I am writing about life in "dev's Ireland". More accurately, I am writing about the everyday lives of the small Irish farmer from the 1930s - 1960s and I wanted to convey the point that there is a tendency today, especially in media and film, to present that time as irredeemably dark and those people as irredeemably backward. Of course it wasn't. There was good and there was bad but the prevailing attitude is that we should slam the door shut on the past an doing so it automatically becomes something bad and failed compared to our enlightened present. I was circling and circling the idea and then found that C.S Lewis of all people had coined the term for me - "chronological snobbery". He defines it as, "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Rebutting this, he quite reasonably requests that, “You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realisation that our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” This is what is entirely absent in modern Ireland dealing with it's recent past. Dispassionate inquiry to determine what elements were "refuted" and what elements were not but were thrown out anyway. This hard break with the past puts out grandparents into museums. It makes their lives and beliefs things to be looked at from afar and with distain, not things to be brought into the present. There is a concerted effort to kill continuity and continuity is key to identity. Heritage is what makes us uniquely Irish. When we make a hard cut between ourselves and our ancestors we open ourselves up to be absorbed into the cultures of others who do care about their heritage, or it simply makes playthings of us for corporations. "Chronological snobbery" - an important term.