Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 6 April 2016
P
atrick Pearse loved his students not wisely
but too well, if you know what I mean – what
with writing poems about kissing them on
the mouth and relocating his school from the
healthy hustle-bustle of Ranelagh to dark
woodlands in Rathfarnham. Oh, and his students didn’t
necessarily reciprocate the affection: a teenage James
Joyce dropped out of Pearse’s UCD Irish-language les-
sons because the teacher was an ideological bore.
That’s just a sample of the titbits you’d pick up from
Colm Tóibín’s long essay on 1916 in the London Review
of Books, arguably this season’s archetypal commemo-
rative/explanatory text from Ireland’s media/
intellectual establishment. Whether you regard it as
barrel-scraping to discredit the Rising or an exemplary
eye for the telling detail is a matter of taste – if you’re
like me, you might reckon it’s a bit of both – but one
can’t help but notice the contrast between Tóibín’s
forensic litany of Fenian foibles and failings and his
breezy flypast of, say, World War I.
In the writer’s brief telling, the war was on the verge
of Bringing Us All Together, something Pearse and the
boyos couldn’t abide and wouldn’t permit:
“Britain was merely the supposed enemy. The popu-
lation of the two countries
spoke the same language
after all, and had the same
education system. Many
Irish people moved back
and forth between Ireland
and England seeking work;
many in Ireland also had
family in England. While
most in the south of Ireland
actively or tacitly supported
Home Rule, Home Rule was
postponed until the war ended. It looked as though the
two islands were going to join forces in the war effort.
(More than 200,000 Irishmen eventually volunteered in
the First World War. Although conscription was threat-
ened in Ireland, it was never actually introduced.)”
Recall that Tóibín is addressing, in part, an interna-
tional audience that may be getting its first substantial
account of the Rising, that his article is billed as “Colm
Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916”; this audience will
hear nothing from him of the consequences for Home
Rule of the Ulster crisis, of Irish carnage in the war, nor
of the massive, life-saving popular movement that
arose in part from the Rising to resist conscription in
Ireland, conscription that was not merely ‘threatened’,
but introduced in legislation.
Some contexts are, it seems, more worthy of contex-
tualising than others. As the brilliant blogger Richard
McAleavey writes:
“Questions about whether Pádraig Pearse, say, was
a fanatic, or a repressed paedophile even, are intended
to psychopathologise any kind of radical political action
or thought. They are intended to draw attention away
from consideration of the real material conditions and
political considerations that produced the Rising, lest
they might be used to draw the wrong kind of parallels
in the present”.
Material conditions? In 17,000 words, Colm Tóibín’s
only mention of Dublin’s infamous slums is in a quote
from arch-revisionist historian David Fitzpatrick, who
says the rebels must have staged the fight in the midst
of the city’s poor to ensure maximum casualties among
them – as though it were the rebels who loaded the
shells into the Helga’s guns, or the rebels who went
house to house in North King Street murdering young
men. These and other aspects of, shall we say, imperial
‘agency’ have been largely neglected throughout recent
commemoration and coverage, in favour of relentless
scrutiny of the Rising’s leaders.
Just below the achingly familiar debate about the
Easter Rising – was it an act of visionary heroism or an
act of perverse terrorism? – there lurks a more interest-
ing series of questions about its relationship to what
One can’t help but notice
the contrast between
Tóibín’s forensic litany of
Fenian foibles and failings
and his breezy flypast of,
say, World War I
Telling the story
of Easter 1916
Republicans should exploit its ambiguity
to make some current popular history
MEDIA
by Harry Browne
April 2016 5 7
came after. And those are the questions that
can lead us beyond dry argument and actually
help us understand who commemorates what
in the Ireland of 2016, and how those commem-
orations have played out and continue to play
out in the state and corporate media.
Thus you can be on either side of the hero-
ism/terrorism split and still hold (tightly or
otherwise) any of the following views: (1) the
state(s) in which we reside today can be under-
stood as a direct and roughly intentional
outcome of the Rising and its guiding lights; OR
(2) Ireland over the last century has been a fum
-
bling, contingent, contradictory and ultimately
limited effort to fulfil the Republic of 1916; OR
(3) the Irish revolution launched at Easter 1916
was firmly defeated in the Treaty and thereafter
by an elite that concealed its continuity with the
ancien régime behind reluctant memorials to
supposed revolutionary heroes. (There are
other positional alternatives and variations on
all points of the political spectrum but these
seem to me to be the major tendencies.)
Official and media Ireland prefers to hold and
host tiresome debates about the Rising itself
(Kevin Myers? Bob Geldof? Really?) rather than
any really clear exploration of where we live
today in relation to it. Positions number 1 and 2
are generally implied rather than directly
stated, with a little frisson of excitement when
the likes of Michael D. Higgins suggests that the
truth may lean further towards 2 than 1 – a sort
of “a lot done, more to do” view of a Republic
that still awaits its full and complete child-cher-
ishing achievement.
In mainstream media, position 3 – that there
was a successful counter-revolution – is almost
unthinkable, or at least unspeakable, residing
outside the realm of acceptable discussion.
And yet it seems to me that it lurks with influ-
ence on both the right and left wings of Irish
politics. The more or less overt Redmondism of
John Bruton and other conservatives – often
more Redmondite than Redmond himself – con-
tains an implied celebration of the ‘restoration’
of constitutionalism in Ireland, coloured by
regret over militant republicanism’s recrudes-
cence in the Northern Troubles, but not reliant
on that regret for its critique of the rebels of
1916-21.
The left-wing, pro-Rising version of position
3, alleging that there was a successful counter-
revolution in Ireland, is more openly and
interestingly embraced. Important figures on
the Irish left, including within Sinn Féin and in
the water movement, have been articulating it
in recent years, including at this year’s Easter
commemorations. It has become a mainstay of
leftist speechifying and social media. It will, I
suspect, feature prominently in the civilian
‘Reclaim the Vision’ commemorations late in
April. (And it will remain virtually inaudible in
mainstream media.)
Yet some of those who have been most
explicitly advancing this analysis, arguing that
we inhabit a state that defeated an Irish revolu-
tion, have also been among the loudest
complainers about media and official hostility
to the ideals and tactics of the Rising, as
expressed in recent weeks. Really, you’d think
that the more appropriate response would be
along the lines of “Voilà! Told ya so”.
Thus, for example, left-wing and republican
social media exploded in anger and dismay
when, early in March, Dublin City Council
draped a banner across the pillars of the Bank
of Ireland in College Green honouring the tradi-
tion of constitutional nationalism, from Grattan
(whose parliament sat in that building) to
Redmond.
At one level, the banner was of course absurd:
that Dublin’s single most visible marker of the
Rising should be a tribute to men whose politics
the Proclamation rejected. (The defence of the
banner by guardians of establishment common-
sense such as Elaine Byrne and Ronan
McGreevy was telling in its historical igno
-
rance.) But surely such ‘inclusivity’ is exactly
what we should expect from a ruling class
Official and media Ireland prefers to hold and
host tiresome debates about the Rising itself
(Kevin Myers? Bob Geldof? Really?) rather than
any really clear exploration of where we live
today in relation to it
1916 in 2016: anti-water charges protesters outside the CrossCare Food Bank Centre in Dublin Industrial Estate
5 8 April 2016
MEDIA
trying to twist this year’s memorials to their
own counter-revolutionary ends? What could
possibly make us think that ‘our’ version of the
Rising would be respected in the state that
crushed it?
In truth, it’s difficult these days for even the
most devout adherent of the workers’ republic
to forswear any and all aspects of the actually
existing Republic of Ireland – not least because
our political opponents are themselves so con-
fused about it. (It’s also nice when its president
makes a good speech.) A certain amount of
uncertainty, theirs and ours, is no sin. One way
for us to advance a rebel politics for the 2020s
will be to exploit that confusion over the coming
years of continuous centenary, to connect our
aims to a genuinely popular republicanism,
driving home the socially revolutionary aspects
of the 1916-23 struggle, and connecting them
to the international politics of resistance in that
period and this one. (The new Irish-themed edi-
tion of the New York-based magazine Jacobin
has made a stirring start in that direction.)
For all there is to admire in the socialist, femi-
nist and otherwise liberating impulses that
drove so many to the Rising, the case for the
Irish revolution gets much clearer in the years
of popular, militant resistance after 1916, espe-
cially in 1919-20 when there are workers’
mini-risings across Ireland as elsewhere in
Europe. A year or two ago I had the disconcert-
ing experience of showing the 1916 rebel grave
in Arbour Hill to the great Italian leftist novelist
who goes by the pseudonym of Wu Ming I: read-
ing the words of the Proclamation etched into
the wall there, I found I had to encourage this
perceptive comrade to see past the family
resemblance to fascist nationalism, especially
in the quasi-mystical personification of Ireland.
I persuaded him, I think, but textual analysis
alone would scarcely have accomplished the
task.
The real history of women’s and workers’
place in the fight, from 1913 onward to and
beyond 1916, tells the story far more clearly.
The post-Rising story is not simply one of execu-
tions and martyrdom sparking further rebellion,
but of a population increasingly engaged in
political struggle for its material well-being.
That real history, and popular memory of it,
have probably helped keep the worst sort of
blood-and-soil commemoration at bay. Some
liberals may claim the rebels were fascists, but
the Blueshirts, lacking the courage of their
founding fathers’ convictions, can’t generally
bring themselves to shout it from the
rooftops.
It’s true that the conspicuous, indeed exclu-
sive, militarism of the Easter Sunday parade
went a little way in that direction, as did some
elements of the RTÉ Centenary gala whatsit at
the Bord Gáis theatre on Easter Monday.
That show started with an absurd tableau of
the nation awakening in the forest primeval, fol-
lowed by some muscular warrior-dancing by Cú
Chulainn, whose portrayal by a black dancer
somehow deepened rather than tempered the
sense of national mythologising. Then, a little
while later, there was the smarmy, sure-to-be-
viral video in which, armed by a confident wee
colleen, an ancient standing stone shoots rays
of pure Irishness all around the earth to shiny
places where shiny people are somehow pos-
sessed to recite the Proclamation. (Yes, that’s
the New York Stock Exchange emblemising the
Republic’s resolve to pursue the people’s hap-
piness and prosperity.)
Within the hour, however, the programme
had retreated to the comforting confusion of
chaotic montage, and Imelda May’s showstop-
ping version of Kermit the Frog’s ‘Bein’ Green’
returned us all safely to the realm of mild self-
mockery, where Irish mainstream discourse is
consensually in yer granny’s, and where we
don’t talk about the North.
The truth is, in 1916 yer granny and mine
probably wouldn’t have been able to come to
any consensus about the Rising. Its leaders and
fighters were radicals, dividers, at the cutting
edge of thought and action about, variously,
culture, class, nation and sex. And not least,
and most relevantly today, about imperial war.
It is surely no coincidence that the people today
most likely to highlight the red ink in the yellow-
ing balance-sheet of ‘physical-force
republicanism’ are also least likely to note the
fresh, daily, continuing slaughter wrought by
physical-force imperialism. In fact, they are
most likely to be imperialism’s celebrants, just
waiting to welcome the tough new President
Clinton to town in 2017 or ‘18.
Whether Constance Markiewicz would have
happily stood by Hillary’s side at Shannon Air-
port is a silly question, though it doesn’t take
any great imagination to hear Clinton, or Miriam
O’Callaghan, or Sean O’Rourke, invoking the
twinned image of these trailblazing women in
the not-too-distant future. We should try to
resist the time-travelling impulse – sorry
Marian, no more ‘what would James Connolly
think of our little Republic now?’
If we want to assess whether we are cherish-
ing the children equally yet, it should be
because they are worth cherishing, not as the
end-point of an argument about what was
meant by a document printed in Liberty Hall,
where Markievicz and her pistols guarded the
printing press, just an eventful century ago.
Let’s not take ‘let history be the judge’ too lit-
erally. Let’s make some history of our own.
In mainstream media
the theory that there
was a successful
counter-revolution – is
almost unthinkable
The media establishment have not established 1916's relevance
April 2016 5 9
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
2014-04-03-Village-Ad-HighRes.ai 1 03/04/2014 20:32
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
2014-04-03-Village-Ad-HighRes.ai 1 03/04/2014 20:32
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
2014-04-03-Village-Ad-HighRes.ai 1 03/04/2014 20:32
