Sir, – Martin Mansergh ("Criticism of Easter Rising commemoration way off the mark", Opinion & Analysis, November 9th) attacks critics of the official commemoration of the Easter Rising, but as I am the only critic mentioned I take it as a direct response to my article "Pride in 'inclusive' 1916 commemoration rings hollow" (Opinion & Analysis, November 7th). In that case it seems he has either missed, or side-stepped the main point I was making.
Of course it is a good thing that the State, however belatedly, acknowledges and commemorates the involvement of so many Irish people in the first World War, and it is right and proper that State representatives should attend ceremonies in Northern Ireland commemorating events in which, again, many Irish people participated.
But my article was about how the Easter Rising was portrayed as the central formative event in the creation of an independent Irish state, and in the definition of Irishness we have today.
The fact that the State was represented at a ceremony for the Battle of Jutland, or that the Abbey Theatre put on a play about the Somme does little to qualify the Taoiseach’s assertion that the Rising was “the central formative and defining act in the shaping of modern Ireland”; or the Tánaiste’s declaration, that “a nation reveals itself not only by the men and women it produces, but by the men and women it honours and remembers”.
The nation thus revealed is not one that is inclusive. It is certainly not inclusive of unionists, yet official Ireland continues to put the peaceful reunification of the island as its overriding objective.
Dr Mansergh treats us to a little history lesson to prove that the violence of 1916 was inevitable. Perhaps it was, but then he should accept the inevitable consequence – that it created an Ireland that excludes unionists, and with which many others, like myself, are uncomfortable.
He implies that my criticism is “from a unionist perspective”. I am not a unionist. I am an Irish citizen, and over the various decades I have lived in and had a vote in Northern Ireland, I have never voted unionist. If union with a genuinely inclusive Irish state was offered tomorrow, I would vote for it.
Dr Mansergh concludes with a piece of daft “whatifery”, or in this case “whatnotifery”, when he says that “without the Rising there would perhaps be no independent Irish State”.
It would be more reasonable to argue that without the Rising there would, perhaps, have been no bloody and divisive War of Independence, certainly no disastrous Civil War, and no 30-year IRA terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland. – Yours, etc,
DENNIS KENNEDY,
Belfast.
Sir, – I agree with Dennis Kennedy (November 7th) that it was unwise of the Taoiseach to call the 1916 Rising "the central formative and defining act in the shaping of modern Ireland".
It indeed played a significant role in the emergence of an Irish state, but only because its participants and supporters laid violence aside and merged with the more numerous anti-Rising Volunteers, Griffith-style dual-monarchists and disenchanted ex-Irish Parliamentary Party supporters into the new “Sinn Féin” that swept the 1918 elections. Their manifesto was distinctly peace-orientated, as one would expect of a document drafted just after the war ended.
If the authorities, acknowledging (even to themselves) that the previous (Asquith) government blundered in the executions and internments that followed the Rising, had conceded to the new Dáil the status of negotiating partner and participant in the peace conference, the tragedy of the War of Independence might have been avoided.
As it was, the British reaction to the election of the Dáil, and through it the real emergence of the Irish State, was as thoroughly anti-democratic as what the 1916 insurgency attempted – or indeed as what the 1912-13 unionists threatened. – Yours, etc.,
MICHAEL DRURY,
Brussels.