In the ten years since this book was written, the pace of Irish historical research has continued to accelerate. To take full account of such a body of work, ranging from David Foxton’s painstaking study of British and Republican courts, Revolutionary Lawyers, to Roy Foster’s extraordinary reconstruction of the ‘revolutionary generation’, Vivid Faces, would certainly enrich this account, but probably not alter its fundamental approach.
The hundredth anniversary of the 1916 rebellion is likely to point up some of the persistent differences between Ireland and Britain. Over the last century these have, beyond doubt, significantly declined: globalization and the de-intensification of nationalism (in Ireland if not everywhere) have modified the sense of difference that powered the separatist cause. It may be harder than ever now to fully grasp the depth and intensity of nationalist hostility to ‘England’ and Anglicization. The centenary will be commemorated in ways very different from the simple celebrations of half a century ago: the two Irish ‘traditions’ are being given equal status. The nationalists who fought in the ‘wrong’ army have at last been officially embraced: the President of Ireland visited Suvla Bay in 2011 and the centenary of the landings in 2015 will see a visit by the Taoiseach. Moreover, the very concept of commemoration has become a field of study in itself, so that the process may be experienced with a degree of objective detachment unthinkable in the past.
Other formerly unthinkable shifts have also taken place in the last few years. The most remarkable event in a century of Anglo-Irish relations, the Queen’s visit to Ireland in May 2011, took her not just to places like the National War Memorial, but also the Garden of Remembrance (commemorating IRA deaths in the war of independence), and even Croke Park – not only the site of an alleged British reprisal in 1920, but an iconic bastion of the anti-English movement spearheaded by the Gaelic Athletic association since the 1880s. Scarcely less remarkable was the visit by the Prince of Wales four years later to the place where his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was assassinated by the IRA in 1979.
But real differences of perspective remain. Ireland is already well into a ‘decade of centenaries’, spanning the revolutionary period from the Ulster crisis of 1912 to the establishment of the Free State in 1922. (The Civil War may be decorously elided.) There is no escaping the fact that this process was primarily not – as a modern representative of Sinn Fein claimed – about ‘good governance, the sense of the collective, the marshalling of common resources’, so much as about direct and often violent confrontation with Britain. Britain meanwhile is commemorating the world war, and in British perception that gigantic conflict has always marginalised Irish events. While many in Ireland are working to bring the two perspectives together – the miserable Gallipoli campaign represents a shared memory of pointless suffering, while the battle of the Somme will, politically at least, be set in parallel with Easter week – it is likely that April 2016 will still seem politically awkward. It was a kind of civil war, if a brief one, and it is often harder for rebels and repressors to find common ground afterwards than it is for former oppenents in conventional wars. I hope that my book, which aims to show the rebellion as a British as well as an Irish event, provides some framework for such an endeavour.
CT
London June 2015