POUR CEUX QUI SONT INTERESSES PAR LES CONTROVERSES HISTORIQUES LIEES A 1916, VOICI UN ARTICLE QUE J@AI REDIGE
A BLOW FOR DEMOCRACY
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s opinion piece in The Observer (1) will give British readers a taste of the sort of arguments that one can find in the Irish media on the 1916 Easter Rising on its 90th anniversary. Reactions have been cautious at best and hostile at worst: that the Rising was a criminal, undemocratic, sectarian act, led by a fanatical madmen who had no 'mandate' from the people, caused untold carnage and misery in the heart of Dublin and was roundly denounced on all sides at the time. Far from being celebrated such an event should be denounced.
For Wheatcroft, the Easter Rising was “a bloody rebellion against parliamentary democracy” because the rebellion occurred in a democratic state and the insurgents had not electoral mandate. The rebels thought it was an irrelevance as the Act of Union had been contrived without a democratic mandate and the British presence in Ireland persisted without a democratic mandate. (2) Leaving aside how far democracy existed under the Union, a clear majority had voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the previous election but it was then obvious that the democratically endorsed Home Rule Bill of 1914 was going to be frustrated by Loyalist, British army and Tory opposition. What was the importation of arms to Larne and the Curragh mutiny, aided and abetted by the Tory opposition, if not an undermining of democracy? More generally, what characterises critics of the 1916 Rising is their inability to understand the colonial nature of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. (3) British rule in Ireland was entirely a product of conquest, and the threat of superior force by the imperial power was the context in which all Irish political discourse was maintained. This was vividly illustrated only three years later when the democratic will of the first Dail was met by state terrorism.
Some of the 1916 critics will deny that Ireland was then a colony or that the Rising can be understood through the prism of anti colonialism, and argue that it was an Eastern Europe or Balkan ethno national type problem. As to the inappropriateness of an anti-colonial struggle between 1916 and 1923, Nicholas Mansergh, a leading Irish and commonwealth historian stated in 1965: "The contribution of Ireland was successively to weaken the will and undermine belief in Empire. Beyond a certain point, it was not worth it. Stanley Baldwin summed it up when he said there must not be another Ireland in India". (4) The revolutionary assertion of an indigenous national sovereignty in the context of the imperial world of the period gave 1916 and its Proclamation global significance. Subjugated peoples everywhere found inspiration in the Easter Rising; Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh for example. “Its imaginative power hastened the end of the imperial and colonial ages and, critically, its wider context as both cultural and political revolution created a template that changed the world.”(5) The Easter Rising was globally recognised as a blow for democracy, and no such thing can be said of any ‘deeply divided’ societies ethno national conflicts.
Critics say that celebrating the Rising would be to ‘glorify violence’ and that the insurgents had suspect democratic credentials as the majority of voters supported the Home Rule party. It is unquestionable that violence has been central to the emergence of modern Ireland, but the same could be said of most of the countries that have emerged since the French Revolution. It is true that the insurgents of 1916 did not seek an electoral mandate before the Rising, but neither did the French revolutionaries in 1789, 1830, 1848 or 1871. Neither did Garibaldi or Algerian and Vietnamese revolutionaries. It was the Tories and the Unionists who first abandoned constitutional procedures and introduced the gun in Irish politics. It was Bonar Law who stated that “there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities”. Had this not happened, it is doubtful whether the Rising would have taken place. Instead of focussing on the suspect democratic credentials of the insurgents, it is reasonable to concentrate on the deliberate denial of democratic principles by Tories and Unionists. If critics are so concerned about commemorations that lead to unnecessary violence, they should begin by opposing the carnival of militarism and glorification of British terrorism that is Remembrance Sunday. In a typical ten minutes on the Western Front, the numbers of people slaughtered in the interests of British imperialism was greater than the total numbers who died during the Rising. While the Rising was very much a reaction against the Great War and militarism, the Poppy is a celebration of it
Other critics have argued that the Rising was unnecessary, constitutional nationalists could have achieved just as much without any recourse to insurrection as Home Rule was inevitable given that a Home Rule Bill was enacted on 18 September 1914 (implementation delayed until after the war) and that the Empire was being dismantled. In fact the modest measure of Home Rule enacted by the House of Commons was rendered meaningless by the combination of armed revolt by the Ulster Unionists, the mutiny against Parliament by the British Army, and rejection of the decision of the elected chamber by the unelected House of Lords and by the British Conservative and Unionist party. So, after nearly three decades of debate and three Home Rule Bills, and even with Home Rule formally on the Statute Book, it was still not going to come into force.
More importantly, the 1916 rebels did not act to hasten Home Rule. Home Rule and the concept of an Irish Republic were not simply totally different things, but they were actually diametrically opposed to each other. Home Rule would have granted Ireland a 'caretaker' parliament in Dublin, but the Proclamation set its sights on the higher goal of unimpeded Irish sovereignty—the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies. A Home Rule parliament was simply a devolutionary device to corral the growing demands for Irish democracy into a legislature whose ultimate control lay under the Crown and the Commons. If the notion of an Irish Republic was freehold, then Home Rule would give the sovereign Irish people no more than mere tenancy status in their own country. (6) As to the dismantlement of the Empire, the brutal suppression of independence movements in India, Cyprus, the then Rhodesia - the list goes on - hardly indicates that there was a recognition of the need for the inevitable dismantling of the British Empire. The Rising brought about Irish independence much earlier than would have occurred otherwise, had it not been for the Rising, Ireland would not have become independent until the Second World War –if then.
It is sometimes alleged that the Rising was a mystical ‘blood sacrifice’. As the noted historian Eoin Neeson recently pointed, the Rising was never intended to be a “blood sacrifice”, such an idea has been “one of the most effective and enduring examples of black propaganda this country has been subjected to in modern times.” At the time of the rebellion, Germany was expected to win the European war. Certainly there was not an expectation then that Germany would be defeated. The general consensus was that the war would be followed by a peace conference at which, the insurrectionists hoped, Ireland would be represented, but only if there had been a signal of a determination to achieve independence. The 1916 leaders hoped the IRA would hold out for three days on Easter Week, thus satisfying the requirement that would enable a victorious Germany to fulfill its promise to give Ireland a hearing at the post-war peace conference as an independent belligerent nation; hence the reference in the Proclamation to the ‘gallant allies in Europe’. (7)
For Wheatcroft, the Easter Rising was “the forerunner” of Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome and Hitler’s 1923 Munich putsch. “Patrick Pearse's exalted (or insane) words about the tired old earth that needed to be enriched by the spilling of much blood …was the very language of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) that the National Socialists would soon use.” Nothing could be further from the truth. "The tree of liberty must continually be watered with the blood of martyrs and the blood of tyrants". This archetypal Pearseian phrase was written by Thomas Jefferson. So are we to take it that the American war of independence was a forerunner of fascism? Bare in mind that the most strident critics of the so-called 1916 'bloodshed' are those who enthusiastically take part on the militaristic ceremonies of Empire at the Somme or on 'Poppy day' or try to rehabilitate the 'peaceful' Redmondism -recruiting sergeant for the Empire's war against Germany and Turkey- that lead thousands to their deaths. Those who think that 1916 was a mistake should start promoting the alternative: the imperialist war-monger John Redmond who was prepared to carry a ‘blood sacrifice’ of 50 000 Irish people in exchange for an unfulfilled promise of a measure of local government!
According to Wheatcroft “for Ireland to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the 1916 rebellion is to betray democracy.” “In 1916, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a democracy with limited representative government and a rule of law.” His assertion of the Rising not being a democratic event should be put in a wider context; while the 1916 Proclamation at least accepted ‘the suffrages of all her men and women’, Westminster was "still refusing to concede women the vote on the basis that to do so would be to give in to terrorism" and all Irish MPs were against women's suffrage around the time of the Rising! It appears that the Rebels may have had a better grasp of the fundamentals of democracy than their critics give them credit for. While it was not perfect, the Proclamation remained an important step forward in women's rights even before the self-proclaimed cradle of modern democracy at Westminster was able to contemplate the step. At a recent conference, President Mary McAleese argued that the Rising was not sectarian, thus countering some revisionist claims that republicans intended to set up a Catholic-dominated state and persecute their Protestant neighbours. At the same event, Owen McGee threw some further light on the matter by explaining how the Catholic nationalist followers of political parties, such as Redmond's, were vigorously opposed to the IRB on the assumption that it was anti-Catholic and that it would attempt a separation of Church and State such as was being conducted in republican France. These Irish Parliamentary Party supporters and the like were not too concerned whether their state gained Home Rule under a monarch or not as long as its Catholic character remained intact. It would seem from this that Protestant unionists had less to fear from republican revolutionaries than Catholic constitutional nationalists. The 1916 Proclamation set out to guarantee religious tolerance and liberty for all the nation's citizens. (
While fascist regimes were turning away from democracy, the Easter Rising was moving towards it.
Given that the official ideology of the southern regime is ‘peace and reconciliation’, one could expect that Liz McManus, the Labour party Dáil member on the cross-party committee organising the ceremony, would insist that all participants should be remembered. "I put forward the view that we should commemorate the civilians who died and people who were doing their duty in the police and the British army as well," she said. In a sign of political ‘reconciliation’ and revisionism, the Irish government is planning a second state ceremony in July to remember those who perished on the Somme in 1916, fighting alongside the British. (9) The two, however, are incompatible. While the insurgents were fighting for democracy and freedom, those fighting at the Somme were doing it for King and Country. In other words they were fighting for the British Empire, the 300-year project of world conquest, colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. This part of the Irish war effort was successful, as the British Empire gained vast territories in Africa and the Middle East from the Great War, and went on to pile horror upon atrocity right up to Palestine and Iraq today. Far from commemorating the ‘Great War’ as a positive event, it should be acknowledged as a ‘Crime Against Europe’ and a ‘War Upon the German Nation’, in the tradition of Irish foreign policy pioneered by Casement and Connolly. The likes of Connolly thought that a Rising was justified because Britain had embarked in a world war and suspended democracy.
If the establishment really believes commemorations of World War dead might be a potential common meeting ground for unionist and nationalist, and if we are to celebrate a common heritage, then it should campaign for monuments to IRA men like Tom Barry and Dan Breen to be erected in the UK. These men after all were British up to 1922 according to history and are therefore as clearly a part of Britain's past as they are of Ireland. It will argue that here will be opposition to this because of unionist sensibilities and among people who had had relations in the security forces. If Unionists and the relatives of people killed fighting Irish independence have a veto in Britain, why should republicans and the relatives of those who died in the Independence Wars not have the same privilege in Ireland? (10) By confusing the insurgents with those who fought them, those who died in Dublin and those who died at the Somme; the original intent of the 1916 Rising becomes totally deformed and lost.
Liam O RUAIRC
NOTES
(1) The Evil Legacy of the Easter Rising, The Observer, Sunday 9 April 2006
(2) Vincent Brown, The 1916 Easter Rising was a success, Village 16 February 2006
(3) On that topic, the actor Samuel L. Jackson was some time ago interviewed by Kate Thornton on ITV about working with Colin Farrell in S.W.A.T. when the following conversation took place:
Kate: What's it like working with Colin, 'cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now.
Samuel: He's pretty hot in the U.S. too
Kate: Yea! but he's one of our own!
Samuel: Isn't he from Ireland?
Kate: Yeah, but we claim him 'cos Ireland is beside us.
Samuel: You see that's your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don't belong to you. We had that problem in America too - it was called slavery.
(Last Post: Colin Farrell: Not British, Sunday Business Post, 14 December 2003)
(4) Martin Mansergh, Letter to Village, 15 October 2005
(5) Tom McGurk. The Easter Rising: The shots that changed the world forever, Sunday Business Post, 12 March 2006
(6) Tom McGurk, ibid
(7) Eoin Neeson, Letter to the Irish Times, 6 February 2006
(
Nick Foley, 1916 Versus Whig History, Irish Political Review, February 2006
(9) Owen Bowcott, Dublin still split on Easter Rising, The Guardian, 10 April 2006
(10) Nick Foley, ibid
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