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Sat 04 Apr 2007How republican chic is replacing the religious relicCulture Shock Is our newfound fascination with the memorabilia of our revolutionary past a way of supplying by proxy the idealism that is being lost amid our wealth, asks Fintan O'Toole?In 1991, the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, I was working at the Abbey Theatre, one of the few public institutions to pay much attention to an event that was still widely regarded as at best awkward, at worst dangerous. We staged two plays together, Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, itself a reflection on the 10th anniversary of the Rising, and Tom Murphy's The Patriot Game, initially written for the BBC to mark the 50th anniversary and now radically reconfigured for the stage.