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In a programme note to his play Making History, Friel said that 'history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discourse and that an historical text is a kind of literary artifact.' Approached in this context, two plays focusing on a significant date of Irish history, the sixteenth century Anglo Irish relations revolving around Hugh O ' Neill, the Earl of Tyrone offer two different versions of the same historical period. The O'Neill written by Thomas Kilroy and Making History by his contemporary playwright Brian Friel. Both playwrights drew upon Sean O'Faolain's biography, The O 'Neill (1942). Kilroy focuses on O'Neill's dilemma between his loyalty to his traditional Gaelic heritage and his commitment to the new modern order. In Friel's play, O'Neill is portrayed as a leader who is aware that he is making history. Discussing history openly with Lombard, the historian who is recording the moment, O'Neill reads history differently from him and suggests to Lombard to put Mabel, his wife, at the centre of his history of O'Neill. However, in the historical myth, Lombard is creating she remains peripheral and O'Neill becomes a hero of counter-reformation. It is Friel in his own re-making of history who will reinstate her in the centre about four hundred years later. This re-making has, in its turn, 'metabiologically' created an atmosphere leading to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The paper will focus on this multiple fictive and real functions of history as truth and mythmaking in the plays mentioned above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]