I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me – & I am very despondent about the future. At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned.
W. B. Yeats, 11 May 1916
On 21 January 1919, the victorious Sinn Féin general election candidates who were at large (36 out of 69 were in prison) assembled in the Dublin Mansion House as the independent parliament of Ireland, Dáil Éireann. For the next two and a half years, an attempt to establish an alternative state structure under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith was accompanied by a guerrilla campaign fought by the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Republican Army, as the organization became generally known, continued to be led from Dublin, where its headquarters were dominated by Richard Mulcahy and Michael Collins, but it also flourished – by contrast with 1916 – in the countryside, above all in Munster. Rebel Cork recovered its fame, Tomas MacCurtain was assassinated by RIC ‘Black and Tans’, and Terence MacSwiney matched Thomas Ashe in conducting the most epic of all republican hunger strikes. In July 1921 a truce was negotiated, followed by longer negotiations for a political settlement. The establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, however, was a deeply contested process; men and women of 1916 took opposite sides over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that created it. A year of civil war was the start of a long struggle to bring political reality into line with the aspirations of the 1916 rebels. The anti-Treaty IRA remained, on and off, ready to return to violence against Britain itself, the six counties of partitioned Northern Ireland, and the twenty-six counties of the Dublin-governed state that they regarded as a British puppet. There was a wide sense that the Irish revolution was a révolution manquée. History had not gone quite according to plan. Had 1916 been betrayed, or was it – perhaps – itself a cause of this disappointment?
In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory registered its impact on that Ango-Irish intellectual elite which had so often been at loggerheads with the Gaelic enthusiasts of the Volunteers. The ‘work of years’ that Yeats was concerned about was the ‘bringing together of classes, the freeing of Irish literature from politics’. Lady Gregory’s mind, too, was ‘filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy, the death of Pearse and McDonough [sic], who ought to have been on our side’. But she had a clear perception that ‘the leaders were what is wanted in Ireland – a fearless & imaginative opposition to the conventional & opportunist parliamentarians’. Yeats was struck by Maud Gonne’s reaction: ‘tragic dignity had returned to Ireland’. As early as 11 May he was ‘trying to write a poem on the men executed – “terrible beauty has been born”’.1 The poem took longer than he, or at any rate Gonne, expected; he worked on it through the summer at her house on the Normandy coast (where, from time to time, he could hear the distant echoes of artillery from the Somme). He finished ‘1916’ at Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home in Galway, in late September, and circulated it to a private audience as ‘Easter, 1916’. Maud Gonne’s response to this extraordinary poem was interesting. It was not worthy of him, ‘& above all it isn’t worthy of the subject’. She, like many, was hoping for a poem ‘which our race would treasure & repeat’, and found a creation that despite its ‘beautiful lines’ was not ‘a great WHOLE … which would have avenged our material failure by its spiritual beauty’.2
What made it hard to recognize this as a great public poem was in part its meditative inwardness: Yeats was visibly wrestling with the reevaluation of the rebel leaders, and though he ended with an almost ‘Davisite’ celebration – ‘Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn’ – the refrain ‘a terrible beauty is born’ remained ambivalent. And from Gonne’s viewpoint, the poem was verging on anti-nationalist, especially its wonderful central section, in which Yeats counterposed the rigidity of republican thinking (‘Hearts with one purpose alone … Enchanted to a stone’) against the endless changing of the real world (the ‘living stream’). Worst of all, perhaps, it obliquely challenged the rebellion’s validity. Yeats stopped short of saying that the real situation had been ‘changed utterly’; it was only the memory of the rebels that had. Indeed, his final stanza gave expression to what may be called the ‘revisionist’ view: ‘Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith …’ – in other words, concede Home Rule. From a republican standpoint this was absolutely heretical – a reversion to the constitutionalist trust in British generosity. ‘Easter, 1916’ has been well called ‘the first work of revisionist poetry, revisionist history, revisionist literary criticism’.3
By withholding publication of the poem for several years, Yeats initially opted out of what F. X. Martin called ‘the rally of the literary men’, one of the key modes of cementing the rebellion’s place in national history. Though some who rallied, notably Bernard Shaw, were major literary figures, the stature of others might sometimes be debatable. One influential work, The Memory of the Dead, produced in 1917 by ‘Martin Daly’ (Stephen McKenna), was a quasihagiographical monument to nine of the men killed in Easter Week. Another, The Soldier’s Story of Easter Week, published by Brian O’Higgins in 1925 but written in 1917, celebrated the rebellion as ‘a spiritual victory over selfishness, expediency and compromise and materialism’. After 1925 it was never out of print, and together with a clutch of similar products it exerted a cumulative influence on the popular reading of the rebellion – what Martin called the ‘faith and fatherland’ interpretation. The dead 1916 leaders underwent a steady process of secular sanctification, at the expense of their human qualities and frailties: the pinnacle of this process was perhaps the famous 1932 biography of Pearse by Louis Le Roux, a Breton author writing in French. First published at Rennes, it was immediately translated by Pearse’s pupil Desmond Ryan (who had himself written a short, celebratory study, The Man Called Pearse, in 1919). Something about the saintly image projected by this work had the effect of preventing any further attempt to evaluate Pearse until the 1970s. It was curious, too, that after the small spate of journalists’ accounts published immediately after the rebellion, no participant, or historian, wrote a comprehensive history of it until Desmond Ryan did so in the late 1940s.4
By comparison, the ‘revisionist’ response got off to a faltering start. The former opponents of insurrection, admittedly, tended to keep quiet – notably Hobson and MacNeill (who never tried to vindicate his countermanding order, and whose tersely argued memorandum did not become publicly known until long after his death). O’Connell, perhaps less surprisingly, also refrained from open criticism. Not so, however, Eimar O’Duffy, who committed his long wrestling with the issue to paper in the form of a semi-autobiographical novel, The Wasted Island. Like so much of the earnest literary output of Sinn Feiners at this time, this was full of ‘hours and hours of talk and arguments’ between differing nationalist groups ‘that are, for all their point and wit, like formal debates’.5 O’Duffy chose a form which did not carry a single thesis, but the pessimism of his title made its own comment – and there was special force in one of his characters’ view of the rebellion: ‘This’ll give the English just the chance they want, to grind us back into the mud we’re barely rising from.’ Another replies, ‘Good God! A hundred more years of slavery. The blind idiots!’ One can certainly imagine Hobson expressing such sentiments, and the fact that the novel was finished after Sinn Féin’s election victory and the establishment of Dáil Éireann in 1919 indicates that O’Duffy did not place much hope in the second round of the Anglo-Irish war. (This despite the fact that under Mulcahy and Collins, who also condemned – though not on paper – the military conduct of the rebellion, a form of fighting much closer to the guerrilla model espoused by O’Duffy and O’Connell was then being adopted.)6
The second fight, which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the establishment of the Irish Free State, had the effect of stilling re-evaluation of 1916 for many years. The anti-treaty republicans of course took their stand on the rightness, indeed the holiness of the rebels, but even their fiercest opponents incorporated the rebellion in the Free State’s political genealogy. (This was not easy in principle, since it risked enshrining the very political violence that the Free State was denouncing as undemocratic during the civil war. It was especially hard for those like Griffith who – unlike his Free State colleagues Collins and Cosgrave – had not only not been ‘out’ in 1916, but who had been consistently opposed to violence even during the 1919–21 conflict.) Denying it was not a political option for anyone unprepared to alienate mainstream opinion. Only a maverick like Sean O’Casey could face the outrage caused by an attempt to portray the absurd, destructive and pointless aspects of the rebellion. The Plough and the Stars (1926) did just that, and despite its ‘overpowering’ quality – in the view of Lady Gregory, no mean judge of drama (‘I felt at the end as if I should never care to look at another; all others would seem so shadowy to the mind after this’) – it provoked a public furore. The uproar at the Abbey Theatre was so violent that Yeats, defending the play from the stage, was able to mime a speech and then go off to a newspaper office to write what he might have said. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s charge that the drama’s claimed realism was ‘morbid perversity’ that ‘held up to derision and obloquy the men and women of Easter Week’ was a comparatively mild protest, but nonetheless effective. O’Casey’s dyspeptic perspective – he would have called it honesty – was not endorsed by any significant public figure for almost half a century.
Participation in the rebellion, or at least the ability to suggest it, became a key part of every nationalist politician’s résumé. Eoin MacNeill remarked to Bulmer Hobson during Easter week that ‘we would have no political future if we were not arrested’. This was certainly true for Hobson himself (who had the unenviable distinction of being the only IRB man arrested by the republicans rather than the British). It may not have been true for everyone – Kevin O’Higgins was a spectacular exception – but the Free State’s first political generation was dominated by 1916 veterans – Cosgrave and de Valera leading, with a cohort of lieutenants such as Mulcahy, MacEntee and Oscar Traynor. In the Fianna Fáil party, especially, which called itself ‘the republican party’, and which under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and his successors was the main party of government after 1932, the challenge ‘where were you in 1916?’ became an all too familiar put-down. And starting from the chilling invocation of the dead by hardline republicans during the debate over the Treaty, Irish political life tended to confirm what Yeats recognized in his fatalistic poem ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ (written in 1917), the power of martyrdom to prohibit compromise – ‘who can talk of give and take … while those dead men are loitering there?’ Political logic could not ‘outweigh/MacDonagh’s bony thumb’; indeed, political discussion was pointless, because only the conversation of the dead – ‘bone to bone’ with their ‘new comrades’, the heroes of the past – really mattered.
The fiftieth anniversary of the rebellion began a process of unravelling these stifling pieties. The public celebration of this event showed, admittedly, that Pearse’s original prorities still prevailed. The reinforcement of ‘Irish’ identity took precedence over the preservation of a ‘united Ireland’. The planners of 1916 had shown little if any interest in the risk of alienating northern Unionist opinion, and the possibility that their action might cement the partition of the island. The 1966 celebrations were similarly self-referential (if not solipsistic), even though the republic had fallen some way short of fulfilling the original vital aim that Ireland be both free and ‘Gaelic’, for which unity had been sacrificed. The festival was accompanied by ‘a colourful crop’ of popular ‘faith and fatherland’ accounts of 1916.7 But the anniversary produced some good histories as well, most notably Max Caulfield’s vividly detailed The Easter Rebellion, even though academic historians still confined themselves to collections of essays rather than full-scale studies.8
It also led some serious thinkers to reassess the rebellion’s place in the title deeds of the Irish state. (We should note, since it is often suggested that ‘revisionism’ was provoked by the revival of IRA terrorism, that in 1966 the IRA was in disarray, and the belief in north–south détente was stronger than it had been at any time since 1921.)9 Eoin MacNeill’s withering assessment of the insurrectionists had recently been discovered (in 1961), and caused a degree of public interest rare if not unique for an academic journal publication. In 1966 Garret FitzGerald, son of Desmond FitzGerald, and a future prime minister, approached the problem from the angle of the Fine Gael politicians who had always had to handle the 1916 legacy gingerly. In a typically unostentatious essay he assessed the validity of the basic justification for the rebellion: the rebels’ belief that ‘without a gesture such as the Rising the spirit of Irish nationality and the sense of national identity would flicker out’. Cautiously airing the counter-view that ‘the gains thus secured were offset by losses’ – above all, partition – he admitted that ‘it would appear more logical to have given the maintenance of national unity priority over the speedy attainment of independence’. History had sadly demonstrated that once the political unity of Ireland was broken, it would be extremely hard (even perhaps impossible) to restore it. So the postponement of independence, ‘even for a couple of decades, would have been a small price to have paid to avoid Partition’. But FitzGerald backed away from this conclusion, using his father’s memoirs (still unpublished at that time) to argue for an acceptance of the cultural anxiety that had impelled the rebels to act. This, he said, called for an effort of imagination, because ‘the very success of 1916 has weakened our understanding of why its leaders felt that the Rising was needed’.10
Francis Shaw and Conor Cruise O’Brien, however, pushed much more aggressively the contention that 1916 was a mistake. Shaw, a Jesuit, wrote his essay ‘The Canon of Irish History – A Challenge’ for the same issue of Studies in which FitzGerald’s article was published, but the editors withheld it until 1972. (Whatever the reasons for this, it had the effect of launching the argument at the height of the IRA’s renewed Northern Ireland campaign, reinforcing the impression that it was a response to terrorism.) It was certainly strong meat for a culture which had made a long and patient effort to absorb the 1916 legacy – to the point where inveterate Unionist institutions such as the Irish Times could celebrate the anniversary, and the Provost of Trinity College had hung a copy of the Proclamation on the wall of his study. Fr Shaw unleashed a head-on assault not only on Pearse’s justifications for the rebellion, but also on the essence of his nationalist doctrine. The argument that Irish national spirit was dying away before 1916 was wholly wrong, he contended. Far from having lost their way, the Irish people knew very well where they were going, and were well on the way there. Home Rule was not only a realistic and achievable goal, but it answered the history of Irish national thought more accurately than did the separatist ideal of the republic. This was serious ‘revision’ indeed – the argument that an accommodation with Britain was natural, right and proper to the Irish, the polar opposite to the ‘faith and fatherland’ insistence on the absolute rejection of any connection. Shaw bolstered it with a blistering denunciation of Pearse’s version of Irish nationality (which he sardonically labelled the ‘new testament’). Its ‘most potent ingredient was hatred of England’; it was ‘essentially a gospel of hate’. Pearse’s claim to ground it in Christianity was specious, indeed blasphemous; of Pearse’s equation in ‘The Coming Revolution’ of the people with Christ – ‘the people itself will perhaps be its own Messiah, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonized and dying … for peoples are divine’ – Shaw suggested ‘it is hard to imagine anyone reading those words today without a shudder’.11 And his key argument was that ‘the people’ had rejected the rebellion, without realizing it, in the way they lived. ‘The ideals which inspired it have not worn well; they have been quietly but firmly side-stepped by the Irish people.’
Conor Cruise O’Brien rested his evaluation of 1916, provocatively, on a quotation from Lenin: ‘The misfortune of the Irish is that they rose prematurely, when the European revolt of the proletariat had not yet matured.’ O’Brien took the MacNeill/Hobson argument that conscription would have radicalized Irish resistance, and gave it a global reach. Not only could Ireland have mounted a real revolution in 1918, but it could have triggered the European revolution that never was. Irish troops in the British army would have mutinied, and the mutiny would have spread to the French and (here an uncharacteristic note of caution entered) ‘it might’ have spread to the German army too. The Irish rebellion then could have been the ‘pin in the hands of a child’ that could, in Connolly’s phrase, have ‘pierced the heart of a giant’ – European capitalism.12 This whole argument, of course, was unlikely to be attractive to those who never wanted a ‘real’ revolution in the first place – and this would include many Sinn Feiners and more Volunteers. But its premise was powerful: the mobilization that would have happened over the conscription issue would have been more spontaneous and far-reaching, and less divisive, than the process of responding to the rebellion.
The quarter-century between 1966 and the 75th anniversary of the rebellion in 1991 witnessed some of the farthest-reaching social transformations in modern Irish history. As the Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers wrote, there could be ‘few more astonishing examples of the change in the political culture of the Irish Republic than the Dublin Government’s decision to have such muted celebrations’ of the anniversary.13 Official activity was limited to a small military ceremony outside the GPO, attended by President Mary Robinson and Prime Minister Charles Haughey; for the rest, the celebration was a gala of poetry readings and parades which ‘could be mistaken for normal Easter high jinks’. The most pressing reason for the striking contrast with 1966 was the fear of giving aid and comfort to the IRA – an acknowledgement, in fact, of how successfully republicans had appropriated the 1916 legacy. (Or, as one anonymous source was quoted as putting it, ‘we have allowed the very noble and honourable tradition which produced Easter 1916 to be hijacked by a conspiracy of thugs’.) The reason had not changed, but had become more acute: ‘The Irish government find themselves venerating those who used violence in 1916 while denouncing those who do so today.’14 At the same time, the ambivalence of 1991 also reflected a shift of priorities, from traditional nationalism to a wider Europeanism – and indeed an embrace of the materialism thought by nationalists to be so alien. When the IRA attempted to transform the view that Pearse would once have had from the GPO, by blowing up Nelson’s Pillar in 1966, the space was eventually filled (at the city’s millennium in 1988) by what Dubliners called ‘the floozy in the jacuzzi’ (officially the ‘Anna Livia Millennium Fountain’), a somewhat louche representation of the Liffey in female form. The Christian millennium would in turn see this displaced by a more chaste giant needle; it would also see the other side of O’Connell Street occupied by an Ann Summers sex supermarket.)
There was also a re-evaluation of the rebellion itself, often blamed (as Myers noted) on ‘the triumph of revisionist historians who regard the 1916 rising as a deeply anti-democratic conspiracy which cast as much darkness across Irish history as it did light’. This may perhaps have exaggerated the power of historians, most of whom were still impressed by the resilience of the traditional interpretation. In 1991, indeed, a vigorous wave of anti-revisionist argument (launched within the profession by Brendan Bradshaw and outside it by Des Fennell)15 crested with a Field Day publication, Revising the Rising, notable for a fierce assault by Seamus Deane on Roy Foster’s historical writing.16 Focusing on a paragraph in Foster’s Modern Ireland (1988) dealing with the negative impact of the 1916 rebellion on Ulster Unionist perceptions of nationalist Ireland, Deane asserted that ‘revisionism’ was not a genuine attempt to write value-free history but a politically loaded project; an anti-nationalist, in fact Unionist, project. This perception lay at the heart of the storm over ‘revisionism’, since nobody could really dispute the proposition (earlier made by Foster under the banner ‘we are all revisionists now’) that all historical research necessarily ‘revises’ the understanding of the past. Nor, surely, could many of their critics really think that historians believed they were producing wholly objective, ‘value-free’ interpretations. What ‘revisionism’ was about – not just in Ireland, but also in countries such as Italy whose risorgimento was the stuff of legend – was a preparedness to correct the distortions involved in the creation of national foundation myths. These myths are politically vital to the process of nation-building, but there has to come a time when, to complete the process of national emancipation, their elisions and fabrications are recognized, and less flattering aspects of the story can be confronted. In place of a linear, teleological story of national liberation, there needs to be awareness of the complexity out of which an alternative story could have emerged. To brand ‘revisionism’ as promoting any particular political view was simply to miss the point.
Admittedly some of the history written after 1966 was strikingly iconoclastic. The pre-eminent example was surely the first biography of Pearse to be published since that of Le Roux, by Ruth Dudley Edwards in 1977.17 This brilliant study was far from hostile to him, but it was widely read as such; simply by treating Pearse as a human being rather than a secular saint it seemed guaranteed to outrage the mainstream view. Heightening the image of Pearse as a man tortured by inadequacy and failure drawn by William Irwin Thompson a decade earlier, and naturally enough – at least for the world outside Ireland – speculating about his sexuality, it nourished a much more complex image of the rebellion’s motives and methods. Yet Ruth Dudley Edwards was still unusual among historians in tackling the shibboleths of 1916. Apart perhaps from James Connolly, no other rebel leader was subjected to full-scale re-evaluation in this way, and in Connolly’s case the evaluation remained primarily political rather than personal.18 The rebellion itself remained an unappealing topic for historians.19 Even in a 500-page Military History of Ireland published in the mid-1990s, barely a single page was devoted to the rebellion; and here it was curtly dismissed as ‘reckless, bloody, sacrificial and unsuccessful’. The rebels made ‘no serious attempt to occupy sites of either strategic or symbolic importance’, instead ‘ensuring … horrific damage to civilians, shops and houses’.20
The stress on the conspiratorial, undemocratic, and destructive nature of the rebellion was only part of the re-evaluation. The most challenging ‘revisionist’ proposition was the argument that all the most important objectives of national liberation – including some, such as ‘unity’, that were lost as a result of 1916 – could have been achieved without bloodshed and violence. In a sense this was a restatement not only of MacNeill’s and Hobson’s objections to insurrection, but of the constitutionalist, ‘Redmondite’ commitment to negotiation. It derived its force from a hard-headed comparison of what was finally achieved in 1921 with what Britain was offering before the violence began. How wide, really, was the gap between these? The key gain, undeniably, was the formal British recognition of ‘Dominion Status’ – the favourite parallel at the time was the status of Canada – which put the Irish Free State in a category that had not been envisaged in the Home Rule discussions. Though republicans denounced the Free State as a puppet regime, there was also a strong argument that its institutions, and in particular its constitution, were ‘essentially republican’.21 And though republicans argued that its ‘independence’ was a sham, which could be withdrawn any time Britain chose, it is clear in retrospect that for Britain there was no going back. The centuries-long attempt to dominate Ireland by force was over. But alongside such gains was the equally undeniable fact that the Irish polity consisted of twenty-six counties, just as it would have done under Home Rule. It could be argued that the gains were achieved not by the unmandated violence of 1916 but by the popular mandate of 1918, a product of the war in general rather than the rebellion in particular, while the setback partition – was not mitigated but actually made worse by the rebellion.
Almost forty years after his 1966 essay, Garret FitzGerald returned as an elder statesman with long experience of government – to the questions he had raised, and came to the same conclusions.22 But he did so in part by taking ‘the national revival of 1916–21’ as the process at issue. Though he found it ‘very doubtful’ that ‘without 1916’ Irish independence could have been achieved within a reasonable time (which he, characteristically, took to be time enough to allow Ireland to grow into the contemporary post-national world), he assumed that 1916 and 1918 were part of the same process. Yet the argument that the decisive national mobilization would have happened in 1918 with or without the 1916 rebellion remains a powerful one. Opposition to conscription was the key motive for the expansion of both Sinn Féin and Volunteer membership during the war. At the individual level, it may be asked whether without conscription Michael Collins (to take one notable example) would have returned to Ireland from London at that point. At the institutional level, no other cause could have brought the Catholic Church so firmly into the Sinn Féin-led national front. And on the face of things, at least, it could be argued that the 1916 rebellion made the imposition of conscription – and hence the dramatic upsurge of national unity in 1918 – less rather than more likely.
The problem with any such assessment is that of all ‘counterfactual’ historical argument: we cannot know what 1918 would have been like if 1916 had not happened. The potent effect of martyrdom is obvious, for instance, but we may be sure that a rebellion was not necessary to create martyrs – Thomas Ashe was killed by the routine incompetence of British administration. What the rebellion surely did was to shift the horizons of possibility, both at the subliminal and the practical level. It has been well said that 1916 was above all a public drama, an astonishingly effective piece of street theatre. It was costume drama, staged by dramatists in a ‘drama-mad’ city. In this sense Michael Collins missed the mark when he complained that it had ‘the air of a Greek tragedy’. That was, above all else, its point. The occupation of the GPO was open to criticism in military terms, but ‘as an act of dramatic symbolism it was an inspired choice, since it cut across the main street of the capital city, paralysing communications and forcing everyone to take notice’.23 Even if it fell too soon because of military miscalculations by the planners of the rebellion, the manner of its fall – the awesome Wagnerian inferno of smoke and flame – etched an indelible image on the public memory. (Neil Jordan’s imposing re-creation of the scene at the opening of his film Michael Collins has eloquently re-established this.) Not all the posts chosen, admittedly, were equally inspired, but the symbolic effect of the rebellion by the middle of Easter week was to burst the limits of what could be imagined. It was not, it transpired, necessary to seize such obvious symbols as Dublin Castle to show that the established order was upheld by psychological as much as physical means.
Collective psychological processes often work in an occult way that makes precise analysis difficult. Whereas it may not be hard to grasp the impact of such high-profile events as the execution of the 1916 rebels, it is harder to explain some of the lower-level shifts which nonetheless vitally contribute to political reconfiguration. An example, not entirely at random, is the adoption of Peadar Kearney’s ‘A Soldier’s Song’ as the virtual ‘national anthem’ of the new separatist generation in 1916. Why should this ballad, which in some ways fell lamentably short of the standards demanded, not just by high artists like W. B. Yeats, but by the Irish-Irelanders who dismissed his cultural elitism, have turned out to give such accurate voice to the mood of the hour? What distinguishes it from the dozens or hundreds of ‘comeall-ye’s’ it so closely resembles? Certainly not the banality of its sentiments or its unreconstructed ‘poetic’ English language. Apart from a few stock Irish phrases, as has been pointed out, ‘there is little about it stylistically to distinguish it from T. D. Sullivan’s “God Save Ireland” composed in 1867’ (the Parliamentary Party’s unofficial anthem), ‘nor indeed from Thomas Davis’s “A Nation Once Again”’. The diction and sentiments of all three stem from the world-famous ‘Moore’s Melodies’ of the early nineteenth century.24 It evokes an epoch where ‘slaves’ battle against ‘despots’ for the destiny of an Ireland that is archaically rhymed with ‘sireland’. It is impossible to say why this number was so spontaneously adopted by the rebels of 1916 – so firmly that it would later see off the Free State government’s attempt to turn ‘God Save Ireland’ into the official national anthem. But it is clear that music played a major role in focusing radical nationalist enthusiasm in the wake of the rebellion. The surge of ‘Sinn Féin concerts’, at which the ‘Soldier’s Song’ featured alongside established favourites such as ‘The Green, White, and Gold’, and new numbers such as ‘Sinn Féin Amháin’, seems to have replaced the pre-war craze for theatrical drama.25 A skein of such subterranean processes was tightened through the rebellion into a new collective self-definition.
The abruptness of the change can of course be exaggerated, and in the traditional story it very definitely was. But there seems little doubt that the rebellion not only quickened the pulse of the separatist movement, but transformed its physical identity. The Sinn Féin movement as reconstructed in 1917 was obviously a mass movement in a way it had never been before – partly thanks to the British reaction. Ginger O’Connell, never an enthusiast for insurrection, admitted that the ‘one solid national gain’ from the rebellion was that the revival of separatist activity afterwards ‘would largely meet with the approval of the country’.26 The movement was also demographically changed. As ‘a wave of new recruits flooded in’, one recent historian notes, the emerging movement ‘was not only much larger but also vastly more energetic and ambitious’. The flood of recruits added not only youth, but adolescence: a shift that was psychologically as much as statistically significant. This was the organization that was able to capitalize to the utmost on the conscription crisis. The Hobson–Markievicz Fianna cohort would of course have matured in the four years of war with or without the rebellion, but the unique political prestige of that action gave them the status of a revolutionary cadre. The rebellion launched the creation of a new political class. The conflict between Sinn Féin and the old Parliamentary Party can be said to have ‘constituted a battle between two political cultures’.27 In Galway, for instance, while only a tenth of Sinn Féin officials in 1918 had been members of the UIL at the beginning of the war, over 40 per cent had taken part in the rebellion. These vying leadership groups were ideologically distinct: ‘their conceptions of what an independent Irish state would be like were very different’. But they were socially distinct as well: ‘for the first time, the lower social orders and the young took their place among the local political elite’.28
This is not to deny that the ‘independent’ Irish state that emerged in the crucible of civil war was intensely conservative, or that it was persistently menaced by a threat of political violence. The civil war itself, and the longer-term, more diffuse violence of the IRA, have often been attributed to the prestige of the republican purism sanctified by the 1916 leaders, whose repudiation of compromise can be seen as deeply hostile to the values of liberal-democratic politics. Certainly that is how it was painted by Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State’s Minister for Justice during the civil war, which he stridently portrayed as a conflict between democracy and militarism. But even though this argument was endorsed by the Catholic Church, it can be (as it perhaps was by O’Higgins) overstated. O’Higgins himself was assassinated by the IRA. Yet this does not prove that Pearse, or indeed the purist Fenians, Clarke and MacDermott, were anti-democratic. They were ready to act without majority support – this was the reason for their conflict with Bulmer Hobson – but in this they were hardly different from any revolutionary insurrectionists of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. They were, as was said of Hobson too, people of almost frightening simplicity. But so was the great socialist insurrectionist Auguste Blanqui, so was Garibaldi, and so, in this sense, were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Most ‘liberation struggles’, indeed, have been violent, and though many have not been followed by stable democratic systems, Ireland’s performance in this respect was impressive.
The most damaging legacy of the Great War period was not political violence as such, but the finalization of partition. It was this that made ‘normalization’ difficult if not impossible. The leaders of the rebellion were undoubtedly guilty of failing to grasp the contradiction between their desire for an ‘Irish Ireland’ and their assumption that the island must form a single political unit. The rebellion played a part in cementing partition, but it is not easy to argue that its part was decisive, or that the Irish-Irelanders were unique in their error. The constitutional nationalists had only awoken reluctantly and belatedly to a realization that ‘Ulster’ was a problem they could not dismiss as an absurdity or a product of British manipulation. By 1911 the damage done by three decades of what Protestants saw as ‘Catholic triumphal-ism’ could not be quickly repaired. Redmond’s recognition of this fact spurred his desperate hope that a common participation in the war effort could preserve the hope of unity. The sincerity of the parliamentarians’ commitment cannot be doubted, and its outcome – the death of many leaders like Willie Redmond and Tom Kettle, and ultimately the death of their party itself – was in the strict sense more of a ‘Greek tragedy’ than the rebellion. And not only did their efforts end in disaster, but the very memory of Irish service and death in the war was then effaced through the ‘great oblivion’. The slow, cautious restoration of this memory has been a vital part of the collective adjustment since the 75th anniversary of the rebellion.
In the central space of St Stephen’s Green park, commemorative busts of Constance Markievicz and Tom Kettle stand quite close together, but angled so they do not quite see eye to eye. Kettle’s memorial, planned in 1927, was held up for ten years by the refusal of the commissioners of public works to permit the phrase ‘Killed in France’ to appear on the inscription. The phrase finally accepted, ‘Killed at Guinchy 9 September 1916’, remains somewhat inscrutable. (By whom? Why?) The main National War Memorial, also delayed until the late 1930s, was consigned to ‘public invisibility’ by being placed at a considerable distance from the centre of Dublin, at Islandbridge.29 But these gentle slights are receding into the past. Though it has never been fully completed, the Islandbridge memorial, like Armistice Day, has finally begun to be incorporated in the official calendar of the Irish government. And in 1998, the construction of an ‘Island of Ireland Peace Tower’ on Messines Ridge represented a striking attempt to reassert the aspirations of the Great War volunteers. It may never be possible to reconcile the Battle of Dublin with the Battle of the Somme, yet both may perhaps be contained by a more capacious understanding of the past.