A strange, haunting, ever-returning image of Ireland is exhumation. The title of Hilary Mantel’s novel Bring Up The Bodies is surely one that ought to have been nabbed by an Irish writer. It is what we are still doing, literally and figuratively.

Up in Faughart, Co Louth, they have been digging for the body of the undercover British soldier Robert Nairac, killed and secretly buried by the IRA in 1977. Nairac is one the last four of the Disappeared. Along with the remains of Joseph Lynskey, Columba McVeigh and Seamus Maguire his corpse, never laid properly to rest, haunts the bogs and forests of the borderlands.

Over in Tuam, a team of forensic archaeologists is preparing for the excavation of the burial site of the 796 children who died in the mother and baby home. They are mostly in the defunct chambers of the home’s sewage system.

This act of recovery, made possible by the heroic work of local historian Catherine Corless, has been described by Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman as “one of the most complicated forensic excavations in the world”. A baby has about 300 bones, so the task will involve the recovery of around a quarter of a million individual pieces of human skeletons – tiny fragments of the lives Ireland deemed so illegitimate as to be not worth living, so negligible as to be not worth mourning.

But these are the literal embodiments of a much wider metaphorical unearthing. Contemporary Ireland cannot seem to........

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