NEWSROUND
Padraig Pearse
Easter
James Connolly tydom, believed that Britain’ s difficulty was Ireland’ s opportunity.
Thus did several hundred poorly armed insurrectionists, plus the 300 trade unionists of Connolly’ s Citizen Army, occupy Dublin and take the might of the British empire.
Despite the distraction of blood-soaked fields of Flanders few of the ring-leaders thought they could actually prevail. And public opinion throughout Ireland was aghast at such an armed rebellion in Ireland. The rising had virtually no public support.
Most of the leaders of the uprising were executed after the five-day jacquerie was crushed ferociously, British Navy gunboats reducing the centre of Dublin to rubble.
But the British Empire’ s love affair with dawn firing squads backfired when they summarily executed the 16 leaders of the Easter Rising, one of them, Connolly in a wheelchair. Their remains were buried in quicklime in Kilmainham jail.
Casement was indicted for high treason at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death by hanging at Pentonville prison on August 3rd. Forgotten were his seminal reports of mass murder and enslavement of indigenous peoples by the imperial powers.
Casement’ s Congo report of 1903 detailed appalling atrocities carried out by the armies of Leopold II, King of“ plucky little Catholic Belgium” to whose aid Britain had come when the Germans invaded in 1914.
The mass executions after secret trials by courts martial caused widespread
outrage across Ireland. Even the Catholic Church swung decisively to the cause of Irish nationalism.
And the incarceration of another 500 insurrectionist prisoners in mainland concentration camps did little to assuage opinion as the public mood changed.
Among the internees was Michael Collins, and on their release six months later, these Volunteers were to become the core of the Irish Republican Army which was to launch a guerrilla war after the nationalists’ landslide victory at the 1918 general election.
Romantic Ireland’ s dead and gone, it’ s with O’ Leary in the grave
“ The Easter 1916 commemoration this year was notable for the fact that the government and Irish people were determined it be a commemoration, and not celebration,“ said Dr Brendan Fleming, Lecturer in English and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
“ In a way not seen before, substantial attention was given to the civilians and British soldiers who died. Renewed attention from historians and the wider Irish population has encouraged a reassessment of this foundational event.
“ The coincidence with the centenary of the Battle of the Somme has also prompted a reinterpretation of the Easter Rising within the wider context of world war.”
Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the democratic method has taken precedence in Republican campaigns. Cathal Burgha, the grandson of the Irish rebel of the same name, rejects the idea that the IRA had a“ mandate from history” to continue violent pursuit of their aims.
Personifying the newfound Republican acquiescence, Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein now tweets about his favourite coffee and squirrels chasing cats- a considerably different tone to holding the entire country ransom at gunpoint.
So what happened to the promises of equal rights and opportunity set out in the proclamation of the Irish Republic?
The reality is that many in Ireland and on the Left in general still don’ t consider the Good Friday agreement or the 1922 partitioning of the country to be legitimate. Because of this, the nationalist Republican dream of a united Ireland refuses to go away.
The Republic of Ireland today may be independent in name but its radical history won’ t be bleached out and, some would say, the fundamental class nature of the Irish struggle is unfinished business.
As the poet W. B. Yeats said of the Easter Rising:“ Romantic Ireland’ s dead and gone, it’ s with O’ Leary in the grave.”