Era. The Middle Ages. The Early Modern Period. The Modern Age. What was taught in school was the main events of those eras, and how societies were constructed and organised within them. And the really dramatic bits in history were always those major events that led to new eras. As you can imagine, they were more fun to tell stories about than live in.

For example, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the West in the 5th Century AD was a crucial historical moment. The deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor, the fantastically named Romulus Augustulus, in 476 was considered a major turning point in history, the moment we moved from the classical world to the medieval world.

In the Middle Ages, we learned about the role of the Church. We also learned about how an economic system called Feudalism was set up and operated.

Feudalism was simple enough really. A man in a metal outfit on a horse rides into an area. He uses his sword to terrify and intimidate the local people, who he calls peasants. They agree to pay him rent so he doesn’t kill them, and he uses that money to build a castle. When he sits on a big chair in that castle, he calls himself a Lord for his trouble. And he pays a fella to write poems and songs about how sound a guy he is. He then encounters someone stronger than him and rather than fight, he swears loyalty to him and calls him King – and gives that King a cut of what he got from the peasants.

Some historians would call that too simple, but you get the gist. You can see why Michael Davitt called his account of getting rid of the landlords ‘The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland’, though it happened much later in these parts than in the rest of Western Europe.

There, it was the Renaissance and the Reformation that saw the end of that medieval world. It happened because people who could read and write and think for themselves ended it. And those people made money in new ways and so they could safely mock those lads on their chairs in the Castles, or in the Churches.

And then came the French Revolution, itself triggered by the transformation of how humans thought about themselves in the world, in what was called The Enlightenment, which brought about what we call the modern world. A lot has happened since then, most of it explained by industrialisation, but which also involved colonialism, and communism and fascism, and democracy and the idea of a group of people being a ‘nation’. The two hot World Wars and the Cold War were the defining events of the latter part of that time.

And that was the period I was most interested in and knew most about – the 20th Century, and especially what led to World War II. If I was on a quiz show, the 1930s would be my specialist topic. It never occurred to me back then how relevant studying that period would become. Recent events are turning my specialist topic into the General Knowledge round.

Up to recently, we were all working on the basis that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of that era in many ways. For the last thirty years, we thought the events of 1989-'90 meant the arrival of the liberal globalised era. An era that emphasised co-operation rather than confrontation; an era that downplayed nationalism and emphasised what united people rather than divided them; an era in which trade was meant to increase the wealth of all, rather than become a scrap at national borders over who got the most pie.

Events on our screens every day are changing that calculation.

In times like these, we can really see why some knowledge of history is useful. Because when these era changes happened in the past, nobody living in that time knew exactly what it meant or where it would lead. It was only afterwards that people could figure it out. But if you study history, you can try and spot parallels to previous times where there have been big changes. And that allows you to at least consider whether what we are experiencing today has the potential to be as big a deal as the fall of the Roman Empire or the French Revolution.

That’s big and heady stuff. And hard for anyone – myself very much included – to get your head around. But if we try and break it down a little bit, some things are clear.

What we know is that the basis on which our world has been organised since at least 1990 is being turned upside down. How exactly, and to what extent, and what might replace it, we can’t be sure of. How it will affect us we can only guess. But we can say some things with certainty.

Ireland in 1990 was dirt poor. Ireland in 2025 – for all our challenges – is far from that. The island of Ireland in 1990 was wrecked by two forms of nationalism killing one another over the same piece of ground. Ireland in 2025, at least up until recently, had developed the idea that living in peace with one another is more important than standing on the head of the other crowd. That’s the basic principle of the Good Friday Agreement.

So, we can reasonably conclude that the era of the last 35 years has been structured in our favour. How can we describe the elements of that era? Simple enough really: living in a secure Europe with a single market connecting it has transformed the lived experience of us all. Positively.

But what does all that mean? I guess it means this. In our public debate, the first thing we need to do is to identify if the era we have lived through - and prospered in - is truly ending. And if it is, we then have to decide what bits of it are worth defending, and what that means in practice. That’s big stuff, and it requires and deserves some big – and even historical – thinking.