There is one thing that Leo Varadkar can do as Taoiseach that his predecessor could not: he can offer a State apology for the execution without trial of Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey during the Civil War.
Eighty-one executions were carried out during the war by the Free State government. All were of dubious legality, but in the case of the four men who were executed on December 8th, 1922, not even a veneer of due process was present.
They were executed as a reprisal for the assassination of TD Sean Hales on the previous day and the wounding of another, Pádraic Ó Máille.
The four had been captured following the Battle of the Four Courts in June 1922 and held in Mountjoy Jail. They could not have been involved in the assassinations, yet they were killed anyway.
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Even in the midst of a Civil War, the brutality of their killings shocked Irish society. The Ireland of 100 years ago had different mores, and the death penalty was liberally used in circumstances which would be unthinkable today, but those executions were regarded as wrong.
The case against the executions was put by the then opposition leader Tom Johnson, the leader of the Labour Party, in terms which are still relevant to this day. He told the Dáil on the day they occurred: “The four men in Mountjoy have been in your charge for five months. You were charged with the care of those men; that was your duty as guardians of the law. You could have charged them with an offence. You held them as a defence, and your duty was to care for them.
“You thought it well not to try them, and not to bring them to the Courts, and then, because a man is assassinated who is held in honour, the Government of this country – the Government of Saorstát Eireann – announces apparently with pride that they have taken out four men, who were in their charge as prisoners, and as a reprisal for that assassination murdered them.”
The Civil War executions have often been justified on the basis that they brought the war to an end quicker than might have happened otherwise and therefore saved more lives.
Claiming the end justifies the means is the prerogative of tyrants throughout the ages, and there is ample evidence that many in the Provisional Government were a heartless shower despite having the support of the majority of the people.
Yes, there were atrocities too carried out by the anti-Treaty side, but they were not the ones charged with upholding the laws of the state. That is why governments are held to higher standards of accountability than anti-government forces.
The public expect governments to act with forbearance, even in the most trying circumstances. The four executions were carried out just two days after the Free State had come into being.
Recently Micheál Martin described the killings as “murder by any definition, and were seen so as that at the time”, but he stopped short in the Dáil of offering a state apology when asked to do so by another Fianna Fáil TD, Christopher O’Sullivan.
It’s not his prerogative. Why should a Taoiseach from the anti-Treaty tradition have to apologise for something that his political forebears did not do?
At a recent meeting of his party to celebrate the coming into being of the State, Mr Varadkar acknowledged the executions of the four men were “unconstitutional”. If they were unconstitutional, surely they were also unlawful and therefore wrong?
And if they were wrong, why not admit it? Fine Gael’s foundation story is that they were there at the birth of the State and ruled for 10 years in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. They then handed over power peacefully to their anti-Treaty adversaries in 1932. The inter-party government of John A Costello declared a republic, and Fine Gael stepped in in 2011 when the country was bankrupt and have had their longest spell in power to date.
In acknowledging all that, Fine Gael also needs to acknowledge that its predecessor, Cumann na nGaedheal, left the darkest of political legacies with its executions policies. Twenty-five years after the last of the executions, the Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy was denied the right to become Taoiseach in the first inter-party government, given his role in the executions. That toxic legacy still lingers.
The Government’s approach to the Civil War commemorations has been anodyne to date. In seeking to offend nobody, they have offended a lot of people. The national commemoration which occurred last September at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, where all the dead were remembered, was so low-profile as to be subterranean.
The decision by a Fine Gael minister for defence Simon Coveney not to send a flag party to a commemoration for the National Army dead was tone deaf. What government does not honour its own who died in the defence of the State at the birth?
Fortunately, Mr Varadkar’s acceptance speech as Taoiseach was an implicit acknowledgement that the Civil War commemorations to date have not been sufficient to match the gravity of what happened 100 years ago.
“As a State, we need to acknowledge and atone for the wrongs that were done on all sides, so we can finally heal the wounds and scars from that time,” he said. He is now examining how this can be done.
Mr Varadkar could start with himself and issue an apology for the executions during the Civil War that were carried out illegally. If not now, when?
Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist and author