1916 (70 page)

I
RELAND 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;
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.

I
RELAND 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 freedom in Flanders fields and elsewhere.
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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?’
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Others emphasised the links between republicans and the German government (‘the imperial butchers of poor Belgium’ in Kevin Myers’ phrase).
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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.’
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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.
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D
EMOCRATIC 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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.”’
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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.
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M
ORALITY

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.
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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]’.
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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.
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Two contributions sum up the position of those who expressed doubts about 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.’
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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’.
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