BELLTIME
Why the values of Ireland’ s 1916 Easter Rising inspire people around the world today, and why they are so needed.
By Padraig Pearse’ s great grand-nephew Ben Phillips( an Englishman)
This Easter, people across Ireland are proudly commemorating 100 years since Padraig Pearse and his comrades led the Rising against British Imperial rule. The rebels were not universally welcomed in 1916. They saw that in the struggle for justice you cannot wait till everyone is ready, and that to endure defeat is part of eventual victory. Time proved them right and confirmed their place, and the relatives of the rebels were welcomed to a series of events by the President and Taoiseach. I attended on behalf of Padraig Pearse’ s family. And I am English. It is a great tribute to the values of the freedom movement that I have never met an Irish person for whom this matters. This is partly because Ireland is a nation of emigrants, its sons and daughters spread across the globe, from Canada to New Zealand and everywhere in between, and so the Irish sense of national family is broader. But it is also because the values that drove the Rising transcend both nationality and time.
In March I attended the beautiful St Patrick’ s Day celebrations hosted by Ireland’ s Ambassador to Kenya, where I now live and work for the international NGO ActionAid. The Ambassador spoke some very moving words about Pearse, and so I found myself in a series of wonderful conversations about the Rising. Listening to Irish expatriate NGO workers, diplomats, business people, as well to the most inspiring Irish nuns who work in Nairobi’ s toughest slums, I was struck by how the values of Ireland’ s rebels still inspire such a broad swathe of Irish people today. But I was also struck at the event at how Ireland’ s Rising resonated with
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Kenyans – they too had had been denied their land and their culture, they too had had to win their freedom; indeed, it can be said that Ireland’ s freedom movement was the first to show that a people colonized by Britain could defeat the colonizers. But what struck me most from all the conversations was that what inspired people about the Rising was not a narrow nationalism but a love of justice, with people moved by a 100 year old call for“ equal rights and equal opportunities of all, cherishing all children equally”. For the Rising to inspire beyond one country is not new. Indeed, we know from the history that even the British officer who chaired Pearse’ s court martial could see the justness of cause, commenting: The idealist poet Pearse, the workers’
“ I have just done one of the hardest tasks I have ever had to do. I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across. There must be something very wrong in the state of things that makes a man like that a rebel.
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