Tony Blair's apology today to the 11 people wrongfully imprisoned for the 1974 IRA bomb attacks in Guildford and Woolwich was not the first time the prime minister has sought amends for Britain's role in Ireland.
Fresh to office and keen to get the IRA to renew their ceasefire after the Docklands bombing, he expressed regret for the British government inaction during the Irish potato famine. "Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy," he said in a message to a commemorative festival in County Cork.
Once the Saville inquiry has reached its conclusion, Blair is also expected to apologise for the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, when British paratroopers shot dead 14 unarmed civil rights marchers.
All these apologies raise a whole series of questions. Should today's politicians say sorry for the crimes of their predecessors? Why should Blair express regret for the potato famine while saying nothing about Britain's role in the slave trade? And is he doing anything more than indulge in political posturing?
The former German chancellor Willy Brandt made perhaps the most memorable show of regret when he fell to his knees in 1970 while laying a wreath at the memorial to the Jews murdered in the Warsaw ghetto. His remorse (which was dramatised movingly in Michael Frayn's brilliant play Democracy) was a part of postwar Germany's efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust.
In comparison Britain has done little to try to absolve itself from its imperial past – which involved at least one genocide, of the aboriginal Tasmanians – or role in the slave trade. Gordon Brown even told the Daily Mail, during his tour of Africa last month, that the "days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over". As Seumas Milne pointed out, Britain has never apologised for the empire.
So should Blair, or the Queen, apologise, as campaigning groups like Rendezvous of Victory demand? I'm not convinced. An apology for a crime perpetrated by our forefathers seems rather pointless. What is important is that we continue to examine our history, the good and the bad, and seek to understand our responsibility for the problems afflicting other parts of the world.
Blair is right, therefore, to examine Britain's role in the potato famine as it helps him to understand the roots of Irish republicanism and nationalism. Brown is wrong to discount Britain's imperial crimes in Africa – recently highlighted in two books about the Mau Mau rebellion – for they are causes of Africa's poverty and instability. Indeed they are a scar on the conscience of the world.
