Twenty-eight dead and who knows how many more maimed for life? No, not Omagh, but the sire of Omagh, the bloody font from which so much misery has poured this century: the 1916 Rising, in which 28 children were killed. We hear about the executed; but of the nameless youngsters who were shot near or in their homes in a wholly unprovoked, unmandated, unnecessary and pagan indulgence in violence for the sake of violence, we hear nothing.
The names are recorded in the most splendid documentary account of the Rising, produced by this newspaper not long after it occurred but, until this month, not republished since. Why not? Is it possible that we prefer the "terrible beauty" mythology of 1916 to the unvarnished truth, cherishing the memory of those who brought killing to the streets of Dublin, but not the victims of that violence?
Those victims numbered in their hundreds, the youngest being J.F. Foster, two years and 10 months old, of Manor Place, round the corner from the next youngest victim, J. Gibney, aged five-and-a-half, of Henrietta Place. Who were these infants? How did their parents feel in the following years when the men who had brought the violence which consumed their children's lives were venerated and extolled as heroes?
World of myth
For these youngsters were of no account, mere tenement slum children who in death remained as invisible as they had been in life. And when 1916 entered the world of myth and iconography, their names were not intoned as belonging to the august fellowship of the Fenian dead. With the ease of a doctored photograph from Stalinist history books, these blameless, impotent paupers were air-brushed from the record, as were the hundreds of other Dubliners who died in or near their homes, a dozen of whom were, with metaphorical anonymity, buried unidentified.
The introduction to the 1916 Rebellion Handbook, published by The Mourne River Press, is by Declan Kiberd, who rather memorably described the Rising some time ago as "a fair fight"; perhaps the Gibneys and the Fosters might have had other ideas about that. He quotes an Irish Independent survey from 1991 which showed that 65 per cent of respondents looked back on the Easter Rising with pride, and that 58 per cent thought the rebels were right to take up arms.
And that is probably the truth; that is probably the way most people do feel about the 1916 Rising. It exists purely in terms of myth: gallant insurgents at the barricades taking on the forces of the Crown. And at mythic level, there is no answer to that, any more than there is any point in arguing the rights and wrongs of the Iliad.
But of course, 1916 is not a disembodied Iliad-type myth. It is a palpable and hateful reality which lives and breathes in Irish life today. It has caused generations of young men and women to take up arms, to kill, to die, all in vain; it has filled mortuaries with shattered bodies, and hospital wards with the broken living. And while it remains in the preposterous and obscene world of "a fair fight", it will continue to inspire young men and women to repeat the principle involved: the right to take up arms and kill because you have received a mandate from history to do so.
Example glorified
Not one of the 1916 leaders had ever stood for election. It was not that democracy had let them down: they had never even tried it. They preferred the gun; and the example they set has been glorified and emulated ever since. If the mandate of history permitted John McEntee of Belfast to shoot unarmed captives, 2nd Lt R. Dunville and Constable Charles McGee, in the back, quite casually and coldly in Castlebellingham in 1916, does that same mandate not exist for his heirs and successors today?
Even to say these things is to invite the malign innuendo of imperfect Irishness, of West Britishness, as if national identity were dependent on a reverence for violence. That is a sick and perverted view of Irishness; it is a view which has echoed through the decades, to the jeers which rang around the head of the former SDLP leader when a republican rabble hounded him out of Belfast: "Gerry Fitt is a Brit."
Abolish the myth
We can, furthermore, say this of republican violence: it doesn't work. After a cataract of human blood, the All-Irish Republic remains as elusive today as it did in 1916 or 1921. Only the sort of fond foolishness which calls 1916 "a fair fight" can adjudge the Anglo-Irish war as a victory for the IRA. We know it wasn't, and until we abolish the myth of efficacious violence from our political life, we are giving a violence a standing invitation to return to our hearths.
What republican violence does really well is to divide and embitter, as Mrs Neilan of Mount Harold Terrace might have testified. One of her sons, A. Neilan, took part in the Rising and was later deported to Knutsford. Her other son, Gerald Aloysius Neilan, was a precise contemporary of James Joyce - he even attended Clongowes - and in 1916 was a lieutenant in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. By evil coincidence he was killed by a sniper on Usher's Island on Easter Monday, outside the very house in which his fellow Clongownian had set his most perfect short story, The Dead. Still, no doubt Mrs Neilan thought it was a fair fight.