1916 (60 page)

By contrast, the ‘sixteeners’ were a clandestine group, who, in the same breath that they revealed themselves and their projects, declared themselves a government and made themselves the nation’s rulers. Also in contrast to eighteenth century France, they did it against a backdrop of a relatively well-developed democracy, in which Ireland was probably over-represented in the Westminster parliament. This was of no interest to them. They did not offer themselves to the nation for consideration as a possible future government: they simply imposed themselves on the nation on Easter Monday, telling it that they were its new government. They may have had discussions on the morality of taking up arms, but not on their attempted seizure of power. They do not seem to have weighed the morality of suddenly declaring oneself, with a group of one’s friends, the government that the rest of the Irish people must obey, on pain of being shot.

The Easter Rising undermined normal political life in 1916, and to some extent continues to do so. Consider the following from Pearse:

The man who, in the name of Ireland, accepts as ‘a final settlement’ anything less by one fraction of one iota than separation from England … is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation … that it were better for that man … that he had not been born.
¹⁷

That is the statement of a revolutionary, an idealist or a fanatic, backed by the reference to scripture
(Mark 14:21)
.
It is not the language of a statesman or politician who must negotiate and compromise, and give leadership in doing so. Even when allowing for context, in its damning of all possible compromise it is an inherently anti-political, anti-negotiation, anti-compromise, anti-democratic statement. Those who signed the Treaty, de Valera and his followers who entered the Dáil in August 1927, all subsequent Irish governments, and all Irish political parties that accepted the
Good Friday agreement of 1998 are damned by Pearse’s statement.

The option for violence, in a context where democratic parliamentary constitutional politics were operative, is an anti-politics option. Politics is about talking and negotiating. Putting it more philosophically, politics is about dialogue and acknowledging the Other. Violence and the seizure of power is its negation. The 1916 option was for dealing with things with the
‘lámh láidir’
: no more compromise, no more talk – no more politics, in short. And politics has ethical value: as Aristotle said, humans are political animals, and part of their human fulfilment is to be involved in the discussion and pursuit of the common good. The anti-politics stance is unethical, in a narcissistic kind of way.

It is the opposite of the model of politics implicit in the Good Friday agreement of 1998. To the extent that one holds the latter to be ethically good, owing to its seeking to realise the values of democracy, the rule of law, and respect for diversity, one has little choice but to judge the Easter Rising to be ethically bad.

Further, the 1916 model is ethically objectionable for another reason, in that, whenever people get bored with democratic politics, impatient with the slow process of dialogue, endless listening, and compromise, the attraction to more ‘direct methods’ becomes stronger. The concern that contemporary western governments often have around low election turn-outs indicates the need to educate people in democracy. It will not be done by praising the ‘sixteeners’.

Finally, to seek to justify the Easter Rising by pointing to the ideals of the Proclamation won’t work. Many people held those ideals in 1916: we didn’t need Pearse and the others to reveal them. Nor is the citing of high ideals as significant as is sometimes made out. Anybody can come up with high ideals. What tells more about the partisans of the ideals is the means they propose for promoting them.

Similarly, trying to justify the Rising by focusing on the personalities of its leaders is question-begging. Most come across as high-minded persons of personal integrity. But that won’t make the politics right. To imagine that it might is to invest them with a status far above that of the rest of us: it’s aristocratic in spirit, not democratic or egalitarian.

Holding up the ideals of
liberté, egalité, fraternité
in France does not commit French citizens to viewing particular individuals such as the Abbé Sieyès, Mirabeau or Robespierre as heroes. In the USA, Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, comes closest to a hero; yet his tolerance of slavery is neither denied nor defended. Americans are quite prepared to admit that Jefferson, like Hamilton and Franklin and Burr, had feet of clay. The debates that went on among federalists and anti-federalists, the conflicting visions of Jefferson and Hamilton, are seen as part of normal politics. The extent to which we place Pearse on a higher plane of moral being to Redmond is a measure of the corruption of democratic politics by the Easter Rising, in favour of a kind of revolutionary elitism that despises politics as the trivial diversion of lesser mortals. Ethically, it’s all wrong.

7. The betrayal of republicanism

Modern republicanism originated in the eighteenth century American and French revolutions. Early Irish republicanism arose in response. Accordingly, allowing for national differences, Irish republicanism can in part be measured against them.

What is striking is how quickly the democratic element in eighteenth century republicanism was lost in nineteenth century Irish republicanism. The Young Irelanders of the 1840s and the Fenians of the 1860s moved away from the public mass-movement, the democratic element of O’Connell’s emancipation and repeal movements.
¹⁸
From the 1860s onwards, Irish republicanism, as expressed in the IRB, has more in common with the violent, secret society, including the anarchist movements found in Italy and eastern Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Even if they officially wanted a democratic state and society, they were, by their very nature, unable to contribute to its development.
¹⁹
The gradual extension of the franchise in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century, the rise of the home rule movement and the Irish party were treated by them as having no significance. Democratic evolution in the United Kingdom (including Ireland), in the direction where the popular will was politically expressible, was something to which they did not contribute and that they dismissed. Their political thinking failed to evolve in line with contemporary political developments, so that their idea of what an Irish republic should be and how it might come about became stagnant and dated. The development of a democratic or republican political culture happened independently of them, and in some ways despite them.

In light of that, the question arises of whether the IRB of the 1880– 1920 period can be said to be a republican movement at all, in the classic American or French sense of republicanism. By 1916, the IRB’s republicanism was no more than secret society conspiracy, whose sole goal was
independence from Britain, coupled with a confused but emotionally intense anti-monarchicalism.
²⁰

Today, there are interesting developments in republican thought, particularly exploration in the USA of the idea of civic republicanism, understood as calling for measures to move people towards socially active citizenship. It presents the republican ideal as a participation in the polis, in opposition to the passive individual consumer, whose real life lies outside of the political realm. Politics is not just about goals, since democracies tend to produce a plurality of philosophies about the right goals; politics is also about the dialogue, the debates, and what Hegel would have called the dialectic, the ideological give-and-take, and the evolution of ideals in the light of what is feasible.
²¹
Irish secret society republicanism cuts in a diametrically opposed direction, since it seeks to remove the zone of significant political action and decision from the public gaze and confine it to the closed, dark room where only the oath-bound may enter.
²²
Pearse and Connolly were committed to the public arena until they joined the IRB and entered the zone of secrecy.

Thus, from an international republican point of view, bearing in mind the ethical values of republicanism, 1916 might best be termed ‘the great leap backwards’. First, it undermined the ethical project of building the republic, and has fixed in the Irish national imagination the idea of a republican as an anti-democratic conspirator, indifferent to social justice, freedom of speech, and the right to life. Second, it identified the republic solely with being independent from Britain. While obtaining independence from Britain was necessary for creating an Irish republic, it was not the only requirement, nor the most important. For a republic, as Jefferson and Robespierre would have argued, involves a change in the moral culture of the people, moving from being apolitical or politically excluded subjects, to being politically participating citizens. Whatever they might have said, the praxis of the Easter insurgents had nothing to do with creating such a republic, for nothing else mattered to them but getting the British out. The republicanism of the 1916 insurgents, which then was that of the IRB, was degenerate. It’s no good pointing to Connolly’s social commitments, or Pearse’s high-minded idealism. When they marched out in the spring of 1916, they were marching to Clarke’s and MacDermott’s tune, and they knew it, a fact reflected in their asking Clarke, as the senior IRB man, to be the first to sign the Proclamation.

What generated a proper republican culture in Ireland was the mass political educational process begun by the Liberator, and developed by Parnell, Davitt, Redmond, and Larkin. Decisions to accept limited sovereignty (as with the Treaty in 1921–2), and to yield or share sovereignty as in the EU referenda, are not (contrary to Pearse) a betrayal of republicanism but its expression, since they occurred as part of the democratic development of public policy responsive to the needs of citizens, oriented to human good and social solidarity. The bastard republicanism, dominant since 1916, has to reject all of these, for its sole concern was independence from Britain: it doesn’t require citizens. Contrary to the idea of the republic as something hidden and secret in the hearts of men, an ethically authentic notion of the republic would have seen it as something slowly growing in and through the public social practices of citizens and the meanings created by those practices. The IRB thought of the republic as existing independently of and separately from all that, and thought of its emergence and taking flesh as achievable by no more than a declaration of the republic (as happened on Easter Monday), or perhaps with a recognition by Britain of its existence. But such a republic is a thin, insubstantial thing, compared to that built up through the political and social interaction of citizens.

Nor did the Easter Rising’s notion of the republic have much in common with the traditional notion of the republican virtue of international solidarity. Consider the behaviour of the Easter insurgents’ spiritual descendants towards Nazi Germany, imitating the IRB’s earlier relationship with imperial Germany during the First World War. In the Easter tradition, the IRA thought only of ‘England’s difficulty’: they were indifferent to the nature of the Nazi regime. By contrast, the French republic of the 1790s positively thought it had a duty to liberate subjects elsewhere and make them citizens: however misguided tactically, it expressed the right value.

C
ONCLUSION

In a framework of liberal democratic values and norms, the consequences of the Easter Rising were largely negative, and on some points extremely so. Insofar as there were some positive consequences, it is probable that the Rising’s influence was minor. The choices and actions of the leaders of the 1916 insurgency are unjustifiable, first because they demonstrate a lack of awareness of the impact on democracy of resort to violence or else a relative indifference to democracy owing to immersion in a political culture of secrecy and exclusiveness, and second because they reflect a refusal to
accept the political realities of unionist/nationalist division among Irish people. That refusal, given sharp expression in the form of the Easter Rising and its consequences, delayed (as could have been foreseen at the time) and lengthened the rocky and painful path to reconciliation on this island. The leaders of the Rising can be remembered as noble heroes of the Irish past, only if one ignores or brackets out their politics. That might be possible in a feudal era, but not in a republican democracy.

The golden jubilee of the Rising marked the apogee of celebrations accorded to the event since the establishment of the state. According to Declan Kiberd, the lavish nature of the myriad of organised activities in 1966 represented ‘a last, over-the-top purgation of a debt to the past’. By concentrating solely on glorifying the past it could be quietly forgotten that the aims of those who had sacrificed their lives in the Rising had not yet been properly achieved. Leaders like Pearse and Connolly were promoted only for their military exploits. Their radical ideas on education and justice, as yet unattained, were not mentioned. This kind of simplistic approach, largely fostered by politicians and propagandists, did not encourage much critical exchange of ideas and as a result a mood of disenchantment quickly set in.
¹

The above quotation appears to typify the feelings of many recent commentators on the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Rising, held throughout Ireland in 1966. These celebrations are usually noted as one of the major public events to have taken place in the Republic of Ireland during the 1960s. Although this period was generally marked by a new mood of national self-confidence many commentators have seen the jubilee commemorations as a negative reminder of how little had changed. The historian, Enda Staunton, has described the commemorations as ‘expensive splurges of triumphalism reflecting the complacency of a state still unshaken in its Roman Catholic and nationalist verities and basking in the first glow of material prosperity since its formation’.
²
The commemorative events that took place in Ireland, particularly those in Belfast, are frequently cited as a key factor leading to the outbreak of violent conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969.
³