In 1966, the golden jubilee of the Easter Rising, Telefís Éireann broadcast a series of 21 lectures on the history of Ireland from the earliest times to the present. The immediate history of what led up to 1916 merited 20 lines.
"In the circumstances of the time," Michael Laffan laconically remarks, "such restraint was remarkable". It is now a commonplace that all remembering serves the present in which such remembering takes place, and that we are each subject to the particular permissions and prohibitions of that present. What are we to do with what we remember, and with our understanding of how we do it?
Three words in particular fuel the telling, and the remembering, of stories of political action. They are allegiance, good, and common. These form implicit themes of 1916 in 1966. The Easter Rising was and remains inherently divisive, just as it was, and remains, potentially unifying. Its ingredients as an historical event retain their overall ambivalence through each phase of remembrance. That is why the idea of exploring the golden jubilee of the Rising in 1966 is such a productive idea.
1916 in 1966 is a reminiscence of a reminiscence, a reflection after a further 40 years on 1916's golden jubilee commemoration in 1966. The 1998 commemorations of 1798 showed us how strikingly different our contemporary stance had become compared to that governing the commemorations of 1898. Now that we are within a decade of wondering how Ireland has changed in the century since 1916 we have a foretaste of the 2016 assessment in this present collection of ten essays.
ALTHOUGH NOT ADDRESSED in these terms, ambivalence is the thread that runs through these papers. The Yeatsian merger of the terrible with the beautiful, the combination of brutal violence with personal nobility, of futility with determination, of recklessness with calculation, of preoccupation with the past as the path towards a future liberation, these were the tectonic forces of that ambivalence.
It is clear from the research in this collection that Sean Lemass, then taoiseach, was acutely aware of this dynamic. 1916 was surprisingly under-commemorated at an official level prior to 1966 precisely because of its ambivalent moral and political ingredients. Republicans with allegiance to the IRA, however, annually renewed it in memory. Towards which direction, then, should the official Republic orient its golden jubilee? Lemass was very clear on this; the jubilee should turn towards the present and the future. It should be used "to urge all people to learn to think and act again as Irishmen and Irishwomen first, and to keep their sectional and individual behaviour subordinate to the welfare of the nation as a whole".
Lemass was calling for a reorientation of allegiance towards a new understanding of the common good, an understanding that required mobilisation towards economic prosperity rather than towards an idea of national emancipation or, as President de Valera put it, towards "the cultivation of the things of the mind and spirit". The historic task of the generation of 1966 was, said Lemass, "to consolidate the economic foundations which support our political institutions". Failure in this would endanger the nation's future.
Three years before the outbreak of the awful violence and anguish from which we have only so recently emerged, there is no real sense of the likelihood of its imminence in 1966. The dragon's teeth, however, were discernible even then. As the editors remind us in their introduction, "What the south wished to jettison by marching over the bridge of commemoration into 'normal modernity' was precisely what northern nationalism needed to hold on to and assert". The goods commanding allegiance on this island were not held as common.
THE ENTICEMENTS OF the newly emerging concept of ecumenism for those managing the political tiller in 1966 is a theme that Mary Daly, in her lucid review of the period, identifies as one that surprised the researchers in this project. The contrasting styles of the Protestant archbishop of Dublin, Dr Simms and that of Archbishop McQuaid will resonate with those who have personal memories of the period. Dr Simms publicly expressed gratitude for "the past 50 years . . . (of) goodwill, tolerance and freedom" while privately indicating the kinds of problem which the commemorations presented for his church in Northern Ireland. Dr McQuaid's refusal to be part of any simultaneous or successive blessing with non-Catholic and Jewish clergymen during the official opening ceremony of the Garden of Remembrance reminds us that the difficulties with ecumenism were not those of Dr Paisley alone.
BUT PERHAPS THE clearest symptoms of ambivalence about 1916 in 1966 were evident, as they should be, in the arts. Anthony Roche tells how the Rising itself was constructed along theatrical lines with Pearse more a scriptwriter than active participant.
His pageants in St Enda's were, arguably, precursors for the staging of the Rising. Pageants were the chosen medium for the 1966 commemorations with Tomás MacAnna scripting Aiséirí for Croke Park. MacAnna recently mused that "it is a sobering thought that had we put on that same pageant some ten or so years after, I and the entire cast might well have landed ourselves in jail!"
Sean O'Casey was the voice that those commemorating 1916 least wanted to hear, nor was Yeats's poem Easter 1916 to the fore. These sailed too close to the ambivalence at the heart of the Rising, at least for the government. Despite his official exclusion, O'Casey's voice emerged clearly in MacAnna's pageant. The Children of Lir was the subject of Oisín Kelly's sculpture for the Garden of Remembrance. He was struck, as Roisín Higgins writes, by this line from the fable: "Once we were men, now we are epochs". Kelly sculpted the middle of the legend, children into swans; the time for adulthood lay in the future!
This is a collection rich in social historical and political material, and serves as an invaluable prelude to how we should think about the centenary celebrations of 2016. That very richness of material, however, cries out for a good index!
Ciarán Benson is professor of psychology at University College Dublin. He was Davis visiting professor in interdisciplinary studies at Georgetown University in 2007