FEBRUARY/MARCH 2006
"Their deaths rise far above the
clamour - their voices insistent still"
President Mary McAleese's speech at UCC yesterday
where she was addressing a conference titled: The long
revolution: the 1916 Rising in context.
HOW GLAD I AM that I was not the mother of adult children
in January 1916. Would my 20-year-old son and his friends
be among the tens of thousands in British uniform heading
for the Somme, or would they be among the few, training
in secret with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or with
the Irish Volunteers?
Would I, like so many mothers, bury my son this fateful
year in some army's uniform, in a formidably unequal
country where I have no vote or voice, where many young
men are destined to be cannon fodder, and women widows?
How many times did those men and women wonder what the
world would be like in the longer run as a result of the
outworking of the chaos around them, this
context we struggle to comprehend these years later?
I am grateful that I and my children live in the longer
run; for while we could speculate endlessly about what
life might be like if the Rising had not happened, or if
the Great War had not been fought, we who live in these
times know and inhabit the world that revealed itself
because they happened.
April 1916, and the world is as big a mess as it is
possible to imagine.
The ancient monarchies, Austria, Russia and Germany,
which plunged Europe into war, are on the brink of
violent destruction. China is slipping into civil war. On
the Western Front, Verdun is taking a dreadful toll and,
in the east, Britain is only weeks away from its worst
defeat in history. It's a fighting world where war is
glorified and death in uniform seen as the ultimate act
of nobility, at least for one's own side.
And on the 24th of April, 1916, it was Easter Monday in
Dublin, the second city of the extensive British empire
which long included among its captured dominions the four
provinces of Ireland. At four minutes past noon, from the
steps of Dublin's General Post Office, the president of
the provisional government, Patrick Pearse, read the
Proclamation of Independence.
The bald facts are well known and reasonably
non-contentious. Their analysis and interpretation have
been both continuous and controversial ever since. Even
after 90 years, a discussion such as we are embarked upon
here is likely to provoke someone. But in a free and
peaceful democracy, where complex things get figured out
through public debate, that is as it should be.
With each passing year, post-Rising Ireland reveals
itself, and we who are of this strong independent and
high-achieving Ireland would do well to ponder the extent
to which today's freedoms, values, ambitions and success
rest on that perilous and militarily doomed undertaking
of nine decades ago, and on the words of that
Proclamation.
Clearly its fundamental idea was freedom, or in the words
of the Proclamation, "the right of the Irish people
to the ownership of Ireland". But it was also a very
radical assertion of the kind of republic a liberated
Ireland should become: "The Republic guarantees
religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens and declares its
resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the
whole nation and all of its parts cherishing all of the
children of the nation equally. . ."
It spoke of a parliament "representative of the
whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of
all her men and women"- this at a time when
Westminster was still refusing to concede the vote to
women on the basis that to do so would be to give in to
terrorism.
To our 21st-century ears these words seem a good fit for
our modern democracy. Yet 90 years ago, even 40 years
ago, they seemed hopelessly naive, and their long-term
intellectual power was destined to be overlooked, as
interest was focused on the emotionally charged political
power of the Rising and the renewed nationalist fervour
it evoked.
In the longer term the apparent naivety of the words of
the Proclamation has filled out into a widely shared
political philosophy of equality and social inclusion in
tune with the contemporary spirit of democracy, human
rights, equality and anti-
confessionalism. Read now in the light of the liberation
of women, the development of social partnership, the
focus on rights and equality, the ending of the special
position of the Catholic Church, to mention but a few, we
see a much more coherent, and wider-reaching,
intellectual event than may have previously been noted.
The kind of Ireland the heroes of the Rising aspired to
was based on an inclusivity that, famously, would
"cherish all the children of the nation equally -
oblivious of the differences which have divided a
minority from the majority in the past".
That culture of inclusion is manifestly a strong
contemporary impulse working its way today through
relationships with the North, with unionists, with the
newcomers to our shores, with our marginalised, and with
our own increasing diversity.
For many years the social agenda of the Rising
represented an unrealisable aspiration, until now that
is, when our prosperity has created a real opportunity
for ending poverty and promoting true equality of
opportunity for our people and when those idealistic
words have started to become a
lived reality and a determined ambition.
There is a tendency for powerful and pitiless elites to
dismiss with damning labels those who oppose them. That
was probably the source of the accusation that 1916 was
an exclusive and sectarian enterprise. It was never that,
though ironically it was an accurate description of what
the Rising opposed.
In 1916, Ireland was a small nation attempting to gain
its independence from one of Europe's many powerful
empires.
In the 19th century an English radical described the
occupation of India as a system of "outdoor
relief" for the younger sons of the upper classes.
The administration of Ireland was not very different,
being carried on as a process of continuous conversation
around the fire in the Kildare Street Club by past pupils
of public schools. It was no way to run a country, even
without the glass ceiling for Catholics.
Internationally, in 1916, Planet Earth was a world of
violent conflicts and armies. It was a world where
countries operated on the principle that the strong would
do what they wished and the weak would endure what they
must. There were few, if any, sophisticated mechanisms
for resolving territorial conflicts. Diplomacy existed to
regulate conflict, not to resolve it.
It was in that context that the leaders of the Rising saw
their investment in the assertion of Ireland's
nationhood. They were not attempting to establish an
isolated and segregated territory of "ourselves
alone", as the phrase "sinn féin" is so
often mistranslated, but a free country in which we
ourselves could take responsibility for our own destiny,
a country that could stand up for itself, have its own
distinct perspective, pull itself up by its bootstraps,
and be counted with respect among the free nations of
Europe and the world.
A Google search for the phrase "narrow
nationalism" produces about 28,000 results. It is
almost as though some people cannot use the word
"nationalism" without qualifying it by the word
"narrow". But that does not make it correct.
I have a strong impression that to its enemies, both in
Ireland and abroad, Irish nationalism looked like a
version of the imperialism it opposed, a sort of
"imperialism lite" through which Ireland would
attempt to be what the great European powers were - the
domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over
others.It is easy to see how they might have fallen into
that mistaken view, but mistaken they were.
Irish nationalism, from the start, was a multilateral
enterprise, attempting to escape the dominance of a
single class and, in our case a largely foreign class,
into a wider world.
Those who think of Irish nationalists as narrow miss, for
example, the membership many of them had of a universal
church which brought them into contact with a vastly
wider segment of the world than that open to even the
most travelled imperial English gentleman.
Many of the leaders had experience of the Americas, and
in particular of north America with its vibrant
attachment to liberty and democracy. Others of them were
active participants in the international working-class
movements of their day. Whatever you might think of those
involvements, they were universalist and global rather
than constricted and blinkered.
To the revolutionaries, the Rising looked as if it
represented a commitment to membership of the wider
world. For too long they had chafed at the narrow focus
of a unilateral empire which acted as it saw fit and
resented having to pay any attention to the needs of
others.
In 1973 a free Irish Republic would show by joining the
European Union that membership of a union was never our
problem, but rather involuntary membership of a union in
which we had no say.
Those who are surprised by Ireland's enthusiasm for the
European Union, and think of it as a repudiation of our
struggle for independence, fail to see Ireland's historic
engagement with the European Continent and the Americas.
Arguably Ireland's involvement in the British
Commonwealth up to the Dominion Conference of 1929
represents an attempt to promote Ireland's involvement
with the wider world even as it negotiated further
independence from Britain.
Eamon de Valera's support for the League of Nations, our
later commitment to the United Nations and our long
pursuit of membership of the Common Market are all of a
piece with our earlier engagements with Europe and the
world which were so often frustrated by our proximity to
a strong imperial power - a power which feared our
autonomy, and whose global imperialism ironically was
experienced as narrowing and restrictive to those who
lived under it.
We now can see that promoting the European ideal
dovetails perfectly with the ideals of the men and women
of 1916.
Paradoxically in the longer run, 1916 arguably set in
motion a calming of old conflicts with new concepts and
confidence which, as they mature and take shape, stand us
in good stead today.
Our relationship with Britain, despite the huge toll of
the Troubles, has changed utterly. In this, the year of
the 90th anniversary of the Rising, the Irish and British
governments, co-equal sovereign colleagues in Europe, are
now working side by side as mutually respectful partners,
helping to develop a stable and peaceful future in
Northern Ireland based on the Good Friday agreement.
That agreement asserts equal rights and equal
opportunities for all Northern Ireland's citizens. It
ends for ever one of the Rising's most difficult
legacies, the question of how the people of this island
look at partition.
The constitutional position of Northern Ireland within
the United Kingdom is accepted overwhelmingly by the
electorate North and South. That position can only be
changed by the electorate of Northern Ireland expressing
its view exclusively through the ballot-box.
The future could not be clearer. Both unionists and
nationalists have everything to gain from treating each
other with exemplary courtesy and generosity, for each
has a vision for the future to sell, and a coming
generation, more educated than any before, freer from
conflict than any before, more democratised and
globalised than any before, will have choices to make,
and those choices will be theirs.
This year, the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, and
of the Somme, has the potential to be a pivotal year for
peace and reconciliation, to be a time of shared pride
for the divided grandchildren of those who died, whether
at Messines or in Kilmainham.
The climate has changed dramatically since last
September's historic announcement of IRA decommissioning.
As that new reality sinks in, the people of Northern
Ireland will see the massive potential for their future,
and that of their children, that is theirs for the
taking.
Casting my mind forward to 90 years from now, I have no
way of knowing what the longer term may hold, but I do
know the past we are determined to escape from and I know
the ambitions we have for that longer term.
To paraphrase the Proclamation, we are resolved to
"pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole
island". We want to consign inequality and poverty
to history. We want to live in peace. We want to be
comfortable with, and accommodating of, diversity. We
want to become the best friends, neighbours and partners
we can be to the citizens of Northern Ireland.
In the hearts of those who took part in the Rising, in
what was then an undivided Ireland, was an unshakeable
belief that, whatever our personal political or religious
perspectives, there was huge potential for an Ireland in
which loyalist, republican, unionist, nationalist,
Catholic, Protestant, atheist, agnostic pulled together
to build a shared future, owned by one and all.
That's a longer term to conjure with but, for now,
reflecting back on the sacrifices of the heroes of 1916
and the gallingly unjust world that was their context, I
look at my own context and its threads of connection to
theirs.
I am humbled, excited and grateful to live in one of the
world's most respected, admired and successful
democracies, a country with an identifiably distinctive
voice in Europe and in the world, an Irish republic, a
sovereign independent state, to use the words of the
Proclamation. We are where freedom has brought us.
A tough journey but more than vindicated by our
contemporary context. Like every nation that had to
wrench its freedom from the reluctant grip of empire, we
have our idealistic and heroic founding fathers and
mothers, our Davids to their Goliaths.
That small band who proclaimed the Rising inhabited a sea
of death, an unspeakable time of the most profligate
worldwide waste of human life. Yet their deaths rise far
above the clamour - their voices insistent still.
Enjoy the conference and the rows it will surely rise.
©Irish Times
The Rows that Surely Did Rise !!!
Repackaging and sanitising the
Rising an impossible task
It was essentially nascent fascist sentiments which drove
the leaders of the 1916 Rising, writes Lord Laird.
Exactly 12 months ago in a television interview President
Mary McAleese was comparing the unionist community with
the Nazis. A year on, in a speech delivered at University
College Cork, Mrs McAleese is endeavouring to persuade us
that the 1916 Rising was not sectarian and narrow.
Equally implausibly, she is also claiming that the
content of the Proclamation of 1916 has "evolved
into a widely shared political philosophy of equality and
social inclusion". The principal architect of the
Proclamation, evidenced both by the style and content of
the document, was Patrick Pearse who was also
commander-in-chief of the volunteers and president of the
self-styled provisional government. Far from being a
prophet of "equality and social inclusion",
Pearse - and most of the leaders of the Rising -
subscribed to a dangerous and proto-fascist melange of
messianic Roman Catholicism, mythical Gaelic history and
blood sacrifice.
The head of what purports to be a modern and
progressive European state ought to be extremely wary
of Pearse's almost mystical views on republicanism's
potential as a redeeming force and his contempt for
"the corrupt compromises of constitutional
politics".
In an article entitled The Coming Revolution, published
in December 1913, Patrick Pearse wrote:
"We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms,
to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make
mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but
bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the
nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its
manhood. There are many things more horrible than
bloodshed; and slavery is one of them." Are these
really the sort of sentiments - essentially nascent
fascism - which democrats should be celebrating after the
experience of our recent Troubles? In December 1915
Pearse penned the following observation extolling the
bloodshed of the Great War: "It is good for the
world that such things should be done. The old earth
needed to be warmed with the red wine of the
battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God
as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for
love of country."
Are these the values which sensible men and women would
wish to inculcate in the young? It may be a cliche, but
is it not infinitely preferable to teach young people to
live for Ireland rather than die or kill for Ireland? On
Christmas Day, 1915 Pearse wrote: "Here be ghosts
that I have raised this
Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed a
trust to us living men. Ghosts are troublesome things, in
a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen
taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You
must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation
sometimes ask very big things and they must be appeased,
whatever the cost." Am I alone in finding such views
alarming?
My view is that people who hear such voices should be
dealt with compassionately but be confined in a
high-security mental establishment. Such people should
not be held up to the young as appropriate role models.
In his play, The Singer, Pearse gave expression to his
messianic Roman Catholicism: "One man can free a
people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no
pike, I will go into the battle with bare hands. I will
stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men
on the tree!" Is this not blasphemy? The 1916
rebellion was profoundly undemocratic. It was essentially
a putsch, not unlike that mounted by Hitler in Munich in
1923. The 1916 rebellion was also unnecessary and a
mistake. What Irish nationalists had sought since the
formation of the Home Rule Party in 1870 was on the brink
of realisation, albeit imperfectly.
Despite the rebellion and the War of Independence, in
broad outline, murder and the mayhem did not improve,
territorially at any rate, the terms which were peaceably
available to John Redmond in 1914. But then, paraphrasing
Pearse's The Coming Revolution, FSL Lyons attributed to
Pearse the view that "nationhood could not be
achieved other than by arms". Fr Francis Shaw went
even further when he observed, almost certainly
correctly: "Pearse, one feels, would not have been
satisfied to attain independence by peaceful means."
An important feature of the rebellion was the rebels'
hostility to all things English and to all things
Protestant, Thomas MacDonagh's enthusiasm
for Jane Austen's novels being a conspicuous, if not
necessarily important, exception. Is this to be cause of
celebration? Mrs McAleese and the Irish Government may be
attempting to challenge the
Provisional Republican movement's claim to be the
undisputed heirs of Easter Week but it may prove to be a
high-risk strategy. How can the 1916 rebellion be
repackaged and sanitised? As Peter Hart in The IRA and
Its Enemies and Richard Abbot in Police Casualties in
Ireland 1919-1922 have amply demonstrated, there is no
valid distinction to be drawn between the murder
and mayhem of the so-called "good old IRA" and
the Provisionals. Murder is murder.
The 50th anniversary of the rebellion in 1966 gave rise
to a lot of irresponsible talk and hot air about
"unfinished business" in the "North".
Such talk coincided with and helped provoke the
re-emergence of political violence in Northern Ireland.
Do Mrs McAleese and Bertie Ahern wish to run the same
risks on the 90th anniversary this year or in 2016? As
realists appreciate, there will not be a united Ireland
in 2016 either.
Lord Laird of Artigarvan is a cross-bench member of
the House of Lords.
...........................................................................
President reinventing our history
David Adams
In her speech at a UCC conference on the 1916
Rising, President Mary McAleese did not so much attempt
to rewrite large chunks of recent Irish history, as try
to reinvent it completely, writes David Adams.
She did not just apply a touch of gloss to some awkward
little pieces of historical furniture, but tried to
deconstruct and refurbish an entire, 90-year, historical
edifice.
According to Mrs McAleese, the Easter Rising was neither
exclusive nor sectarian.
Yet how, other than exclusive, to describe an unelected,
unaccountable, elite embarking on armed insurrection
against the wishes of the vast majority of its fellow
citizens? What appellation, other than sectarian, can be
attached to the subsequent campaign of intimidation,
assault and murder directed against scores of Irish
Protestants on the pretext that, because of their
religion, they must surely be British sympathisers and
collaborators?
To suggest, as the President did, that the 1916 Rising
was inclusive and non-sectarian simply because some women
and a very few highborn Protestants played a part, is
risible.
That is like arguing that the National Party of South
Africa wasn't racist because, as was the case, it had a
tiny sprinkling of ethnic Asians and Africans within its
midst.
Similarly, Mrs McAleese claimed that Irish nationalism
was never narrow. Bizarrely, she based this assertion
largely on the fact that many nationalists "belonged
to a universal church that brought them into contact with
a vastly wider segment of the world than that open to
even the most travelled imperial English gentleman".
There is something deeply ironic in the President taking
a sideswipe at English (notably, not British?)
imperialism while, in the same breath, lauding the
supposed benefits of belonging to a "universal
church" that historically has been more imperial in
outlook and operation than any
nation.
More telling, though, is her failure to recognise that it
was precisely because of its unhealthily close
association with one religious denomination to the
exclusion of all others that Irish nationalism was so
narrow and partial.
President McAleese dismissed those who might have
suspected that post-1916 nationalism would seek "the
domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over
others", though she did concede that it was easy to
see how people might have "fallen into that mistaken
view".
A "mistaken view"? Did the President not
notice, then, the virtual theocracy that, between them,
the church and a subservient nationalism created and
maintained in Ireland from independence until recent
times?
I agree with President McAleese that today's Republic of
Ireland is a modern, prosperous, democracy with, as she
put it, a widely shared political philosophy of equality,
social inclusion, human rights and anti-confessionalism.
I disagree profoundly, however, with her on how it
arrived at that point. The President would have us
believe that the liberal democracy of today flowed from
the 1916 Proclamation. The truth is that prosperity
flowed directly from Ireland's membership of the European
Union, and liberal democracy from the implosion of an
institution given so much rope in the form of unelected
and unaccountable power and influence, that eventually it
hanged itself.
The 1916 leaders could not possibly have foreseen the
first, or even begun to imagine the second, much less
plan for either.
I have no strong view on whether or not there should be
an official parade to commemorate the 1916 Rising: that
is a matter entirely for the people of the Republic and
their elected representatives. What I do take exception
to, is propaganda posing as historical truth:
irrespective of whether the object is to reclaim a
particular event, elevate a political party or
rehabilitate a religious organisation.
Last Friday, the President did not present a differing
"analysis and interpretation" of recent Irish
history but, rather, a history almost totally divorced
from fact. Far worse, there was nothing in what she had
to say about the "idealistic and heroic founding
fathers and mothers" that could not equally be said
in defence of the Provisional IRA and its actions (or,
for that matter, its would-be successors in the
Continuity and Real IRAs).
After all, they too were a tiny elite of extreme
nationalists who took it upon themselves to drive out the
British at the point of a gun. They too, claimed to be
wedded to the principles of equality and civil and
religious liberty for all, while prosecuting a murderous
campaign against their Protestant neighbours.
If we follow President McAleese's uncritical analysis and
reasoning to its logical conclusion, in intellectual
terms, all that separated the modern IRA from the rebels
of 1916 was the passage of time. To heap retrospective
adulation upon the leaders of the 1916 Rising while
denying it to the Provisionals, is to differentiate only
on the grounds of the relative success of one and
complete failure of the other.
Surely, it is not beyond the President and others to find
a way of celebrating independence without glorifying the
manner in which it was achieved. Until then, nationalism
will continue handing a blank cheque to successive
generations of "freedom fighters".David Adams
..........................................................................
An Irishman's Diary
Underlying the President's dreadful speech at
UCC last weekend was the clear predication that Irish
nationalism was invented with the 1916 insurgency, writes
Kevin Myers.
Thus, wiped from our public history, yet again, were the
achievements of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who two
years before had peacefully secured Home Rule. So Ireland
in 1916 stood on the verge of self-government, once the
Great War was over. Then along came the murderous
lunatics. . .
We cannot remotely guess what path Home Rule Ireland
might have followed without the Rising. But we can
certainly deny that the Irish nationalism resulting from
Easter 1916 was the absurdly benign confection of Mary
McAleese's fantasies: "[not] the domination of one
cultural and ethnic tradition over others", but,
"from the start. . . a multilateral enterprise,
attempting to escape the dominance of a single class, and
in our case a largely foreign class, into a wider
world".
This is utter rubbish. Between 1920 and 1925, some 50,000
Irish Protestants were effectively driven out of the 26
counties. Another 10,000 Protestant artisans left Dublin.
Thousands of (mostly Catholic) RIC men were forced into
exile, and attacks on rural Protestants were widespread
in the new State. When King George VII was crowned in
1938, some of the remaining Protestants in West Cork
gathered in a church to hear the BBC radio report on the
ceremony, with the doors locked, and with sturdy young
men patrolling outside, on the look-out for attack.
That's how confident the Protestant minority felt in the
new "multilateral" Ireland.
Independent Ireland, first under Cumann na nGael, then
Fianna Fáil, became an increasingly intolerant and
confessional State. The sale of condoms, hitherto legal,
was outlawed in 1926, and remained so for nearly 70
years, into the 1990s. The abolition of divorce laws
inherited from the British followed. The official censor,
James Montgomery, deliberately imposed Catholic teaching
on all films. So he cut all mention of divorce from
fictive films, as he frankly confessed, "even if it
spoils the story." The same for "birth
control", or abortion. All references deemed
critical or offensive to the Catholic Church were
similarly cut. And finally, under de Valera, the film
censor's unofficial remit became official government
policy, and the Catholic Church achieved special legal
status not just over cinema, but over the entire State.
The full Monty.
The Celtic Tiger
Thus Ireland retreated from the world, plummeting into
poverty and cultural isolation. As I said recently:
"In 1910, emigration notwithstanding, Ireland was
one of the richest countries in a desperately poor world,
and was more prosperous than, for example, Norway,
Sweden, Italy and Finland. By 1970, self-governing
Ireland, though untouched by the second World War, had
become just about the poorest country in Europe."
For over 50 years, emigration was the destiny for the
majority of Irish-born people.
Moreover, as dismaying as the factual inaccuracy of the
President's address was its smugly sectarianly tribal
silliness. Thus: "Those who think of Irish
nationalism as narrow miss for example, the membership
many of them had of a niversal church which brought them
into contact with a vastly wider segment of the world
than that open to even the most travelled imperial
English gentleman." Now this, surely, is one of the
most fatuous observations in the entire history of the
presidency (Come in, Catholic Paraguay: this is Catholic
Ireland calling). A British imperialist at UCC comparably
alleging that the empire provided a powerful cultural
link between a crofter with his donkey in the Hebrides
and a Mahratta lancer in Poona would have been hooted off
the stage.
The truth is that the post-1916 convergence of both
religion and nationality - the two becoming virtually
indistinguishable by the 1950s - produced a cultural and
economic disaster. Ireland was a bleak and impoverished
madhouse, effectively run by a savage and parasitic caste
of crozier-wielding bishops.
Yet this was an utter contradiction of what pre-1916
Irish nationalism had been or sought: then it had been
neither isolationist nor narrow, and had attracted
widespread Protestant support. (The 1914 Howth and
Kilcoole gun-running operations to the Irish Volunteers,
and the Gaelic revival, were largely Protestant affairs.)
Tom Kettle, Stephen Gwynne, Willie Redmond, John Esmonde
- Irish Parliamentary Party MPs - all enlisted in the
British army in 1914 because they saw it as their duty to
protect a fellow European country against the rapine and
murder inflicted by the Germans in 1914 (who of course by
1916 were the insurgents' "gallant allies").
But the most depressing aspect of the President's direly
chauvinist and reactionary address was that, contemporary
references aside, it could have been made in 1966, as if
all the scholarship and bloodshed of the past decades had
never occurred. Certainly, her allusions to the public
school administrators of Ireland gathering round the fire
at the Kildare Street Club, to the "heroes" in
the GPO, and to the largely (but not quite entirely)
mythical "glass ceiling" for Catholics belong
to the wretchedly simplistic and nationalist caricatures
of 40 years ago.
As insightful as her wretched speech was the balance of
the UCC conference itself, and its complete exclusion of
some serious critics of the Rising - most notably Ruth
Dudley Edwards, The Sunday Independent's superb
columnist, and the author of easily the finest biography
of Pearse. It is absolutely extraordinary, but
dismayingly revealing of the underlying agenda therein,
that she was not even invited. There's another, though
lesser fellow who wasn't asked and who might have made a
minor contribution or two. UCD history graduate. Writes a
fair a bit about 1916: not a fan. But for the life of me,
can't remember his name.
Kevin Myers employed by the
Irish Times to write the columns that were once written
by Miles NaGopaleem author of At Swim Two Birds
...........................................................................
LETTERS TO THE IRISH TIMES:
Madam, - Is it a coincidence that the President chose to
speak on the
subject of the 1916 Rising at a time when the Taoiseach
is planning to
introduce a military commemoration? If Mary Robinson had
ventured into such
terrain during her presidency it would surely have
provoked a constitutional
crisis. Or is it now permissible for the President to
become involved in the
political process? - Yours, etc,
MARGARET LEE,
Ahane,
Newport,
Co Tipperary.
Madam, - President McAleese's speech in Cork has clearly
irked those who
continue to regard her as a Fenian upstart, a tribal
time-bomb or a Croppy
who will not lie down quietly in the former Vice-Regal
Lodge and hold her
whisht, except by royal command. Is the tribute paid to
the 1916
Proclamation of an Irish Republic by the President of
this sovereign
Republic now expected to become some
"post-modern" version of Oscar Wilde's
"love that dare not speak its name"?
People are, of course, entitled to their prejudices. What
is most
extraordinary, however, is Margaret Lee's question
(January 31st) as to
whether it is "now permissible" that the
President "chose to speak on the
subject of the Easter Rising". She completely
ignores the fact that two of
the President's predecessors were themselves Easter
Rising veterans who
annually celebrated that event in full conformity with
the role of President
as envisaged in the Constitution authored by one of them.
Ms Lee fails to appreciate that there has been no
constitutional
counter-revolution in the interim. She proclaims that
"if Mary Robinson had
ventured into such terrain during her presidency it would
surely have
provoked a constitutional crisis". Really? On May
12th, 1996 it was none
other than President Robinson who unveiled the statue of
James Connolly
opposite Liberty Hall, the nerve centre of the 1916
Rising, from which
Pearse and Connolly had led the combined forces of the
Irish Volunteers and
Irish Citizen Army to seize the GPO that Easter Monday.
She declared that
"Connolly was and remains an inspirational figure -
as socialist, as trade
unionist and as Easter Rising leader". She
emphasised how important it was
"to revisit the man and his vision on the 80th
anniversary of his execution,
to reclaim him".
President Robinson went on to speak of "the
relevance of James Connolly to
modern Ireland" and how vital it was to "draw
further inspiration" from "the
emphasis Connolly placed on the values of pluralism and
inclusiveness, until
his death on the 12th of May, 1916".
There was, of course, no "constitutional
crisis". The Rising remains the
common inheritance of the Republic as a whole,
notwithstanding sharp party
divisions, or even the Civil War itself. The Cumann na
nGaedheal president
of the Free State executive, W.T. Cosgrave was no less
proud a 1916 veteran
than the Fianna Fáil leader Eamon de Valera, who would
eventually defeat him
at the ballot box in 1932.
Each had previously been elected to the first Dáil whose
Declaration of
Independence on January 21st, 1919 explicitly stated:
"Whereas the Irish
Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916
by the Irish
Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people. . .
and whereas at the
threshold of a new era in history the Irish electorate
has, in the General
Election of December 1918, seized the first occasion to
declare by an
overwhelming majority its firm allegiance to the Irish
Republic; Now,
therefore, we the elected Representatives. . . in
National Parliament
assembled, do, in the name of the Irish nation. . .
ratify the establishment
of the Irish Republic".
In less than three years the 1916 Rising had been
vindicated by the first
ever election held in Ireland based on adult suffrage. It
could have had no
more impressive a democratic validation than that. -
Yours, etc,
MANUS O'RIORDAN,
Head of Research, Siptu,
Liberty Hall,
Dublin 1.
****
Madam, - In an uncharacteristically pacifistic turn,
Kevin Myers pours scorn
on the leaders of the 1916 Rising and accuses those of us
proud to remember
Pearse, Clarke and Connolly as propagating a
"political cult of necrophilia"
(An Irishman's Diary, January 31st).
He asks: "Why had none of the signatories of the
Proclamation, not one of
them, ever stood for parliament?" As a scholar of
the British constitutional
framework, I would have thought Mr Myers capable of
recalling the manner in
which the Act of Union was bought from an utterly
unrepresentative
parliament. The Union was imposed and maintained against
the will of the
Irish people throughout the 19th century, mostly by
legislation that
routinely suspended the rule of law. The privilege of the
minority ruling
class was that it could impose such violent
constitutional change without
bloodshed. So what parliament would Pearse have attended?
Not since the Act of Union had a parliament sat in
Dublin. The best efforts
to establish a parliament based on the principle of Home
Rule were scuppered
by the combined machinations of the British military
officer corps and the
Tories. As early as 1914, it was evident that even if
Home Rule were granted
at the end of the first World War, the country would be
divided.
For whom did the men and women of 1916 speak? The simple
answer is the
people of this country who sought the legitimate goal of
national
self-determination. That the leaders of 1916 were so
removed from a national
mood of independence is not credible when one considers
the results of the
1918 general election. The sweeping victory of Sinn Féin
at the December
polls not alone provides a retrospective legitimacy to
the campaign for
nationhood sparked in Easter Week but proves that the
leaders of 1916 did
not act in a political vacuum.
The murder of combatants on each side was a consequence
of a quest for
national self-determination. Mr Myers refers to the death
of Const James
O'Brien. He fails to mention the murder, in custody, of
the pacifist Francis
Sheehy-Skeffington, on the orders of Colonel
Bowen-Colthurst.
It is only right and fitting that the President of this
country should
declare herself proud of the achievements of the men and
women of 1916.
Unfortunately, the intransigence and fulminations of a
generation of British
politicians, stoked up by a loyalist dimension in the
British high command,
provided little scope for a democratic solution to
Ireland's quest for
independence. Long before Easter 1916, the likelihood of
bloodshed in
Ireland was raised by none other than the combined forces
of the Ulster
Volunteer Force and the staunch unionist ethos of the
British military. -
Yours, etc,
BARRY ANDREWS TD,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.
****
Madam, - President McAleese, in her speech on 1916 in
Cork as carried by you
last Saturday, seems to have undone the good work she has
performed over the
past few years on cross-community relations. Or is it a
case of the mask
slipping and the real person coming through, as suggested
by her famous
"Nazi" remarks last year? At least her fellow
Nazi comparisoner, Fr Alec
Reid, has said that he condemns all such uprisings, and
that he wishes 1916
had never taken place.
Mrs McAleese is President for all; and her speech, coming
as it does soon
after the Taoiseach's announcement of a reinstatement of
the military parade
at Easter, leaves me very worried. Now that the Provos
have stopped killing
Protestants, is this a case of it being respectable once
again to
commemorate Pearse and his red blood-sacrifice theories.
For if 1916 is now
justified, why not go the whole hog and celebrate the
murderous campaign
from 1970 onwards which ran out of support and
respectability, to be rescued
perhaps by the peace process? So let's
"celebrate" Enniskillen, Kingsmills,
Le Mon, etc. These too, like 1916, did not have political
justification,
which was sanctified retrospectively.
I well remember the 1916 anniversary in 1966 when we were
treated to an
uncritical treatment of all that went on in 1916 in a
sort of blood and guts
way on RTÉ and elsewhere. Many people believed this
helped to fuel the
Provisionals' campaign a few years later. I had thought
"never again", but
now I am not so sure.
Maybe our President should praise the likes of Parnell,
who, if he had not
been brought down by his own party in collusion with the
Catholic Church,
might have obtained Home Rule for us, and a better
Ireland.
I am so disappointed by Mrs McAleese, and I think she
should consider her
position. - Yours, etc,
BRIAN McCAFFREY,
Clifton Crescent,
Galway.
****
Madam, - In view of the lead given by President
McAleese's commitment to the
ideals of the 1916 Proclamation (guaranteeing "equal
rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens"), when can we
expect to see lady members
teeing up at Portmarnock? - Yours, etc,
PAT MURPHY,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.
Madam, - The President's apologia for 1916 (The Irish
Times, January 28th)
cannot gainsay the fact that the men who instigated it
did so without any
mandate from the Irish people to resort to armed force.
Moreover, to
engineer the uprising they deceived their own colleagues,
kidnapped their
friends and resorted to forgery to dupe their commander
in chief, Eoin
MacNeill, into supporting a rising of which they knew he
disapproved. They
had no more mandate to act for the Irish people than John
Redmond had when
he committed some 45,000 young Irishmen to die in the
so-called war for
small nations.
The only person who scrupulously obeyed the basic
democratic republican
imperative - ie, respect for the will of the people,
including,
incidentally, that of his fellow Ulster men and women,
native and planter
stock alike - was Prof Eoin MacNeill, co-founder of the
Gaelic League and
founder and first commander in chief of the Irish
Volunteers, the precursor
of the modern Irish Army.
As CP Curran observed, MacNeill's study window was the
sally port of modern
Irish freedom. Yet this man from the Glens of Antrim
remains forgotten and
ignored by the President and Government of a country
which would have had no
sovereign existence without his decisive intervention at
critical junctures
in its history. It is to be hoped that the Army, at
least, will be spared
the necessity of participating in the commemoration of an
event that
involved the disobeying of the express orders of its
founder and first
commander-in-chief. The Army's celebration should be to
parade each year on
the anniversary of its founding on November 25th, 1913. -
Yours, etc,
MARTIN TIERNEY,
Marlborough Road,
Glenageary,
Co Dublin.
****
Madam, - It would be difficult to overstate the
importance, even profundity,
of the address by President Mary McAleese at UCC last
Friday.
The time had arrived for someone from an elevated
position to bring some
clarity and order to the conflicting and at times
confused thinking on the
validity of the Easter Rising and what followed.
The President is right. The slow confluence of history,
in all its
diversity, has made it possible at last to see some
flowering of many of the
noble political, social and moral precepts set out in the
Proclamation of
1916.
We have now arrived a good deal closer to achieving
"equal rights and
opportunities for all", "religious and civil
liberty", "the happiness and
prosperity of the whole nation", the
"cherishing [of] all the children of
the nation equally" and a parliament
"representative of the whole people of
Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and
women". There is
still much to be done, but the progress is astonishing,
an example of social
and political morality for any other nation that wishes
to attain the
ultimate goal of good governance.
The revisionists also have the right to their views, even
if their vision is
based on what might have been, rather than on what
happened. They also have
the right to express themselves with passion.
Passion can be a dangerous thing. But passion inspired by
insight, reason
and tolerance can be most moving and beautiful. That is
what the President
has achieved.
Unless my head is wrong, her address will receive an
approving response in
the hearts of many people of different political views.
You were so right to
lead your front page with the story and give the full
text of her speech
inside. - Yours, etc,
RORY O'CONNOR,
Rochestown Avenue
Dún Laoghaire
Co Dublin
Illustrations by Jocelyn Braddell