Kevin Myers: Easter is the time of year when people who normally seem wise and sensible start talking amiable gibberish. Take, for example, Charlie McCreevy, the finest Minister for Finance in our history, the man who ignored the goody-goodies who were yelping about the immorality of low taxes, and the attempts of EU bullies to make us conform with the ludicrous tax culture of mainland Europe.
He's usually a man for figures; but not at Easter. When the heady whiff of the 1916 Rising fills his nostrils, he starts babbling the innumerate arithmetic of Irish republicanism. Last weekend he declared: "But ultimately the attachment of the young people to their native land and their determination to achieve the freedom for which a large majority of the Irish people voted in 1918 overcame the power of a then mighty empire."
Charlie, if your budgetary sums were as woeful as your historical ones, the first secretary in the Department of Finance would long ago have put you in a straitjacket and confined you to the Merrion Street dungeons, where you would be fed morsels of algebra and fragments of long division. It's simply not true that "a large majority" of the Irish people voted for "freedom" in 1918, if by that you mean Sinn Féin, which managed to get just 48 per cent of the vote.
That is the official figure. Thanks to Todd Andrews and others, we know that there was massive Sinn Féin personation across Ireland, which increased the vote by an unquantifiable amount. So we can say for sure that even 48 per cent is an inflated representation of the number of people who authentically voted for Sinn Féin.
And yes, of course, Sinn Féin was unopposed in some constituencies, where there were accordingly no elections. We therefore have no means of knowing how many people would have voted Sinn Féin, had there been a complete election. But we do know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that only a minority of people voted for Sinn Féin in 1918.
Which is why Sinn Féin-IRA today are, contrary to what Michael McDowell declared last weekend, the true heirs of both the men of 1916, and the Sinn Féin of 1918, and the IRA of 1919-21. The people of Ireland did not authorise the 1916 Rising. None of its leaders had ever sought the mandate of the electorate. The only one of the men executed afterwards who had ever stood for election was John MacBride. He was a latecomer to the Rising and, like Patrick Pearse's poor brother Willie, was shot in a fit of murderous British pique - in his case, perhaps, in revenge for his defence of the Boer republics 15 years before.
The men of 1916, like the men of the IRA ever since, were strangers to electoral politics. Their immediate heirs learned, rather more quickly than a later generation, how to exploit the twin mysteries of the bullet and the ballot. But they were no more wedded to the electoral outcome of the processes of democracy than the IRA today. Elections in their eyes were - and still are - simply ruses of war, not binding legal processes.
The Minister for Justice insisted that the IRA today was involved in "smuggling, racketeering, and blackmail to fund itself. The republicans of 1916, 1921, 1922 and 1923 never did those things." Hmmm. Perhaps not. But what did they do? Well, in 1916 they started a Rising in which hundreds of civilians, including 28 children, died. These deaths were attributable solely to the Rising. No Rising, no killings. That's it.
The devotion of the old IRA to democracy was shown the day that the First Dáil sat, and two harmless police officers were murdered in Tipperary. So that didn't take long now, did it? Possibly, the IRA didn't take out youngsters and break their legs with baseball bats in 1921 and 1922, but it did murder Protestants in very large numbers in Cork, the Border districts and Belfast. And yes, loyalist killer squads at the time, including rogue police officers, were killing Catholics in the North in even greater numbers - the difference being that we don't hear voices today declaring the relative virtues of ancient loyalist paramilitaries.
The 1918 election gave as much moral and legal validity for the newly formed IRA to bump off police officers, and for Collins's squad to murder DMP detectives in cold blood in front of their families, as it does to the IRA today to do whatever it does so well - a murder here, another there, a few broken limbs, the occasional intelligence raid, and so on. That is to say, none at all. For the vast majority of the minority of people who actually voted Sinn Féin in 1918 were certainly not voting for war, though that's what they got.
Of course, it's very hard for politicians of Fianna Fáil pedigree, who still revere the men of 1916, to stomach the truths about the time. They can't bear to think that Patrick Pearse was a bloodthirsty, raving madman, or that James Connolly was a diehard Marxist, a Caledonian Lenin who thirsted for world-wide class warfare, with Ireland being as good a place to start as any. Fine Gael has the same problem with its founder, the jovial, ear-biting serial killer Michael Collins. And almost everyone has with that barking lunatic Wolfe Tone: ah yes, guillotines in College Green, and Catholic priests being drowned en masse in the Liffey, just as the Revolutionaries had done in La Vendée.
Well, that's got that off my chest. Now I'm for it.