The centenary of the 1916 Rising must help prepare people for the challenge of commemorating other events in the years ahead, such as the War of Independence and the Civil War, according to President Michael D Higgins.
The President also said that that while there has been a “great deal of critical assessment of the Rising”, the same scrutiny has not been given to “militarist imperialism”.
Mr Higgins made reference to a quote from John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who encouraged Irishmen to fight for the British Army in the first World War in order to help realise Home Rule, to support his point.
Mr Redmond said: "No people can be said to have rightly proved their nationhood and their power to maintain it, until they have demonstrated their military prowess; and though Irish blood has reddened the earth of every continent, never until now have we as a people set a national army in the field."
In a speech on Easter Monday at an RTÉ symposium called Remembering 1916 in Dublin's Mansion House, the President said myths of redemptive violence were at the centre of both Irish nationalism and "imperial nationalism".
"My view is that the latter has not, perhaps, been revisited with the same fault-finding edge as the former," Mr Higgins said. "Indeed, while the long shadow cast by what has been called 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland has led to a scrutiny of the Irish republican tradition of 'physical violence', a similar review of supremacist and militarist imperialism remains to be fully achieved.
‘Imperial triumphalism’
“In the context of 1916, this imperial triumphalism can be traced, for example, in the language of the recruitment campaigns of the time, which evoked mythology, masculinity and religion, and glorified the Irish blood as having ‘reddened the earth of every continent’. But this is for another day.”
He said he is conscious of the challenges presented by the decade of commemorations, including the centenaries of the 1913 lockout, the outbreak of the first World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War.
“In a way as we go through the commemoration of 1916, we must be thinking of how we can use it to enable us to prepare for the ethical challenges of these later events.”
In an address that lasted over a half an hour, and which drew sustained applause from the almost capacity crowd in the Round Room of the Mansion House - where the first Dáil met in January 1919 - Mr Higgins also argued that the egalitarian spirit of 1916 and the democratic programme of the first Dáil soon gave way to conservatism.
He said the passage of a century allows people now to see the past in a fresh light, “from some of the narrow, partisan interpretations that might have restricted our view in earlier periods”.
“Let us revive the best of the promise of 1916, so that those coming generations might experience freedom in the full sense of the term - freedom from poverty, freedom from violence and insecurity, and freedom from fear.”