Sir, – Those who seek to justify the 1916 Rising at the expense of the 1914 Home Rule Bill make a number of mistakes.
First, they trot out the line that the Ulster Volunteers were armed to the teeth and would never have allowed the Home Rule Bill to be implemented, and yet those same Ulster Volunteers didn’t stop the Home Rule Bill being passed at Westminster and becoming the law of the land. Once it was the law of the land there is no reason to doubt the British government would have implemented it, just as it implemented all the other major reforms that were passed at Westminster.
Second, 1916 apologists refuse to acknowledge why exactly the majority of Ulster people were opposed to home rule in the first place. It was because they were fearful for their religious freedoms and business interests, which as the history of the Free State proved, they were quite right to fear.
Third, the real crux of the debate about 1916 is not so much the Rising itself – the Proclamation could have been read out anywhere, be it the new Irish parliament proposed under home rule or at a council meeting, for all the relevance it has ever had to the lives of real people – but rather the chain of events it created. Was the Rising worth the War of Independence it caused, or the Civil War, or the decades of economic and social stagnation, the loss of hundreds of thousands of people to emigration, the social damage inflicted by a Catholic theocracy?
What did we get by 1922 that we wouldn’t have got by 1922 under home rule?
When people are reluctant to worship at the altar of 1916, they raise issues of guilt that make those who do so feel uncomfortable, and it is well known that Irish people far prefer to wallow in denial than face reality. As we approach 2016, it has to be asked what exactly is it we are celebrating? Are we celebrating the avoidable deaths of the War of Independence, or the bitterness caused by the Civil War, the effects of which are still with us, or the fact that the Rising created the partition of the island and ensured that there would never be a united island under one government, the very opposite of its claimed goal?
People who say it doesn’t matter today need to be reminded that the reason Ireland lost its economic sovereignty in 2010 and is currently still in an economic cul-de-sac is directly linked back to the type of politics that was created in Ireland after independence, with cronyism and localism dominating the decision-making process and an almost violent reaction to anyone who points out flaws or who offers a different opinion to the one agreed on by the cute hoors. This mentality is still evident in the Garda and public sector because it’s the mentality that still applies all across the political class who still in 2014 fight every effort at transparency tooth and nail.
If we are ever to learn from our past mistakes, to avoid repeating them, we have to have the guts to face up to debating our past.
In 1914 we had home rule for the entire island, based on inputs from both traditions but those in the nationalist tradition squandered the chance to create a country based on the best of both traditions and instead inflicted two countries based on the worst of each tradition. It is perfectly reasonable to question the type of country we have evolved into, what shaped it and why, and what do we need to change for the future. Challenging the myth of 1916 is part of that process. – Yours, etc,
DESMOND FitzGERALD,
Canary Wharf,
London.