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Goldsmith International Literary Festival
Shared history? Reflections on war and revolution
Ballymaon, Co. Longford
4 June 2016
The 1916 Centenary events have seen a wave of popular enthusiasm for learning
more about the Rising and a real pride in the generation which fought for
independence. This has been aided by digitization of a whole range of primary
source material has democratized research into the experience of those who
were part of the revolution. The role of women, the lives of civilians and the
impact of conflict on children are all areas that thankfully we now know far more
about. Another positive feature of the Centenary has been the awareness of the
multi-‐faceted layers of Irishness in the revolutionary era. So while there were
Cockney, Scouse and Glaswegian rebels in the General Post Office, there were
also many British soldiers in Dublin with Irish accents. Perhaps two-‐thirds of the
troops in the city when the Rising began were from Irish regiments. While we
often illustrate the tragedy of our Civil War with clichés about ‘brother against
brother’ the fact is that brother literally fought brother during 1916 as well. One
of the first British Army fatalities, Captain Gerard Neilan of the Royal Dublin
Fusiliers was from Rathmines; his brother Arthur was among the Irish
Volunteers in the Four Courts close to where Neilan was shot. There were also
many ex-‐British soldiers among the ranks of the revolutionaries, notably James
Connolly and Michael Mallin and dozens of the rebels had relatives serving in the
British military.
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Seosamh de Bruin recounted how at Jacobs after the surrender; ‘The factory was
taken over by a detachment of the Dublin Fusiliers and by a curious coincidence
as one brother left the factory in the republican ranks, another marched into it in
the uniform of the British Army.’
It is testimony to further layers of complexity that at least four young men who
fought in Easter Week as Irish Volunteers and avoided detention subsequently
joined the British Army and served on the Western Front; remarkably all four
survived to come back to Ireland and take opposing sides in the Civil War! The
presence of Irishmen among the British forces led to some interesting
encounters. Patrick Colgan described the soldier who guarded him as ‘a decent
poor fellow. When he learned I was from Kildare he became quite friendly. He
told me he was from Carlow; his name was Boland … he couldn’t understand why
we should start a rebellion until the lads returned from the Dardanelles. I said
what would happen if they didn’t return.’ But there was also tension and
resentment; John McGallogly from Glasgow was held in Richmond Barracks and
recalled how after he ‘ventured a remark … one of the guards, a red-‐haired
Irishman, said, ‘You shut up you Scotch bastard. You only came over here to
make trouble.’
Similarly James Burke described being ‘brought over to Kilmainham Jail, where
some drunken soldiery of the Dublin Fusiliers immediately set upon us, kicking
us, beating us and threatening us with bayonets. As a matter of fact my tunic was
ripped off me with bayonets, and our shirts and other articles of clothing were
saturated with blood. We looked at one another the next morning and thought
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we were dead. The Dublin Fusiliers were the worst of the lot. The English
soldiers were mostly decent. Most of them were young fellows who did not know
one end of a rifle from the other as far as I could see.’ Burke’s account is one of
several that attest to harsher treatment being meted out to rebel prisoners by
their fellow countrymen than by British-‐born soldiers. One of the most notorious
incidents also points to this. Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a remarkable
campaigner for votes for women, among other causes, was summarily executed
after arrest in Dublin’s Portobello barracks on the orders of Captain John Bowen-‐
Colthurst of the Royal Irish Rifles. Bowen-‐Colthurst was a Cork man who
murdered several other civilians during that week.
And this brings me to my first problem with ‘shared history.’ Recently Minister
Charles Flanagan wrote about the ‘shared and sometimes overlapping histories
of these islands’ and about the need to remember British soldiers killed during
Easter Week, particularly as many of them were Irish. Nowhere in his Irish Times
article did the Minister mention what the primary role of the British military in
Ireland (including its Irish born recruits) was or explain why Irishmen were in
British uniform in the first place. The reality was that political life in pre-‐
independence Ireland was governed by the knowledge that the British
government, could, if it wished, deploy overwhelming force if its rule was
threatened. There were usually between 25-‐30,000 military personnel based in
Ireland, soldiers, sailors, marines and the rest, and almost every large Irish town
contained a barracks. To put this in perspective, there are around 10, 000
members of the Republic’s Defence Forces today; Ireland a 100 years ago was a
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far more militarized society and one in which political choice was quite
obviously constrained by the ability of the administration to deploy this force.
Hence in 1916, when that rule was challenged, it was the British forces who were
responsible for the majority of death and destruction in Dublin. There was
nothing particularly unusual about Irish service in the British army; very empire
recruited armed forces from among their subjects and often required those
locally recruited soldiers to repress their fellow countrymen. The troops who
carried the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 for example, were largely Indian
themselves.
It is possible to remember individual soldiers sacrifice and acknowledge the
complexity of their motivations while still recognising that their primary role
was to enforce denial of self-‐determination to the Irish people. And of course
many Irish people were also complicit in the British Empire’s rule in India and
elsewhere. As Seán T. O’Kelly, in 1916 a Sinn Féin councillor in Dublin (and later
President of this state) told a rally of the Friends of Freedom for India, the Irish
were ‘under deep obligation to work for India and for Egypt until both are free …
we owe a deep debt to these countries, for has it not been largely by the work of
Irish brains and Irish brawn and muscle that these two ancient peoples have
been beaten into subjection and have been so long oppressed … Our Indian
friends, could, if they wished, tell us many heart-‐rending stories of the brutalities
practiced upon their peoples by English regiments bearing names such as
Connaught Rangers, Munster Fusiliers, Dublin Fusiliers, Iniskillen Fusiliers,
Royal Irish Regiment and so on. These and many other British regiments were
largely composed of Irishmen. Egypt has the same sad stories to tell to our
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disgrace. Until we Irish do something practical to make amends for the wrong
doing … that shame will rest with us.’
I do not think we do a service to understanding history by concluding that all of
this service is worthy of exactly the same commemoration. Nuance and
complexity must include uncomfortable truths and not be a cover for arguing
that ultimately everybody in 1916 was in the right.
Much of the commentary about the Rising in the last year, particularly from
journalists and ‘personalities’ has been more skeptical about the Centenary than
public opinion; there is nothing wrong with that. There have been very familiar
recitations about blood sacrifices, holy wars, undemocratic fanaticism, lack of
mandates and so on. But very often we have been presented with a caricature,
usually divorced from any context, often from people who should know better
and sometimes admittedly from people who will never know better; whether
they be Bob Geldof, Patsy McGarry, John Bruton or recently the former Attorney
General, Paul Gallagher. Home Rule has been described as ‘independence’ and
John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule movement described as having been
opposed to ‘violence.’ We are informed regularly that what was achieved in 1921
was inevitably going to occur anyway, without the need for a shot fired or a life
lost. Indeed it is routinely suggested that it was actually the 1916 rebels who
were responsible for partition.
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There seems to be little awareness that political, communal and sectional strife
were well established in Ireland before 1916 and that violence was part of
political life. People were shot during election campaigns in 1910; street fighting
was an established part of electioneering; hundreds were driven from their
workplaces in sectarian riots in Belfast during 1912; suffragettes were beaten up
for campaigning for the vote-‐ indeed Francis Sheehy Skeffington was stripped
and assaulted at a rally for Home Rule in 1912, by supporters of Redmond’s
party; strikers were batoned and sometimes killed, not only in the Dublin
Lockout but in disputes in Sligo and Wexford as well, and civilians shot dead by
troops on Dublin’s Bachelor’s Walk in 1914.
A glance at the rhetoric of one Irish leader in 1916 provides us with a clue as to
why we must be careful when making pronouncements about violence;
‘It is heroic deeds … that give life to nations -‐ that is the recompense of those
who die to perform them … It was never in worthier, holier keeping than that of
those boys, offering up their supreme sacrifice with a smile on their lips because
it was given for Ireland. May God bless them! And may Ireland, cherishing them
in her bosom, know how to prove her love and pride and send their brothers
leaping to keep full their battle-‐torn ranks and keep high and glad their heroic
hearts … No people can be said to have rightly proved their nationhood and their
power to maintain it until they have demonstrated their military prowess (and)
The Irish … are one of the peoples who have been endowed in a distinguished
degree with a genuine military spirit, a natural genius and gift for war… But they
have brought another quality into the field which is equally characteristic … that
is, their religious spirit ... the Irish soldier, with his limpid faith and his unaffected
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piety, his rosary recited on the hillside, his Mass … under shell-‐fire, his “act of
contrition” … before facing the hail of the assault … though Irish blood has
reddened the earth of every continent, never until now have we as a people set a
national army in the field … ‘war is a terrible thing, and it brings out many brutal
acts; but war also very often brings out all that is best in man.’
Here we have heroic sacrifice in battle giving life to nations, people earning their
manhood on the battlefield, men dying with a smile on their lips because it was
for Ireland; their brothers leaping into the ranks to replace them and the
association between this military prowess and devout Catholicism going hand in
hand. It is the type of language that many modern commentators find very
uncomfortable when uttered by people like Padraig Pearse. But it was John
Redmond who wrote those words after visiting the Western Front during
November 1915. Redmond also described how while at the front ‘we walked to a
battery of two 9.2 British naval guns, enormous monsters, which were trained on
a building just behind the German lines, about three miles distant. These guns
have a range of over 10 miles. I was given the privilege of firing one of these huge
guns at its object. The experience was rather a trying one, and I only hope my
shot went home.’ It is entirely possible that John Redmond personally killed far
more people than any of the 1916 leaders.
In 1916 both mainstream Irish nationalism and unionism were supporting the
greatest violence ever unleashed on the world until that point, and despite the
obvious horror of that war being readily apparent were still encouraging their
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supporters to enlist in it. I hope when we rightly remember the Somme this year
we will see as much rigour displayed by historians and commentators in
indicting those responsible for that slaughter as we have in dissecting the
thinking of Pearse and others.
And when we talk about democracy in 1916 we could do well to remember that
not one Irish woman and only a minority of Irish men possessed a vote in
Westminster elections.
In Longford North in 1911 out of 22,121 people there were just 3,611 voters. But
the local MP JP Farrell held the seat uncontested from 1900-‐1918. In Longford
South there were 21,699 people and 3,695 voters who from 1900-‐1917 were
represented by John Philips, without the bother of having to vote for him. In
Westmeath North 29,265 people but just 4,919 men with the vote. They returned
the independent nationalist Laurence Ginnell, one of the most radical Irish MPs
in London. He was also one of the few MPs who supported the right to vote for
women. Westmeath South had a population of 27,061 but just 4,443 voters. It
returned Sir. W.R. Nugent, a Home Ruler; returned, not elected as there had not
been an election in the constituency since 1892. So clearly we need to be a little
bit more precise when we discuss mandates in 1916. But we also then need to
think about how we will explain the transformation than occurs in 1918.
I would question the presumption that the separatists were a tiny,
unrepresentative group before 1916. They were a minority certainly but not an
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isolated one; many of their ideas were shared by supporters of Home Rule and of
John Redmond. There were few nationalists for example, who would have
disagreed with the young Redmond’s characterization of the British Empire as ‘a
greedy and bloodthirsty oppressor of the weak.’ While they expected that their
representatives should do their best to get what they could from Westminster,
they would also have been aware that there was no ‘act of justice or reform
which has not been extorted in one way or another from the British parliament
by force or fear’, indeed that ‘no single reform … has ever been obtained by
purely constitutional methods.’ That’s John Redmond again. While disagreeing
with some of the methods of the Fenian bombers of the 1880s they might have
nodded their heads when support was sought for men who were ‘our kith and
kin … men who sacrificed everything that was most dear to them in an effort to
benefit Ireland. What do we care whether their effort was a wise one or not,
whether a mistaken one or not?’ John Redmond, sounding suspiciously like what
later critics would call a ‘sneaking regarder. ‘ Indeed in 1897 the welcome home
rally for one of those men, Tom Clarke, was chaired by Redmond’s brother
William. As late as 1912 Clarke would acknowledge the work done by John
Redmond for his release, including numerous visits to him while in prison.
But of course Redmond’s views on Britain and the Empire changed. But did
anyone else’s? It was characteristic of Redmond’s party that they promised self-‐
government would mean a great deal more than the reality: Limerick MP William
Lundon could claim that they did not seek ‘a little parliament in Dublin that
would pay homage to the big one, but a sovereign and independent one and if he
had his own way he would break the remaining links that bound the two
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countries … he was trained in another school in ’67 and he was not a
parliamentarian when he walked with his rifle on his shoulder on the night of the
5th of March.’ (A reference of course to the Fenian rising). John Philips, the
Longford South MP was also one of many Irish Party members who had been
Fenians in their youth.
So the rhetoric of the party promised a great deal. At the end of March 1912 over
100,000 people gathered in Dublin in support of the new Home Rule bill. There
Redmond’s deputy, John Dillon, told them that ‘we have undone, and are
undoing the work of three centuries of confiscation and persecution … the holy
soil of Ireland is passing back rapidly into the possession of the children of our
race … and the work of Oliver Cromwell is nearly undone.’ Now undoing the
work of Cromwell suggests far more than limited self-‐government. As the
separatist Laurence Nugent put it: ‘let it be understood that outside of the
professional politicians, Home Rule meant to the ordinary citizen freedom for
Ireland without any qualifications.’ The problem was of course that Home Rule
would not have brought even the limited independence achieved in 1921.
When Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary, asserted at the Royal Commission
on the Rebellion in 1916 that ‘The spirit of what today is called Sinn Feinism is
mainly composed of the old hatred and distrust of the British connection, always
noticeable in all classes and in all places, varying in degree and finding different
ways of expression, but always there, as the background of Irish politics and
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character’ I think he was correct. Most Irish nationalists simply did not regard
British rule as legitimate.
As the Land League alphabet put it succinctly
‘E is the English who have robbed us of bread
F is the famine they gave us instead’
We are talking about a country only 70 years removed from that catastrophe.
What might that have meant in 1916? Eamonn Broy, then a policeman in
Dublin’s Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street Garda station) described
how during the Rising ‘several loyal citizens of the old Unionist type called to
enquire why the British Army and the police had not already ejected the Sinn
Féiners from the occupied buildings. Whilst a number of that type were present a
big uniformed D.M.P. man, a Clare man, came in. He told us of having gone to his
home in Donnybrook to assure himself of the safety of his family. He saw the
British Army column which had landed at Kingstown marching through
Donnybrook. “They were singing”, he said, “but the soldiers that came in by
Ballsbridge didn’t do much singing. They ran into a few Irishmen who soon took
the singing out of them”. We laughed at the loud way he said it and the effect on
the loyalists present.’ Here we have Dublin policemen, agents of the crown,
laughing at British losses and Unionist discomfort. What does that tell us?
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The reality was that for all the talk of a United Kingdom, Ireland was thought of,
and ruled like, a colony. It was not Canada, nor New Zealand or Australia, or even
South Africa. It was not a settler state where the majority of citizens identified
with the ‘mother country.’ That is the reason why it was India that was
continually referenced in debates in Westminster about Irish self-‐government.
That was why Home Rule MPs could be dismissed in the Commons as ‘eighty
foreigners.’ In 1874 Benjamin Disraeli, no less, had claimed that Ireland was
‘governed by laws of laws of coercion and stringent severity that do not exist in
any other quarter of the globe.’ Over 100 such acts were passed during 19th
century; the suspension of civil liberties and of the subject’s right to protection
from arbitrary state power in Ireland was almost permanent. Like India, the
British administration in Ireland was headed by a viceroy (the Lord Lieutenant)
and he and the Chief Secretary and Under Secretary were appointed to run the
country. At its most benign such officialdom was characterized in the words of
one observer by ‘a gentle, quiet, well meaning, established, unconscious, inborn
contempt.’
The problem was of course that Irish society had changed drastically since the
Famine. The Catholic rural and urban bourgeoisie was on the rise and things
were certainly changing, but not by 1914, fast enough. It probably helps explain
some of the attitudes of the Dublin Police that constables were forbidden from
being members of any secret society, except the Freemasons. It was quite clear
that anti-‐Catholic sectarianism remained deeply embedded in the structure of
British rule and Irish society itself. It was expressed quite openly during debates
about self-‐government. When the Unionist MP T.W. Russell warned that ‘if you
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set up a Parliament in College Green … the wealth, education, property and
prosperity of Ulster will be handed over to a Parliament which will be elected by
peasants dominated by priests, and they again will be dominated by the Roman
Catholic Church’ he was not demanding a secular state; he was objecting to
‘peasants’ and Catholic peasants at that, electing a parliament. The fact that by
1914 as David Fitzpatrick has written that ‘a private army ruled in Ulster with
the acquiescence of the state’ further reinforced nationalist alienation.
It is certainly not widely understood in Britain today and perhaps even under-‐
appreciated here what this crisis actually meant. Between 1912 and 1914 British
Conservatism funded and encouraged the idea of armed rebellion against an
elected British government. As Roy Foster has explained ‘the removal of the
Lord’s veto, and the subsequent Home Rule bill, were presented in Ulster as
issues that could not legitimately be decided by party votes at Westminster;
support for this argument came from a wide variety, ranging from the
respectable to the great, including George V… the Ulster question arrived in
Britain as the issue upon which the landed and plutocratic interests decided to
confront Lloyd George’s welfare policies … ‘
The implications of this revolt cannot be emphasized enough; Conservative
leader Andrew Bonar Law warning that there ‘were things stronger than
parliamentary majorities’ and that there was ‘no length of resistance to which
Ulster would go which he would not be ready to support.’ The Liberal
government, victorious in general elections, was described as ‘a revolutionary
committee which has seized by fraud upon despotic power’; the situation in
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Britain of 1912 compared to that of England in 1688 when the ‘country rose
against a tyranny. It was the tyranny of a King, but other people besides Kings
can exercise tyranny, and other people besides Kings can be treated in the same
way.’ The Tory leader noted that James II had ‘the largest paid army which had
ever been seen in England (and) what happened? The King disappeared because
his own army refused to fight for him.’ We can take it that this message was
understood by the officer class of the British military. A swathe of the most
powerful and wealthy in British society, from the Duke of Bedford to Waldorf
Astor pledged their support to rebellion against parliament while in Ulster the
Unionist leadership established a Provisional Government and a private army. In
1914 thousands of weapons were imported for the Ulster Volunteers without
interference from the forces of the state. In the spring of 1914 British officers at
the Curragh informed their government that they would refuse orders to move
against the Ulster Volunteers. The officers claimed to have been assured that
they would not be asked to fight against Unionists, prompting Labour leader J.H.
Thomas to ask if working class soldiers were to be asked in future their opinions
before being used to break strikes. Yet when supporters of Home Rule attempted
to bring in guns for the new Irish Volunteers, British troops shot dead four
civilians on the streets of Dublin. As Bulmer Hobson noted ‘it seemed the English
wanted to have it both ways. When they (the Irish) sought to enforce their
national rights by methods of Fenianism they were told to agitate
constitutionally … when they acted constitutionally they were met by (the)
methods of Fenianism.’
This is part of the context, along with the Great War, for Ireland’s rising.
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I do not believe however, that the UVF’s revolt caused the Rising; the Irish
Republican Brotherhood believed in breaking the connection, Ulster Volunteers
or not. But the Unionist rebellion and Tory support for it radicalized the wider
nationalist constituency. So when the IRB’s Irish Freedom asserted that ‘Our
country is run by a set of insolent officials, to whom we are nothing but a lot of
people to be exploited and kept in subjection. The executive power rests on
armed force and preys on the people with batons if they have the gall to say they
do not like it’ that statement certainly had enough truth in it for it to resonate
with many people beyond their ranks.
But to the separatists themselves, those who turned this feeling into rebellion.
In November 1913 Patrick Pearse wrote that ‘There will be in the Ireland of the
next few years a multitudinous activity of Freedom Clubs, Young Republican
Parties, Labour organisations, Socialist groups, and what not; bewildering
enterprises undertaken by sane persons and insane persons, by good men and
bad men, many of them seemingly contradictory, some mutually destructive, yet
all tending towards a common objective, and that objective: the Irish Revolution.’
It is actually a very good summary I think. And if some of the people involved do
indeed seem eccentric, we might consider how Francis Sheehy-‐Skeffington
responded when he was described as a ‘crank’; ‘Yes’ he said, because a crank was
‘a small instrument that makes revolutions.’
But it is notable that Pearse himself was not always a revolutionary and the one
thing we must not forget is that people’s ideas changed, often rapidly. Pearse is
interesting as well because he reflects a mixed heritage. As he put it ‘When my
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father and mother married there came together two very widely remote
traditions-‐English and Puritan and mechanic on the one hand, Gaelic and
Catholic and peasant on the other; freedom loving both, and neither without its
strain of poetry and its experience of spiritual and other adventure. And these
two traditions worked in me and fused together by a certain fire proper to
myself, but nursed by that fostering of which I have spoken made me the strange
thing that I am.’ Pearse was from Great Brunswick Street, a centre for
monumental sculpture and building work and most of the businesses there were
set up by English artisans who came to Ireland during the church building boom
of the 19th century. Pearse’s father James, was a freethinker and follower of the
MP for Northampton Charles Bradlaugh, a republican and an atheist, at least
when he arrived in Ireland.
The term minority can conjure up images of a tiny fringe but the separatist
movement was deeply embedded in nationalist Ireland. In my view it is a
mistake to compartmentalize: what is striking about the milieu is the level of
interaction. There was a world encompassing all strands of radicalism, in which
people are often members of several organizations at the same time; in which
activists knew each other personally; in which they read each other’s
newspapers (of which there were dozens) and went to each other’s meetings.
They bought the IRB’s Irish Freedom, or Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin or Jim Larkin’s
Irish Worker from Tom Clarke’s newsagents in Parnell Street. They attended
social events and ceilis together, went out with each other and married each
other. There are the veterans of the campaigns against royal visits and the Boer
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War, the movement for suffrage, the radical theatre, the Land League, the Gaelic
League, the GAA, the labour movement and the various military organizations;
the Irish Volunteers, the Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, the Hibernian Rifles,
the Fianna and Clann na nGaedheal scouts. As in every movement personal likes
and dislikes played a role in decision-‐making and personal contacts influenced
choices; what strikes you is the fluid nature of the movement, that the authorities
often called ‘Sinn Feinism’ and its members ‘Sinn Feiners’ though many were not
members of that party or adherents of its views. Nevertheless we should not
underestimate the influence of Arthur Griffith and his journalism either.
There are a number of elements that were significant. One was the activity of
women. The lines in the Proclamation ‘Irish men and Irishwomen’ did not spring
out of nowhere. The promise of the vote was significant when John Dillon could
declare that ‘Women's suffrage will, I believe, be the ruin of our Western
civilisation. It will destroy the home, challenging the headship of man, laid down
by God. It may come in your time -‐ I hope not in mine.’ Only one branch of the
Home Rule party even allowed women join it. But Griffith’s Sinn Féin supported
suffrage, and Griffith had backed Jennie Wyse Power’s suggestion that dual
membership of Sinn Féin and the Irish Womens’ Franchise League be allowed to
party members; the IRB’s Irish Freedom applauded the Suffragettes who
disrupted the visit of Herbert Asquith to Dublin as ‘fighters for freedom.’ Of
course for many male activists women’s rights and feminism were not important
(and indeed some were hostile to them). But Connolly, Pearse, Plunkett, Mac
Donagh and Clarke were certainly influenced by decade of women’s political
activity.
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Three years before the Rising in a Dublin divided starkly by the Lockout Pearse
wrote that ‘if I were as hungry as many equally good men of Dublin are it is
probable that I should not be here wielding a pen: possibly I should be in the
streets wielding a stone … my instinct is with the landless man against the lord of
lands, and with the breadless man against the master of millions. I may be
wrong, but I do hold it a most terrible sin that there should be landless men in
this island of … fertile valleys, and that there should be breadless men in this city
where great fortunes are made and enjoyed.’ In Dublin the Home Rulers (despite
considerable antagonism with Martin Murphy himself) knew what side they
were on. You can see that clearly on Dublin Corporation, dominated by
Redmond’s party in a city that was notorious for its poverty, low wages,
tenement slums and infant mortality. In contrast seperatists tended to
instinctively take the workers side in 1913 and to promise to end corruption and
jobbery in Dublin’s politics.
But of course this was a national movement. As Ernie O’Malley would assert just
a few years later: ‘Each county was different; the very map boundaries in many
places seemed to make a distinction.’ The make up and culture of the movement
varied from Belfast to Cork and from there to Limerick and Galway and so on.
The importance of rural labour and the tradition of land agitation was significant
in many areas. Many still tend to embrace the cliché of 1916 being a rising of
poets, playwrights and dreamers. But as the experience of the Rising outside
Dublin shows this was hardly the reality;
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Chief Inspector Clayton of Galway East was asked of the rebels in his county
‘’were there any people of superior class or education among them?
Clayton answered ‘None … one of the leaders was a blacksmith, and the Colonel
of the Irish Volunteers was a publican. They were all shopkeepers and farmers’
sons.’
When asked were ‘none of them of the literary type?’ Clayton replied
‘None.’ (Though personally I think I’d follow a blacksmith quicker than a poet).
The experience of landlordism and land agitation was not confined to those
living outside the towns. Significant numbers of those involved in radical politics
urban areas were from the country. Joseph and Seán Connolly, for example, were
members of the Irish Citizens Army from Gloucester Street in Dublin’s inner-‐city
but their father’s family had been evicted in Co. Kildare a generation before. This
also applied of course to the large number of activists who lived outside Ireland;
to the members of the IRB, the Volunteers and other organizations in Britain and
America. They were in the main, men and women from the skilled working class,
artisan or lower middle class backgrounds, with many grocer’s assistants, shop
clerks and tradesmen among them; there were certainly some of the literary
type. But class remains significant in examining the Ireland that emerges
afterwards I think-‐ the poor were underrepresented among the rebels, even in
Dublin.
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There were many varieties of separatist. On St. Patrick’s Day 1916 there was a
major Volunteer mobilization in Dublin. Many of the participants went to mass
that morning. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral Harry Nicholls and George Irvine also
attended their morning service, in uniform and carrying their rifles. Protestant
rebels formed another strand within the movement and there were far more of
them than simply the well known characters such as Ernest Blythe or Constance
Markievicz; people such as Seamus McGowan or Fred Norgrove in the Citizens
Army or Arthur Shields or Nellie Gifford. Some Protestant activists came from
Home Rule or even Unionist backgrounds such as Roger Casement, Erskine
Childers, Robert Barton or Captain Jack White. Given their differences in
background and identity we should be wary of generalizing; but when people are
still dubbing the Rising a ‘Catholic’ rebellion they might at least mention that
non-‐Catholics from a variety of faiths were also involved in it.
Religion of course was also inseparable from the question of Ulster and partition.
What did the separatists think? Well many of them were optimists. Bulmer
Hobson would assert that ‘Protestant Ulster is awakening to the fact that its
grandfathers dreamed a dream, and its fathers tried to forget it-‐ but the call of it
is in their ears.’ The view after 1912 that Unionist mobilization would ultimately
force a confrontation with Britain and thus make Unionists recognize their Irish
nationality was very widespread. As Eoin MacNeill put it ‘A wonderful state of
things has come to pass in Ulster… it is manifest that that all Irish people,
Unionist as well as Nationalist, are determined to have their own way in Ireland.
On that point, and it is the main point, Ireland is united. Sir Edward Carson may
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yet, at the head of his Volunteers, “march to Cork”. If so, their progress will
probably be accompanied by the greetings of ten times of their number of
National Volunteers, and Cork will give them a hospitable and memorable
reception. Some years ago, speaking at the Toome Feis, in the heart of
“homogenous Ulster”, I said that the day would come when men of every creed
and party would join in celebrating the defence of Derry and the Battle of
Benburb. That day is nearer than I then expected.’
Patrick McCartan, a leading figure in the IRB and Sinn Féin in Tyrone took the
rhetoric so seriously that he lent his car to the local UVF during the Larne
gunrunning; the Home Rulers were not slow to remind Sinn Féin of that in 1918
when McCartan stood unsuccessfully for parliament. But Pearse contended that
‘One great source of misunderstanding has now disappeared: it has become clear
within the last few years that the Orangeman is no more loyal to England that we
are. He wants the Union because he imagines it secures his prosperity; but he is
ready to fire on the Union flag the moment it threatens his prosperity. The
position is perfectly plain and understandable. Foolish notions of loyalty to
England being eliminated, it is a matter for business-‐like negotiation ... The case
might be put thus: Hitherto England has governed Ireland through the Orange
Lodges; she now proposes to govern Ireland through the A.O.H. (Hibernians) You
object; so do we. Why not unite and get rid of the English? They are the real
difficulty; their presence here the real incongruity.’
We can discuss how naïve or idealistic this view was but it was certainly not
sectarian. It was the Home Rulers who wanted Ulster coerced not the
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republicans. As John Dillon explained in Belfast during 1915 ‘When the war is
over … the section of the Irish nation which has done best on the battlefields of
France will be strongest in the struggle which may be thrust upon us … we shall
never consent to divide this island or this nation.’ In effect a promise of civil war
to settle the Irish question. Nevertheless by this stage Dillon and Redmond had
also accepted that Home Rule would come with partition; two years before the
Rising.
What radicals shared was a belief that a fight was necessary and inevitable. The
world war made the idea of an insurrection far more practical than it would have
been in peacetime. Pearse may have talked about getting used to the sight of
arms, but it was the British state that put arms into the hands of hundreds of
thousands of Irishmen after 1914 and propaganda glorifying death and sacrifice
was the norm. So whether it was the memory of perceived missed opportunities
in the Boer War for Tom Clarke; or for James Connolly despair at the failure
Socialist International to oppose the slaughter in Europe, the world war made
the Rising possible. Connolly suggested that despite the weakness of the
revolutionaries sometimes ‘a pin in the hands of a child could pierce the heart of
a giant.’ But the War also presented the rebels with a potential ally in the shape
of Germany and belief that German aid was coming was crucial to convincing the
rank and file that a rising was possible.
However even before the Rising radicalization was apparent across much of
nationalist Ireland and growing: you can see that in the reaction to the threat of
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conscription, the falling recruitment rates, the votes for Labour and anti-‐
conscription nationalists in Dublin by-‐elections, in the increasingly critical tone
taken by the Bishops, in the militancy of the Eoin MacNeill leadership of the
Volunteers, who promised in April 1916 that ‘if our arms are demanded from us,
we shall refuse to surrender them. If force is used to take them from us, we shall
make the most effective resistance in our power. Let there be no mistake … we
shall defend our arms with our lives.’ The mood was changing and it is intriguing
to imagine how the Mac Neill/Hobson strategy might have worked amid a
conscription crisis in 1917 for example. But the Rising certainly brought matters
to a head.
I think the key point in understanding its outcome is that British rule had very
little legitimacy in nationalist Ireland. That is why the Rising was ultimately
successful, not because a passive, cowed population were awakened by a blood
sacrifice. Most nationalists accepted that Britain’s overwhelming power made
change unlikely, but to assume that they were becoming happy west Britons, as
some hoped, and the more pessimistic feared, is incorrect. National self-‐
determination was the question of the age. The generation that carried out the
Rising made it seem possible that Britain could be challenged, that its power was
not unassailable and that the questions of Irish self-‐determination would have to
be dealt with. A pin in the hands of a child did pierce the heart of a giant. That
was their achievement.
I want to conclude with a few comments about the politics of commemoration.
Because we have another seven years to go! In the buildup to 2016 there was a
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real sense, among politicians and commentators that we were ‘entering
dangerous territory.’ Much of the discussion about how the events would be
remembered seemed predicated on the idea that too much commemoration, let
alone (God forbid) celebration, would lead directly to a popular revival of
militant armed republicanism. Indeed the Northern Ireland Secretary of State
Teresa Villiers wrote recently that ‘It is widely acknowledged that tensions
around the 50th anniversary probably contributed to the outbreak of the
Troubles.’ The question might be asked ‘acknowledged’ by who? Because saying
something often enough doesn’t make it the case and few seem to remember that
it was actually Loyalists who took up the gun in 1966. Partly this view is a result
of a misreading of how the 50th anniversary events resonated north of the
border. It also reflects a curious pessimism about the ability of post-‐Agreement
Northern Ireland to withstand debates about an event that took place 100 years
ago; this is not to suggest that peace cannot be fragile but that it is more likely to
upset by contemporary problems than discussion about 1916. But this sense of
fear seems to have inspired the at times vaguely ridiculous attempts at
‘branding’ Easter 2016 as essentially a tourism marketing opportunity. The
fearful approach encourages the bland, as the assumption seems to be that too
much politics will frighten people off. This is ironic, since central to the current
idea of commemoration is the very politically driven view that it must reflect the
existence of ‘two traditions’ in Ireland and our ‘shared history’ with Britain. It is
an idea embedded in the politics of commemorative trade-‐off, whereby
nationalists get to celebrate Easter Week, Unionists to remember the Somme,
and politicians, historians and civil servants congratulate each other on their
maturity. The issues that deeply divided Irish people a century ago are simplified
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or glossed over and the role of Britain virtually ignored. Theresa Villiers also
asserted that the ‘island of Ireland has often witnessed the power of history to
fuel long-‐held antagonism’. Surely the fact that Ireland was ruled by Britain
fueled these antagonisms more than the ‘power of history’?
That Ireland and Britain share a history is a historical fact but they did not share
an equal history: only one was conquered by the other and only one became a
global empire. Ultimately, and allowing for all the complexities and nuances that
British rule in Ireland involved, in the last resort the Crown depended on force to
hold this country. Attempting to commemorate 1916 and avoiding mentioning
this lest it give offence will ultimately satisfy nobody. As a result of this approach
we now have a wall in Glasnevin Cemetery on which those who were massacred
in North King Street share space with soldiers from the Regiment which killed
them. There is little recognition in the idea of shared history of the difference in
the power relations between nations or classes, between the rulers and the
ruled, and a too easy acceptance that, as part of a commitment to friendship
between states or communities, history must be sanitized. Whatever about 1916,
when it may be argued most of the British military had little choice about where
they were sent or what they did, when we get to 2020 are we really going to list
Black and Tan fatalities alongside the dead of Croke Park? Because that is the
logic of shared history; but it is not I would argue necessarily good history. And a
case can be made for inclusion of forces such as the Black and Tans and
Auxiliaries on the basis that, like the soldiers in 1916, many were Irish. Indeed at
least 1,500 Black and Tans or Auxiliaries were from this country.
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As it happens I am in favour of critically examining the politics of the 1916
rebels, what their vision of republicanism was and whether some of the faults of
independent Ireland are traceable in their ideas and their actions: as a historian I
appreciate and want to understand the stories of men and women who fought on
opposite sides or indeed did not fight at all in 1916. But I do not think there
needs to be equality between those that sought freedom from the greatest
empire in the world and those who fought for that empire. If we try to say
everything, we may ultimately end up saying nothing. That surely would not be
an appropriate way of remembering our revolution.
