The 1916 Rising doesn’t pass the criteria. The insurgents didn’t have a just cause. Just cause is constituted by unprovoked armed inter-state aggression, such as Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914, or a government committing genocide against some of its own people. Nothing remotely comparable occurred in Ireland in the period prior to 1916. One could accept that Britain’s ruling Ireland was the outcome of ‘historic injustice’ and that the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland was deeply flawed, but that would not suffice to constitute just cause in 1916.
The Rising’s leadership did not amount to a competent authority. A group can’t constitute itself a government simply by declaring itself to be such: it must have some recognisable legitimacy or de facto control. Only the British government and/or the Irish party, representing the majority of Irish people, could have had either in 1916.
Without just cause or competent authority, the Rising’s passing any of the other criteria is irrelevant. Even if it had passed both, it couldn’t have passed some of the others: it had no reasonable prospect of success (as its leaders knew), and it was not the last resort. Lack of those two alone would mean it failed proportionality as well.
The criteria for just conduct in war are: (i) not targeting non-combatants, and (ii) not causing disproportionate suffering. The first was violated by the shooting out of hand of a number of civilians, such as the unarmed Constable James O’Brien outside Dublin Castle, and the man who wouldn’t surrender his cart to be used in a barricade at Stephen’s Green. Generally, however, the insurgents did not target civilians. As regards (ii), since starting the insurrection was unjustified, the causing of any casualties (in this instance ‘over 250 civilians, 130 members of the Crown forces and over 60 insurgents’) can’t be proportionate.2
II. ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS
The role of context
Applying just war criteria is a dry, scholastic exercise. As presented schematically above, it involves a good deal of detaching or abstracting from the wider context. For such a significant historical event, a richer contextualisation is necessary. The rest of this paper will be concerned with contextually-oriented ethical evaluation of the Rising.
It is important not to exaggerate the weight to be placed on context, and to be aware of the problems in explaining by appeal to context. For a start, to say something is to be ‘understood in context’ is a truism: the challenge is to pick out the relevant explanatory elements in the context. Next, excessive emphasis on context is vulnerable to a possible infinite regress or circular reasoning: the explaining contextual features are themselves also presumably to be explained by context. That can be avoided only if one can say something about major events without being very heavily dependent on contextual explanation. Thus, the rather a-contextual application of ‘just war’ theory to the Easter Rising, even if inadequate, is not to be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant.
Context can be differentiated into synchronic and diachronic sub-contexts. In the case of the former, one explains by appeal to other events more or less contemporary with the event in question. For the Easter Rising, the home rule bill of 1914, the First World War, and the relative political situations of the Irish party, Sinn Féin (SF), the Ulster unionists, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) feature in the relevant context. As regards diachronic sub-contexts, we can differentiate between past and future: what led up to the Rising and what followed from it. The first is the previous history of Ireland, particularly (but not exclusively) as interpreted in the nationalist tradition originating in the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, and leading up to the Rising. The second is the history of the effects of the Easter Rising, which have been substantial, emotionally charged, and ambiguous. It may not be relevant for historical explanation of an event, but it is relevant to the ethicist’s evaluation of that event.
The elements of ethical analysis
First, as noted, fuller ethical analysis of something like the Easter Rising requires appropriate attention to contexts. It is worth noting that the historian’s contextual analysis of a particular event cannot but carry some element of ethical evaluation, however implicit. Thus, though it is not the historian’s goal, ethical analysis is not extraneous or alien to historical understanding.
Second, ethical analysis can focus on (a) persons’ characters and motives, (b) actions and policies, or (c) consequences and outcomes. As regards (a), evaluation of individuals, including character and motives, is a matter for the biographer, and can’t be provided here. Since our focus is the event of the Rising, what I will have to say about individuals will be indirect, arising from ethical analysis of policies or consequences.
Item (b), evaluation of actions and the policies that give the actions their intentionality or meaning is central to the task. The synchronic aspect of context (crudely, what other groups were up to at the time) is directly relevant to that.3
Evaluation of consequences (item (c)) also comes into play, since what has flowed from the Easter Rising affects its ethical evaluation. There is a problem here for the ethicist, in that agents can never foresee with certainty all the consequences of their actions. Sometimes agents can be ‘morally lucky’ or ‘morally unlucky’, in the sense of the consequences of their actions turning out a lot better or a lot worse than might be expected. Allowing for that, I think that reasonably expectable consequences, rather than actual consequences, should be what we weigh. This will involve a tangential view of people’s character, primarily in that good intentions will not excuse folly, nor make up for prudence, foresight and some understanding of others.
Third, ethical context usually involves an ethical-political framework. It involves identifying the values to be sought, and the norms to be observed with respect to the choice of actions in pursuing those values. Such frameworks include (for example) nationalism, pluralist liberal democracy, Marxism, and Christian social theory. I shall ignore Marxism since it is irrelevant here. Whatever about its role in Connolly’s earlier work, and even allowing for some suspicion between the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army in the General Post Office (GPO) that Easter week, it casts little light on his involvement in the Easter Rising. I shall also have relatively little to say about Christian social theory. I note in passing that its values, particularly as expressed in Catholic moral theory, are closer to liberal democratic than to nationalist values.
The nationalist ethical framework views the IRB, Sinn Féin and the cultural nationalists as pursuing goals oriented to such values as national independence and self-determination, where those values outweighed virtually all others. They understood what they were doing as part of the Irish nation’s long struggle, not just to win national independence, but also to come to a kind of collective spiritual self-consciousness as a nation. Everything else was to be evaluated in light of whether it promoted or hindered that goal, and the people competent to make such evaluation were those steeped in the culture, language, and legends of Ireland, those in tune with Ireland’s soul.
The ethical framework of liberal democracy is concerned with representative democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It is largely accepted and endorsed by contemporary western and Irish culture, and hence will be important in this paper. Elements of it were mentioned favourably by the men and women of 1916, although in ways that suggest that it did not cross their minds that it could be incompatible with certain interpretations of nationalism. The bulk of the ethical critique of the 1916 Rising comes from that background, particularly since the 1970s. Moral revulsion in the 1970s at the political philosophy of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence it supported cast Easter 1916 in a morally unfavourable light for those holding liberal democratic values.
The choice of ethical framework
The significance of there being more than one ethical–political framework is that the respective values or priorities may be mutually incompatible. Nationalism and liberal democracy, compatible on many points, diverge, if not as regards t
he values, at least as regards their relative importance or the appropriate order of priority. Consider the hypothetical questions: ‘If 90 per cent of the people of Ireland, north and south, voted in the morning to re-join the United Kingdom and be ruled from Westminster, should that be accepted?’ or: ‘If you had to choose between living in an independent Ireland under a dictatorship or living in an Ireland ruled democratically and with due respect for human rights as part of a United Kingdom, which would you choose?’ The questions are hypothetical in that we actually have both independence and democracy, and no risk of being obliged to choose. In another way, they have not been hypothetical, for IRA campaigns since 1922 have been an attempt to impose one answer, and Irish governments’ repression of the IRA was an insistence on the opposite answer.
Questions about what people would do in counterfactual circumstances (circumstances not currently obtaining) are hypothetical; but the values revealed by their answers are not hypothetical. There is nothing hypothetical about values, for values inform moral and political beliefs, beliefs motivate and guide action, and actions have consequences.
There is a question mark over the democratic credentials of the Easter Rising’s leaders, as over those of the IRB since its establishment in 1858.4This does not mean that the Easter leaders were opposed in principle to democracy. But if democracy as currently experienced was flawed by their standards, or corrupted beyond redemption through being associated with any kind of submission to or involvement with Britain (essentially the IRB view), then it couldn’t count as a democracy, certainly not something with any kind of moral or political authority. In a word, the leaders of the Rising were not democrats in practice: they were nationalists first, and their understanding of democracy was subordinate to their understanding of nationalism.
In the spring of 1922, prominent IRA leaders such as Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellows made it clear that they would impose a military dictatorship on behalf of the 1916 republic, if the outcome of Dáil votes or general elections was not satisfactory. Many of the relatives of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation rejected the legitimacy of the Free State and regarded its democratic credentials as insignificant if not fraudulent, in some cases for decades after the Civil War ended. It is striking how scant in the debates about accepting the Treaty are the references to ascertaining or being governed by the popular will. This applies not just to anti-Treaty figures, but also to pro-Treaty military and IRB figures such as Collins.5
There is a problem, then, with 1916 in the liberal democratic ethical–political framework. The position is less clear in the nationalist ethical–political framework, for one could have shared the values of the 1916 leaders but disagreed with them on tactics; perhaps Eoin MacNeill might fit that description. I emphasise that there is no escaping the choice of some ethical–political framework. There is no ethical perspective or standing point that transcends all ethical–political frameworks: one must choose.
I consider the liberal democratic value system ethically superior to the nationalist one for a variety of reasons. First, it places the individual person at the centre of its value system, and places correspondingly great weight on individual freedom. By contrast, the nationalist tradition, strong on the freedom of the nation, has been ambivalent on individual freedom, particularly where such freedom might be used in ways of which nationalists might not approve.
Second, Irish nationalism was heavily influenced by romantic and nineteenth century German metaphysical doctrines about nations as essences, with individuals constituted as persons by being Irish, French, German, or other. Liberal democracy stands free of that view, rejecting the idea that persons are, in any strong sense, ‘parts’ of a nation, and sceptical about the historical warrant for the romantic idea of the nation. With the same metaphysics of what a nation is, fascism emerged in the post-1918 era from groups with views similar to those of the 1916 insurgents. The strong nationalism of Pearse and the cultural nationalists was anthropologically wishful, politically illiberal, and philosophically questionable.
Christian thought largely endorses the liberal democratic critique of nationalism. While it would be unhappy at liberalism’s tendency to take individual persons to be the only locus of moral significance, Christianity rejects the nation as a locus of moral value equal to or exceeding that of the person, and allows only the human race (and humanity’s common good) as having comparable (though not superior) moral value. Catholicism in particular also views nationalism as a force with a marked tendency to war.
I turn, then, to evaluating the Easter Rising of 1916 within a larger context than that of ‘just war’ theory. That context is the ethical–political framework where democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are primary and overriding values.
Finally, note the contemporary contextual factor that ethical evaluation of the Easter Rising is also coloured by one’s view of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement concerning the future of Northern Ireland. Support for the agreement implies endorsement of the view that it would be good that power be shared between nationalist and unionist, that political violence should be forsworn and neither community coerced, that the nationalist and unionist communities should each accept that the other has some moral right to a different perspective and different values, and that the Republic should abandon any formal ‘claim’ to Northern Ireland. One might allow for ignorance, political immaturity, and naïveté on the part of the 1916 leaders, and mitigate criticism accordingly. But one cannot consistently or coherently praise them for doing the very things that we would condemn if done today.
III. 1916 IN ETHICAL REVIEW
I deem the Easter Rising ethically wrong for the following reasons:
1. The unnecessary War of Independence
The 1916 Rising started a chain of events culminating in the War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–3). It was, of course, not the only causal factor leading to those events. But then, the notion of causality in history and the sciences is not that of a necessary or sufficient factor: a cause or causal factor is simply that which raises the probability of a certain outcome. The historian’s task is to weigh different factors and apportion responsibility proportionately. Ethical evaluation is not unlike it.
To evaluate the Easter Rising negatively because it was a cause of those events is not to say that its leaders carry sole responsibility for later wars. But they do carry a great deal of responsibility. The 1919–21 War of Independence seems to have been extraordinarily unnecessary, given that what the Treaty achieved was not that different from what the home rule legislation had achieved.6 (The anti-Treaty faction was convinced that what the Treaty offered was closer to Redmond’s home rule than to Pearse’s republic.) The claim is supported by the fact that subsequent Irish governments eliminated virtually all of the objectionable provisions of the Treaty without firing a shot, thus vindicating the gradualism of the Irish party. The only thing they could not eliminate was that which was not, pace the nationalist myth, in Britain’s gift to give, viz. the consent of the northern unionists to be part of a united and independent Ireland.
2.The long civil war
Militarily insignificant, the Rising’s political impact has been considerable, so ethical evaluation of the Rising must focus primarily on it.
Pearse, Eoin MacNeill and the other Irish Volunteers had (in contrast to the IRB) initially resorted to arms, not so much to achieve Irish independence as laid out in the Proclamation, but to respond to the arming of the Ulster Protestants in 1912 and the British government’s relatively passive response to that event, and Redmond’s failure to negotiate away the proposed partition of Ireland in the 1914 home rule bill. Even when one allows for nationalist wishful thinking that Britain was the ultimate cause of northern unionist opposition to home rule and that it could easily have changed northern minds if it had wished to do so, it is still impossible to see how a military uprising in Dublin, directed against British forces, would bring the northern Protestants to heel. If anything, i
t was more likely to do the opposite.
The 1916 leaders knew precious little about northern Protestants, and didn’t take them seriously. It is no answer to point to northern Protestant IRB members like Bulmer Hobson. In the early twentieth century, James Craig was, and Bulmer Hobson was not, representative of northern Protestants. In the 1880s, Parnell had remarked that 1,000 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) men would be enough to take care of any Orange mob once home rule arrived, but by 1914 his successor John Redmond had learned the hard lesson that northern Protestants presented too formidable a force, even without the support of Conservatives and Liberal unionists, to be so lightly dismissed.
It was a lesson that the leaders of the Easter Rising, even those like Seán MacDermott who had some northern experience, were unable and unwilling to learn: that’s an ethical failure. If they imagined that the Proclamation’s ideals of equality for all Irish people, regardless of religion, would have removed unionist fears, they were extremely naïve: in matters such as this, naïveté is morally culpable. The Proclamation referred to struggles for independence going back to 1600, as if its authors hadn’t a clue about the Ulster unionist view of the seventeenth century struggles, or had no idea of the great and impassable gulf between seventeenth century Irish Jacobite values and the post-religious Jacobin values inherent in Wolfe Tone’s dream of a union of Protestant, Catholic and dissenter under the common name of Irishman. While it is not the worst moral failure, ignorance is ethically culpable, particularly when it concerns issues for which one is prepared to kill people. To claim today that the 1916 Proclamation was a serious reaching-out to unionists goes beyond naiveté to silliness.
It would be closer to the truth to say that the 1916 leaders were – even if they were in collective denial about it – prepared to coerce the Ulster unionists into a united Ireland, and that they rejected the Irish party because it was not prepared to fight such a war.7 Today, we accept that a united Ireland can come about only by consent, and appear to accept it not just as a practical necessity but also because it is morally wrong not to accept it. The implication is that Redmond was realistic and prudent and the Easter leaders were neither, which in turn implies that Redmond’s actions (in this area) were morally correct and those of the Easter leaders were morally wrong. That ethical wrongness is compounded by the fact that they couldn’t actually manage to fight such a civil war, yet by their action they and their successors in the War of Independence started a process bound to heighten unionist insecurity with repercussions for northern nationalists.
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