1916 and all that
People of a certain age, like myself, will remember how Irish primary schools walls displayed, in a prominent place, a copy of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence, issued by the rebels on Easter Monday in Dublin’s General Post Office. This looked like a blown-up In memoriam card, with the photos of the leaders arranged around the top. Below the proclamation was printed in Irish on one side and on English the other. The whole was framed in wood. It could very well have been a Funeral card, as the sentiments expressed in the proclamation died with its leaders. They have been routinely scoffed at by the rulers of the Irish Free State and its successor regimes. In fact, you might say the display of the proclamation was a long standing joke. I have heard that it has been taken down from the walls of my own primary school at Corlurgan.
The rebels were idealists, and idealism has become a dirty word in the shabby materialist world of modern Ireland, but even before then people like Padraig Pearse had been made into martyrs, but their thoughts and writings had been thrown into the gutter. Each year their self-styled political heirs gather at their graves in Bodenstown, while pursuing policies that entrench and embed exclusivism and inequality. One might say that the rebels were moved by the spirit of what the Ancient Greeks termed thynos; a desire to feats of action on behalf of their fellow men and women which might be unpopular and usually means breaking away from the herd. (Frankly, I don’t know why they bothered.)
This week marks the anniversary of the rebels’ executions, possibly the greatest acts of overreaction by the British Crown in Ireland. That arch hypocrite Ulick O’Connor once said that one of the only acts of kindness performed by the English in Ireland was to allow the badly-wounded James Connolly to be executed sitting in an armchair. Connolly was an indefatigable fighter for workers’ rights, and he would have been out of place in the sanctified petty-bourgeois world of independent Ireland, where I doubt he would have lasted long. But unlike the Brits, his own side wouldn’t have provided him with an armchair.
Let me repeat a question I’ve asked before: Where were the bankers in 1916?
