Inclusiveness, the British Army and the 1916 Centenary

Memorial to British in 1916 Centenary - Irish Examiner, April 1st, 2015.
Memorial Sought for British Troops Killed in 1916 - RTÉ News, April 8th, 2015.

The Irish National War Memorial Gardens commemorate Irishmen who died in the Great War in the armies of the Triple Entente, which was an alliance between the British Empire, the French Third Republic and the Imperial Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. (The memorial to all Irish soldiers does not commemorate any Irishmen who fought for the Central Powers, funnily enough). The memorial is located in Islandbridge, Dublin 8, but Merrion Square, just outside the Dáil, was one of the originally proposed locations.

A very telling speech was made during the 1926 debate about the location of the memorial, which seems to appropriate to current concerns about how to be “inclusive” in commemorating the Rising.

The speaker objected because he feared that locating the memorial in front of the parliament of an independent Ireland would give the impression, to those unfamiliar with Irish history, that the monuments were connected. That the deaths of Irishmen fighting for the Triple Entente led to Ireland taking her place among the nations of the Earth. He did not see this as being at all the case:

We had our talk of political dismemberment; we had our talk of partition; we had our conference on the less or more of partition; we had the shelving of the whole issue, and the hanging up of the [Home Rule] Bill until after the war, when that whole issue was to be reopened. The horse was to live, and it would get grass after the war.

The horse, not unwisely as I see it, decided it would have a bit for grass before the end of the war. Someone said, or wrote, that somehow, at sometime, and by somebody, revolutions must be begun. A revolution was begun in this country, in Easter 1916. That revolution was endorsed by the people in a general election of 1918 and three years afterwards the representatives of the Irish people negotiated a treaty with the British government. It is on that treaty, won in that way, that this state and its constitution are based, and I submit to deputies it is not wise to suggest that this state has any other origin than those. 

Let men think what they will of them. Let men criticise them, and hold their individual viewpoints. But those are the origins of the State.

It would be lacking in a sense of truth, a sense of historical perspective, a sense of symmetry, to suggest that the state had not these origins, but that it is based in some way of the sacrifice of those who followed the advice of parliamentary representatives of the day and recruited in great numbers to the British army to fight in the European war.

Fifty thousand Irishmen died in France. I hope that the memory of those men and their sacrifice and the motives of their sacrifice will always have respect and reverence in Ireland.

Who was the slavering, Brit-hating, báinín-wearing, backwoods-dwelling Republican jihadi who made that speech? It was the then Minister for Justice of the Free State Government, Kevin O’Higgins (the quotation is taken from Terence de Vere White's 1948 biography of O'Higgins, Anvil Press, 1966. p 173).

Nobody was as ruthless as O’Higgins in implementing the Treaty during the Civil War and after. But for all that, O’Higgins saw a clear line of demarcation between those Irishmen who fought under the Tricolor and those Irishmen who fought under other flags.

If O’Higgins’ shade were to return one year from now, and walk down what he knew as Sackville Street, what would he make of the Centenary? Reader, couldn’t you excuse him for wondering why he and his comrades ever bothered?

The Redmond Problem

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Former Taoiseach John Bruton is not to be dissuaded in his support for John Redmond as a great Irish patriot and parliamentarian. But is John Bruton aware that the case he is currently building could blow up in his face and help sweep Sinn Féin to power just in time for the 100th Anniversary of the Easter Rising?

John Burton’s advocacy of John Redmond is part of the wider campaign to water down any commemoration of the 1916 Rising. This watering-down campaign has not been announced as policy, as there are concerns that such watering down would go down badly with the people. As such, the campaign has been a little more subtle.

There was Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland, which received blanket media coverage. There was President Higgins’s return visit to the United Kingdom, which was covered no less.

There has been this spurious “Decade of Commemoration,” where successive governments have tried to lessen the impact of the 100th Anniversary of the Rising by saying the Rising was just one of a number of things that happened at that time.

As a strategy, this is in the same league as a callow youth’s plan to sneak a copy of some naughty magazine in between a National Geographic and this week’s Western as he approaches a till manned by a live, actual female.

No-one is fooled. The people don’t care. We had a year-long commemoration of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin last year, and this year’s love-bombing of the 100th anniversary of the start of the “Great” War. Both were met by the same shrug as the checkout girl’s, who has zero interest in the callow youth’s taste in periodicals. The nation doesn’t care about a decade of commemoration, but there seems to be a big green X marking the spot for either April 24th or Easter Monday of 2016 somewhere at the back of our minds.

That the Rising still means so much to people is surprising, and certainly not in line with how successive governments have been viewing the situation. It only became obvious after the Presidential visit to the United Kingdom when, in a flush of enthusiasm, an invitation was extended for some members of the British royal family to come over and be part of the fun.

The nation reacted with horror and the proposal hasn’t been heard of since.

The reason that Irish governments have been very wary of the 1916 Anniversary is that the Rising was legitimised after the fact. Padraig Pearse and the other rebel leaders had no mandate to do what they did. They couldn’t declare a republic in 1916 because they didn’t represent anybody but themselves in 1916.

The 1916 mandate was backdated by the first Dáil in 1919, and since it all turned out grand in the end, nobody but an anti-national spoilsport would go questioning the morality of the whole thing. For the first fifty years after independence, everyone wore the white cockade.

And then, on January 4th, 1969, a march in support of a crazy notion of one-man, one-vote in Northern Ireland was ambushed on its way into Derry, to the supreme indifference of the watching policemen as a fusillade of stones, iron bars and nail-studded sticks rained down on the marchers.

One thing led to another and by the 1970s getting tanked up and singing Seán South of Garryowen south of the border didn’t seem like harmless fun anymore. Nobody wanted to mention the war.

That war-that-wasn’t took thirty years and over three thousand lives until a serendipitous accident saw political leaders in Ireland, Britain and the USA come to power, leaders who were willing take chances and bend rules for peace.
There are those who are sickened by retired terrorists swaggering around the corridors of power instead of doing stir in some suitable jail, but that is the price of peace. People have to turn a blind eye to things in the name of the greater good.

Until a bull charges into a china shop as John Bruton did when he condemned the 1916 leaders in a speech delivered at the Irish Royal Academy on the day of the Scottish Referendum.

For Bruton, the Irishmen who fought for Britain in the “Great” War were patriots, whereas those who rebelled in 1916 were not fighting a just war. But Bruton makes a logical error here. He presents reaction to the 1916 Rising as an either/or scenario.

If you are against the 1916 Rising, you must be in favour of Redmond, and you must therefore do your duty by the Empire. Meaning, in this case, head for the Somme two months after the Rising and get mown down by the German machine-guns in your thousands and thousands.

There was a slogan that was common in Ireland during those troubled times one hundred years ago – “Neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.” In his speech at the Royal Irish Academy, Bruton has eliminated that third way as an option at the time, and has presented war as inevitable. The only question was whether you marched under the tricolour or the Union Jack, but march and kill or be killed you surely would.

And that’s a very inappropriate road for Bruton to have gone down. Just how inappropriate was spotted immediately by the current Minister for Agriculture (and favourite to become the next leader of Fine Gael), Simon Coveney. On the morning of Bruton’s speech, Minister Coveney tweeted “For the record: I believe much of John Bruton’s commentary on 1916 is simply wrong and does not represent the views of Fine Gael supporters.” Duly noted, Minister.

It may be that Bruton doesn’t realise that he polarised the choice, and it was just unfortunate wording on his part. Or it may be that he’s fully aware of what he’s doing, and believes that, in times of peace and (returned?) prosperity, the nation will follow the good man Redmond ahead of gunmen like Breen, Barry and O’Malley.

But nationalism works at a level beyond the senses. When it boils down to flags, the Irish nation, for all the faults of the state, will rally under only one, and it won’t be the one still flying over Edinburgh. That is the nature of the patriot game.

What Exactly Are We Commemorating Here?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

It’s time to talk about 1916. It’s a pity that we have to talk about it at all, as the anniversary should be, in theory, like a second St Patrick’s Day at its very worst. But recent events and remarks in the press about inviting British Royals to attend whatever ceremonies will happen now beg the question what exactly is it that we’re commemorating, and what do we hope to achieve in that commemoration?

The momentum behind the idea of the British Royal Family being involved suggests that this hasn’t been thought through at all, and if we only learned one thing in recent years, we should have figured out that not thinking things through can only lead to trouble.

Fifty years ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, things were much clearer. The then President and Taoiseach were both active participants in 1916, and were going to push the boat out come what may.

Fifty years later, we are in a very different Ireland indeed. Thirty years of war in the North has made a lot of people ambivalent about nationalism. The continuing recession has made people bitter, and the continuing exposure of scandal-ridden state institutions as being deeply, deeply flawed eats away at national pride. The current government was elected to change all that in what felt like a culturally seismic election, and nothing has changed at all.

And through all this, Ireland’s warped relationship with the English now bubbles up again to distract further from the major work of repairing the country, ninety-four years after we were returned charge of it. England is Ireland’s frenemy, to use that useful phrase popularized by our sisters in the TV show Sex and the City.

We need them and we hate needing them. We insist that we are different because we are scared at how alike we are. We live and die with their soccer teams while lustily booing their soccer teams’ stars during the World Cup.

And of course for the English, the Irish are just a detail, like a bothersome bumble-bee at a picnic. The English are traumatised by the loss of their Empire, their national identity and, if things go Alex Sammond’s way in October, a good big slice of their United Kingdom itself. They really can’t make time for the Irish not knowing how to feel about Steven Gerrard.

Ireland isn’t the only country to have won a kind of freedom from the English. The United States of America did so as long ago as 1776. British Prime Ministers and Monarchs have visited the United States in official capacities many times since, but I don’t remember any of those Prime Ministers or Monarchs being asked to make goms of themselves at any Fourth of July celebrations.

India – another country where the British thought partition would be an answer – celebrates her Independence on the 15th of August. You will see His Royal Highness the Prince Harry buying beasts at the Fair in Belmullet on that day before you will see the Indian Government feeling the need to invite a Royal to India to confirm that there are no hard feelings, no, really.

Because isn’t that what this invitation is about, really? To reassure ourselves that we are still loved by our betters? There is no other way to explain it. It’s got nothing to with the dead generations from which Ireland derives her long tradition of nationhood, is it?

There’s an argument to be made that the idea of the nation state is a fading one, and the growth of the superpowers – the USA, a United States of Europe / European Federation, Russia, China and the rest, with individual national identities being to the super-state what Ballina is to Mayo, or what Mayo used to be to Ireland, is the way of future.

The future has a tendency to happen whether or not we’re prepared for it. The problem with a 1916 Commemoration Invitation to a British Royal is that such an invitation isn’t looking to that future.

If it were, the invitation would be to Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi and Francois Hollande (we’d have to give Hollande a +1 of course, rather than name his partner – you know what that fella’s like). But nobody’s talking about inviting our current and future partners. The invitation is to our former rulers, who still loom so large in our heads.

Why is that? Why, after ninety years, have we not learned to stand alone? And why, in the spurious “decade of commemoration,” aren’t we talking about the reasons that the Rising happened in the first place? What place will that long tradition of nationhood referred to in the Proclamation have when we celebrate its hundredth anniversary?

Liam Ó Briain, who later went on to become a Professor of Romance Languages in UCD, wrote a memoir, Cuimhní Cinn, of his own time in the Rising as a young man. Ó Briain was stationed on St Stephen’s Green West, near the Royal College of Surgeons. One night, he led a squad of men to raid some nearby premises to see what they could loot to use as barricades.

One of the troops found some old, thick books and suggested they be used, as they were thick enough to be as good as sandbags. Ó Briain examined the books – they were annals of the monasteries, the old books like the Book of Leinster and the Book of Ulster, which contains the first written history of Cúchulainn.

“We can’t use them lads,” Ó Briain told the men. “If we’re fighting this war for anything, we’re fighting for those books.”

The Government hopes to have a role for the British Royal Family at the 1916 Commemoration, and ideally they’re hoping that the Royals will be represented by the heir to the throne himself. What role will those old books have, the old books that Liam Ó Briain thought justified having a Rising in the first place? Or are we still standing by the gate, waiting for a nod from Sir as he rides by? Will the Irish stand there forever?