1916
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The third and final commemorative event – that of the battle of the Somme in June – was more significant, given that it was explicitly linked by the Irish government to the Easter Rising programme two months earlier in the official literature produced by it in conjunction with both events:
The Government is committed to respecting all traditions on this island equally. It also recognises that developing a greater understanding of our shared history, in all of its diversity, is essential to developing greater understanding and building a shared future.121
The analysis of the connection between the two events offered therewith is instructive:
The war was initially promoted by Britain as ‘the defence of little Belgium’. It later evolved into one fought for the rights of small nations as expressed by President Wilson, and the principle of self-determination for such nations, especially in the defeated central European empires, formed much of the debate at the subsequent peace talks at Versailles. For some Irish nationalists there was an irony in fighting in the British army for such a cause. Moreover initial public enthusiasm for the war quickly faded as it was felt that there was little recognition for the contribution of those Irishmen who had enlisted. The rising casualty lists, allied to the threat of conscription, further dented such enthusiasm. It was against this backdrop that the 1916 Rising was organised … When the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed the heir to the Austrian crown Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife during their state visit to Sarajevo in June 1914, he started a chain of events that would directly affect Irish people in every part of Ireland and some of those living in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The course of Irish history was greatly altered, leading to the emergence of forces that still influence the politics of today. The increased awareness of the Irish aspects of the War have helped to put those forces to positive use by allowing people from the two major traditions to meet on common ground.122
The decision to link the two events gave rise to a certain amount of disagreement. Not surprisingly government supporters tended to row in behind the proposal, as did leading members of Fine Gael. Liz McManus for Labour adopted a different approach, arguing that the separate commemoration of the conflict on the Somme ‘simply perpetuates a form of commemorative apartheid’. What was needed instead, she argued, was ‘that the language of our official commemoration on Easter Sunday, of our speeches and our publications, should be truly inclusive and reconciliatory and thus extend to all the combatants of 1916, as well as to the innocent civilians’.123 Others went in the opposite direction, and over a number of weeks at this time a correspondence was conducted on the letters page of the Irish Independent under the intriguing heading of ‘Was the Great War a crime?’124 If the government had hoped that the gesture would lead to a rapprochement with northern unionists they were quickly disabused of the idea,125 although it undoubtedly was consoled by the fact that there was no widespread or sustained public criticism, north or south of the border, of its action in marking the anniversary of the Somme in such a manner.126
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL THEMES
So much for the events that took place in 2005–6 to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. What aspects of the Rising as a historical event attracted the attention of those who participated in the diverse forums referred to in the second part of this paper?
Many themes were discussed, not least the legacy of the Rising – for women, for north–south relations, and for the conduct of public affairs in Ireland as a whole. None of these were particularly original, having been examined in depth at periodic intervals over preceding decades – albeit that the passage of time and the changed national circumstances within which the 2006 commemoration took place meant that the arguments inevitably found new audiences. For reasons of space, however, attention will be focussed here solely on the one issue that was more widely and deeply analysed than any other: that is, the justification for the Rising. The centrality of this question is best summed up in the words of Professor John A. Murphy when writing in the Evening Echo : ‘Contrary to a popular misconception, all historians, revisionists or otherwise, are in agreement about the significance of 1916 … The real difference among historians and the general public is whether the Rising was a GOOD THING [original emphasis].’127 The analysis of this issue covered several distinct themes: the state of the country in 1916; the impact of the First World War; the issue of a democratic mandate for the Rising; and explicitly moral issues such as the use of violence and the killing of civilians. These points are now considered in more depth.
IRELAND IN 1916
Those who were critical of the Rising emphasised two points regarding the state of Ireland in 1916: the satisfactory state of British government of the country at that time, and the fact that a home rule bill had been passed at Westminster. Regarding the former, several aspects of Ireland’s recent past were emphasised. Robin Bury, for example, referred to the fact that, by 1916, ownership of land had, by and large, been transferred from landlords to tenants, local government had been opened up and was ‘in Catholic hands’, and Ireland had a disproportionate representation at Westminster;128 while Diarmuid Ferriter (the most active participant in the national debate from within the historical profession) noted that ‘Irish people generally enjoyed the right to free speech, free assembly, free organisation and a varied and (mostly) uncensored media’, in a largely crime-free island where the elderly were now in receipt of pensions and the Catholic demand for suitable university facilities had been conceded by the creation of the NUI.129 The moral of the story was clear: Ireland, being well-governed, had no immediate need to be self-governed. From this perspective, furthermore, to the extent that a demand for limited self-government did exist, it had been satisfied in September 1914 by the enactment of the third home rule bill.130
Those who opposed this line of thinking rejected this depiction of British rule in Ireland as a progressive force. They cited, in particular, the events of 1912–14, with its descent into anarchy predicated on the refusal of northern unionists and British Conservatives to accept the rule of law; and 1919–21, which demonstrated the refusal of the British government to accept Ireland’s right to self-determination, if necessary by the use of physical force. Thus, for one correspondent to the Sunday Independent, ‘The period we should look at is 1914–21 in the light of actions and threats of those people whom [Kevin] Myers/ [Ruth Dudley] Edwards seem to feel were all honourable and were ruling us in a utopian type of democracy.’131 Tim Pat Coogan echoed the sentiment, and argued that the home rule crisis, and the conduct of the unionist/tory alliance during it, had not just influenced the Rising, but (bearing in mind the formation of the Irish Volunteers came in response to the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force) was, in fact, a precondition for it.132 Regarding the home rule legislation, several commentators noted that the Act was not, in fact, in force in 1916 (nor was any variant thereof for several years to come), and that the government had insisted (to the discomfiture of the Irish party) that its application to the whole of the island would have to be reconsidered in light of northern unionist opposition.
IRELAND AND THE WAR
Similarly polarised views were evident regarding Ireland’s role in World War One. For critics of the Rising there was an obvious moral. In the words of one correspondent,
those resorting to arms in the GPO etc. were reporting to a tiny coterie of the secret and unelected Irish Republican Brotherhood (not Sinn Féin, by the way), whereas those tens of thousands of others marching off during the Kaiser War were responding to the legal (if flawed and distracted) government of the day and to the democratic Irish Parliamentary Party … The IRB insurgents were essentially armed proto-fascists informed by Pearse’s ego. Without even consulting the people, they just ‘knew’ what the people wanted and how it should be achieved … The other group were honourable and courageous volunteer servicemen, who paid a fearsome price for their noble service to European freedo
m in Flanders fields and elsewhere.133
For another (Tom Carew of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), one of the few members of the labour movement who publicly opposed the Rising’s commemoration), the contrast between the mass participation of Irishmen in the British army and the limited numbers involved in the Easter Rising led him to pose the blunt question: ‘Where was the real Ireland in 1916?’134 Others emphasised the links between republicans and the German government (‘the imperial butchers of poor Belgium’ in Kevin Myers’ phrase).135
On the other side of the argument was a more sceptical interpretation of the war, and Ireland’s involvement in it as part of the United Kingdom. From this perspective Britain, as an imperial super-power, was as guilty as any of the other major European states for the creation of the conditions that led to the outbreak of war in 1914. Furthermore, given that the war was ostensibly fought over the right to self-determination of small nations, Britain’s refusal to concede the same claim to Ireland cast a rather different, and more sinister, light on its actions from 1914–18. In the words of one correspondent to the Irish Independent, ‘Let us not kowtow to the small quasi-band of narrow-minded imperialists who would appear to believe that the First World War, a battle between mighty empires, was a much more noble and worthy affair, compared to the right of a small country to her freedom.’136 Martin Mansergh also pointed out the hypocrisy of contemporary unionist criticism of the republicans’ association with imperial Germany in 1916, bearing in mind their own willingness to do likewise two years earlier.137
DEMOCRATIC MANDATE
Of all the issues relating to the justification, or otherwise, for the Rising, the issue of a democratic mandate was the most frequently, and minutely, discussed. Not surprisingly the discussion was again polarised. On the one hand stood those who insisted that the failure of its leaders, prior to the Rising, to put peacefully their programme to the Irish electorate, and respect their verdict, undermined the republican and democratic aspirations of the Proclamation.138 Thus, in the words of David Adams, the Rising was the work of ‘an unelected, unaccountable, elite embarking on armed insurrection against the wishes of the vast majority of its fellow citizens’.139 More forcefully, Lord Laird suggested that Pearse (and presumably others in the enterprise) ‘subscribed to a dangerous and proto-fascist melange of messianic Roman Catholicism, mythical Gaelic history and blood-sacrifice’, and could not, in any circumstances, be described as a democrat.140
The most aggressive assault on the democratic credentials of those involved in the Rising, however, came from the other side of the Irish sea, in the form of two vitriolic attacks by journalists working for British newspapers. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in the Guardian on 9 April, suggested that the Rising was an early example of the European-wide ‘reaction against constitutional liberalism and [decline] into irrationalism’ that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. He depicted the United Kingdom of the day as ‘a democracy with limited representative government and a rule of law’ whose flaws were fewer ‘than most countries on earth then or many today’. By contrast the 1916 insurgents could only be compared to the participants in the Beer hall putsch.141 An even more outspoken piece was penned by Richard Ingrams, writing in the London Independent on 15 April. Therein he wrote of the similarity between the actions of the ‘terrorists’ of 1916 ‘and their modern Muslim equivalents’, on the basis that ‘they too’ (referring to the rank and file of the Rising) ‘had a fervent religious faith and some of their leaders had the same kind of suicidal urges as al-Qa’ida’, urges which the British authorities ‘were happy to oblige’ via the programme of executions.142
On the other side of the fence were those who suggested that the nature of Ireland’s constitutional relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom was the result of a history in which democratic norms had been routinely ignored by the British government, that the flaws in British democracy conceded by Wheatcroft were neither incidental nor minor, but endemic and structural, that the postponement of the general election which was due to be held in 1916 was symptomatic of same; and that the 1918 general election served as a democratic validation of the revolutionary act. Barry Andrews TD, writing to the Irish Times, referred to the undemocratic origins of the Act of Union itself, ‘which was imposed and maintained against the will of the Irish people throughout the nineteenth century’.143 On the same theme, and writing in the same paper, another correspondent listed some of the flaws that vitiated contemporary British democracy (including religious discrimination, a highly restricted franchise and an incomplete separation of the powers), as well as rejecting the suggestion that Pearse (and the other leaders), by their failure to stand for parliament, had forfeited the right to claim a mandate for independence: ‘Quite simply, the parliament at Westminster was precisely the reason that the insurgents were fighting in the first place.’144 Garret FitzGerald, for his part, noted simply that ‘there is much hindsight in what passes for today’s conventional wisdom that condemns 1916 as “undemocratic.”’145
Probably the most adroit contribution came from Stephen Collins, political editor of the Irish Times and a distinguished historian in his own right. Noting that the leaders of the Rising were bound to adopt conspiratorial methods, they had, he argued, clearly ‘defied democratic norms’, not just simply in their repudiation of Redmond, but of MacNeill also. Referring to the home rule crisis, however, he argued that ‘it was the failure of politics to deliver the democratic will of the majority of Irish people that created the opportunity for the Rising’ in the first instance. In any event, he argued that, contrary to the perception that the forces of constitutional nationalism had been eclipsed by 1916, the tradition of O’Connell, Parnell and Redmond had reasserted itself after independence and became the dominant force in the culture of the state.146
MORALITY
In contrast to the two-handed rhetorical battlegrounds discussed above, the issue of the general morality of the Rising was a three-cornered contest. There were, as before, those who argued the toss for and against the Rising; but on this occasion there was a third viewpoint, one that argued that the Rising, as a historical event like any other, was not amenable to moral evaluation. The most cogent exposition of this view came from Minister Michael McDowell. He argued, in his customary trenchant manner, that the employment of a moral rhetoric when passing judgement on those involved in the Rising was fundamentally unsound. In his words:
To say ‘Redmond was wrong’ and ‘Pearse was right’ or to claim that history vindicated one and condemned the other is meaningless twaddle. In a complex situation, the motives, values, and perspectives of the actors rarely fit into such childlike moral categories. I prefer to think that the motives and standards of nearly all the main actors were admirable.147
Most contributors, however, while they accepted the innate difficulty of employing modern standards to judge past events, accepted the inevitability of doing so in the absence of any viable alternative.
One of the few analyses that explicitly incorporated an assessment of the moral dimensions of Easter Week was provided by Dan O’Brien of the Intelligence Unit of the Economist magazine. Writing in the Irish Times he applied (in a necessarily brief discussion) what he saw as the two decisive tests of just war theory – proportionality and last resort – and found that the Rising fell down on both counts. He noted that the application of such theories to state formation in other countries was problematic rather than politically significant, but that ‘because Ireland’s revolutionary ghosts have been uniquely active, the issue has remained live [here]’.148 An alternative view was provided by Mr Stephen Harrington of Allihies, Co. Cork who, writing in the Examiner, suggested that the public’s willingness to consider the moral foundations upon which the state was formed indicated a superior civic sense of purpose compared to, for example, the United States, where such national soul searching was conspicuous by its absence.149
Two contributions sum up the position of those who expressed doubts abou
t the moral underpinnings of actions undertaken during Easter week. The first came from Senator Brendan Ryan of the Labour party. In a series of rhetorical questions, he implicitly argued that the Rising, while it may have been heroic, was not morally justified:
Were the conditions of the Irish people so appalling as to justify a resort to violence? Were we denied other routes to achieve our independence? Were we excluded from the media or from politics? Was discrimination against Catholics so deep-rooted and so widespread as to necessitate armed rebellion resulting in the death of large numbers of people?
In common with O’Brien he cautioned against applying retrospective wisdom to the event, on the basis that ‘you don’t need a degree in moral theology to realise that beneficial outcomes do not confer retrospective morality on an immoral action.’150
The second came from Breifne Walker, of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Dublin, who lamented what he saw as the tendency to view the civilian casualties of the Rising as being ‘of little moment’. In his eyes both the original Rising itself, and its official commemoration, had ‘provided endless legitimacy’ for the ‘sinister moral calculus’ that judged such deaths ‘to be of little moment’.151
One response to this line of analysis was given by Páraic MacBheatha of Navan, Co. Meath. He argued that, given the inchoate nature of the law of war in 1916, it ‘was too ambiguous to either prohibit or permit armed insurrection’; but that the right to national self-determination was internationally recognised.152 Picking up on this point, a contributor to the Irish Independent noted the irony of critics of the Rising having ‘no problem in accepting the legitimacy of the Belgian people, with foreign support, resisting by force the German occupiers of their country; but at the same time … [rejecting] the right of the Irish people to do the same thing’.153 Finally Barry Andrews noted that the deaths of combatants on both sides ‘was a consequence of a quest for national self-determination’ – although, it should be noted, such a defence was of limited relevance in the case of civilian casualties.154