My feeling is that time and distance can only dull things so much. I found it really hard to read accounts of the Mongol conquests... and yet the consensus opinion is that nobody would get upset about them today: for me, the perfect analytical distance maintained by western historians makes them all the more horrific.

I agree with you about the history of Britain's occupation in Ireland - every single move seems calculated to cause more harm - but it's basically the colonial playbook. Has anyone ever got it right, or are the 'successful cases' just ones where the voices of the victims have been completely obliterated?