The 1916 Proclamation is the last of the Fenian declarations of independence. It is in many ways a 19th-century document, with its emphasis on national sovereignty; its nationalist (and bogus) interpretation of Irish history; its invocation of “the dead generations” (the most fatuous and insolent of all tyrannies, according to Thomas Paine); and its echoes of Robert Emmet and James Lalor.
The tone of the Proclamation, however, is more pious than the secular and liberal sentiments expressed in 1863 and 1867.
What significance has the Proclamation for us now as we hurry along into the 21st century? Well, it still startles us with its gender equality, all the more so emanating from a Brotherhood.
It repeats “men and women” three times, as though aware that this will be a work in progress for some considerable time.
In those years, women were prominent in the Irish Citizen Army and in Liberty Hall. Many suffragists were nationalists and vice versa, and suffragists were everywhere in the Dublin of the period.
Today’s generation is cynical about politics and disenchanted with political rhetoric. Yet we remain starry-eyed about the Proclamation, in part because the signatories put their lives where their rhetoric was.
Indeed, we like to think that the document is richer than it actually is. There is nothing new about the “civil and religious liberty” it espouses. The 1916 Proclamation lacks either a cultural or social programme.
In this respect, when people speak of the social principles informing the Proclamation, they may well be confusing that document with the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil in 1919 which can properly and explicitly take credit for articulating the aspiration to human rights and social justice in revolutionary Ireland.
Most revered
The most quoted, most revered – and most misunderstood – phrase in the 1916 Proclamation is that which speaks of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”. The word children, occurring four times in the text, is clearly used in the figurative sense of the national family. Children means the people of Ireland in general, not the young of the species.
The new Republic’s expressed concern “for the welfare of the whole nation and of its parts” followed by the cherishing phrase and then the determination to end the divisive differences between “a minority and the majority” – all this in a crowded sentence – makes it clear that the cherishing reference is unequivocally to the historic divide between Protestant and Catholic, planter and Gael, unionist and nationalist.
The sentence also conveys the orthodox nationalist view that the tragic differences among the people of Ireland have been fostered by the imperial power on a divide et impera strategy.
The signatories would have had in mind the ongoing Home Rule crisis and the unthinkable cloud of partition looming on the horizon. The cherishing phrase was an olive branch to the unionists, as grotesquely unlikely as that would seem to them in the context of a nationalist rebellion.
Besides, the unionists saw themselves as children of a different nation.
The context puts the true meaning of the cherishing phrase beyond doubt.
Chronic inequalities
Today in Ireland, unlike a century ago, social justice, equality of opportunity and the right of children are all burning issues. There is continuing anger at the chronic inequalities of Irish society and their impact on the young.
The thirst for justice is associated with the perceived betrayal of the high ideals animating the 1916 leaders.
And so the phrase “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”, even though historically misunderstood, has a powerful grip on the popular imagination. (It has a much stronger appeal than Article 40.1 of the Constitution – “all citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law”).
Day after day, in countless public statements and letters, individuals and movements invoke the cherishing phrase in support of their several causes.
This unshakeable popular reading, in its very error, reflects a powerful tribute to the signatories. So the Proclamation has a greater relevance today than if it had never been misinterpreted.
All that being said, we may well question whether any new Proclamation, no matter how well intended, would serve a useful purpose in the 21st century. The workaday applications of a reformed Constitution point the way in our democracy. And an inspirational Proclamation may well breed fanatic hearts and see all compromise as betrayal, as indeed some ardent followers of the 1916 Proclamation have done.
John A Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University College Cork
