There was nothing in the copious writings of the 1916 leaders to suggest that they contemplated active coercion of the North as a practical proposition, Fianna Fáil Senator Martin Mansergh said yesterday.
"Indeed, it is interesting that Sinn Féin have tended to highlight more the 25th anniversary of the deaths of the hunger-strikers over the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, which had very little to say about the North. Despite later protestations about partition, the priority was independence for the larger part of Ireland, where it would be welcomed."
Mr Mansergh, who was an adviser to three Fianna Fáil taoisigh and played a key role in the peace process, told the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, that the 1916 leaders did not want to spark off a sectarian civil war.
"The Belfast volunteers were instructed by Connolly, who knew the North well, to undertake no activity there, well before the Rising, saying that the issue of unionism would be addressed later, when other things had fallen into place.
"This was even though he was aghast at the idea in the Home Rule debate that, under partition, a nationalist minority would be left at the mercy of the Orange party."
Addressing the summer school on whether the ideals of the men and women of 1916 had any relevance in 2006, Mr Mansergh said that while aspects of the 1916 Rising remained controversial, mainly because it had been deployed as a precedent to justify an aggressive, not just a defensive, IRA campaign in the quite different context of Northern Ireland, there was very little abnormal or unusual about a national independence struggle in a 20th century context, particularly given that it won two years later a resounding, if retrospective, popular sanction.
Mary Clancy, lecturer in women's studies in NUI Galway, praised the commitment to equality between men and women in the Proclamation. "However, the concept was a fragile one. It was a promise and an aspiration. Yes, it was given certain legislative force later, but I think it was tested throughout the 1920s and 1930s and male politicians failed the test."
Prof Dermot Keogh, of the UCC history department, said that the 1916 leaders could only be judged on the equality issue by the Proclamation itself.
"I suspect that some might have become terribly reactionary and would have agreed with the poor participation of women in politics and others would not. On the basis of the Proclamation, all, I think, in a sense, would have favoured equality."