![\"Sackville](\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/files\/2016\/10\/Sackville_Street_Dublin_after_the_1916_Easter_Rising.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Remembering Easter 1916<\/strong> Paradox is at the core of the rising. A generation ago, Ruth Dudley Edwards called it a \u201ctriumph of failure,\u201d a political and cultural success achieved on the back of a military and logistical disaster. That is not simply a clever line: it also captures the unexpectedness of a symbolic victory made possible not by British malevolence (which the rebels took for granted) but by British stupidity (which they did not). (Only Pearse wished for martyrdom although Plunkett, who was dying already, also spoke of his soul\u2019s \u201cdivinest flame\u201d seeking to die. The rest of them would rather have lived.) That aside, reactions to the rising have varied significantly since its fiftieth anniversary (not least, historiographically, by the restoration to the picture of women as well as men). There used to be a choice between \u201creverence for the Rising or scathing skepticism\u201d, Fintan O\u2019Toole wrote in The Irish Times recently. Now it is possible to hold both views.[2]<\/u><\/a> Certainly the reverence has worn off. Too much has happened in the interim \u2013 too much blood-letting in the north of Ireland, too much sacred violence, too much research and revisionism, too much postmodern irony \u2013 to allow the haloes of Pearse, Connolly et al. to go unadjusted. Celebration has given way to commemoration, to contemplation, even contrition. (Of course, the last of these is nothing new. \u201cDid that play of mine\/Send out some men the English shot?\u201d asked Yeats in 1938, characteristically fretting about the moral power of poetry by writing a poem. The answer to his question, by the way, is: almost certainly not.) Yet a centenary does seem to call for some sort of collective reaffirmation of an event that, one way or another, determined the next one hundred years of Irish history. Even a commentator as usually ironic as Declan Kiberd has spoken approvingly of the \u201cnationwide cultural celebration\u201d that took place in Ireland this year \u2013 \u201cconcerts, plays, poetry readings, energetic debate, often in the thoroughfares.\u201d After the years of the Celtic Tiger, \u201cin which everything from public transport to consciousness itself seems to have been privatized, the community was learning once again how to use public space and reclaim the streets. After the even more recent years of austerity, the people were simply happy to have something to celebrate.\u201d[3]<\/u><\/a> Using public space and reclaiming the streets? In a more innocent age, de Valera called it \u201ccomely maidens dancing at the crossroads.\u201d Skepticism has given way to delight.<\/p>\n To be sure, other acts of remembrance have taken place this year, more painful because less practiced. 1916 was also the year of the Somme. More Irishmen, by many tens of thousands, were prepared to fight for the Empire than against it, my grandfather, a young Catholic from Donegal, being one of them. The usual explanations for this willingness to fight \u2013 that they were following instructions from Redmond, that they wanted to be with their friends, that they were deluded by false consciousness \u2013 seem too neat \u2013 the kind of explanations historians give \u2013 and too condescending \u2013 denying agency to those who, with their lives at risk, had every reason to exercise it. Few of them achieved the eloquence of a Tom Kettle who went to his death, he said, defending the \u201csecret scripture of the poor\u201d but their lives are reminders to us that there were different ways of being Irish in 1916. Pearse and his colleagues seemed to think there was only one.<\/p>\n The existence of those other Irelands is why the centenary may give us pause. The men of 1916 were teetotalers in another sense, having what historians these days like to call a \u201ctotalizing\u201d view of Irish history, a narrative so sweeping as to sweep all other stories aside. They drew their legitimacy not from the inconveniently alive \u2013 those who might contradict them, those who might disagree, those whose interests did not align with theirs \u2013 but from the conveniently dead \u2013 those who represented \u201cthe old tradition of nationhood,\u201d those who represented the unextinguished right of \u201cevery generation\u201d, those who had risen six times in three hundred years to achieve that Irish freedom that they now proclaimed to exist. The past was invoked as a sanction and a prayer: \u201cIn the name of God and of the dead generations\u201d; in Ireland\u2019s \u201csupreme hour\u201d \u201cunder the protection of the Most High God\u201d Ireland\u2019s \u201cfreedom,\u201d \u201cwelfare\u201d and \u201cexaltation\u201d would be assured. They were thinly disguised theologians believing in a secularized version of divine providence, Ireland to achieve her freedom because such \u2013 despite the obscurities of history – was her destiny. It was as if Hegel was a member of the Gaelic League. The irony is that the men of 1916 promised freedom but were themselves in thrall to a kind of thanatological mysticism, the very names of the dead, Tone, Emmet, Mitchel, an incantation and an assurance to them.<\/p>\n In fact, their most obvious inspiration was not Tone or Emmett or Mitchel but Rousseau. The Easter Proclamation spoke of the \u201cpeople of Ireland\u201d or \u201cthe Irish people\u201d or the \u201cwhole nation\u201d as if the people of Ireland would recognize themselves in such descriptors. The truth, of course, is that they would not. Indeed the proclamation itself admitted as much, speaking of the \u201cwhole nation\u201d but also \u201cits parts,\u201d a majority and a minority whose differences had been fostered by an alien presence and which would disappear when that alien presence disappeared. The foreigner had made Irishmen foreign to each other. Banish the foreigner. To put the point in Rousseau-ean terms, it was the General Will that was proclaimed at the General Post Office, all contrary views reduced to the status of \u2018factions\u201d which, eventually, would be \u201cforced to be free.\u201d The General Will, that seductive, coercive doctrine, has given moral force and sanction to any number of enormities committed in its name. In a famous set of lectures later published as Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin witheringly spoke of \u201cone of the most powerful and dangerous arguments in the \u2026history of human thought\u201d: the notion that to liberate people \u201cis to do just that for them which, were they rational, they would do for themselves, no matter what they in fact say they want.\u201d[4]<\/u><\/a> Souls must be engineered whether those souls wish to be engineered or not.<\/p>\n In that sense, one can almost hear in the proclamation a summons to moral unity that would be provided by the summons itself, its declarative certainties substituting for argument and making it redundant. \u201cWe have no misgivings, no self-questionings,\u201d Pearse wrote. \u201cWhile others have been doubting, timorous, ill-at-ease, we have been serenely at peace with our consciences\u2026We called upon the names of the great confessors of our national faith, and all was well with us. Whatever soul-searchings there may be among Irish political parties now or hereafter, we go on in the calm certitude of having done the clear, clean, sheer thing. We have the strength and peace of mind of those who never compromise.\u201d[5]<\/u><\/a> What Chesterton called, in other circumstances, \u201chealthy hesitation and healthy complexity\u201d seems lacking.[6]<\/u><\/a> The sheer thing was the right thing.<\/p>\n Yet the men of 1916 were in some ways as complicated, as variegated, as divided, as the history they proclaimed to be sheer and simple. Tom Clarke\u2019s father was a cavalryman in the Royal Artillery, a member of the Church of Ireland, a veteran of the Crimean War. His brother also served in the army. Thomas MacDonagh\u2019s father was a schoolteacher who rejected the Fenianism his son was later to embrace. His grandmother was an English Unitarian. Eamonn Ceannt\u2019s father was a native Irish speaker who insisted that the family speak English. Ceannt taught himself Irish and persuaded the family to revert to it. Connolly served in the British army for seven years, admittedly calling it a \u201cveritable moral cesspool,\u201d a \u201cmiasma of pestilence\u201d \u201cmost revolting\u201d and \u201cbestial.\u201d[7]<\/u><\/a> Joseph Plunkett, educated in England and deeply read in English literature, was a cosmopolitan mystic who discovered his Irishness almost as if discovering himself in an unknown country. \u201cThis island is fascinating\u201d he said of a visit to Achill in 1909, sounding more like an anthropologist than himself an Irishman.[8]<\/u><\/a> Sean MacDiarmada tried his hand at teaching, gardening, and tram-conducting before finding his vocation as a Sinn Fein organizer working mainly for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The brotherhood, you sometimes feel, was almost as important to him as the Irish Republicanism, giving him a moral companionship otherwise unavailable to him.<\/p>\n And then there was Pearse \u2013 in some ways the most divided of them all. \u201cPearse, you are too dark in yourself,\u201d he wrote in 1912:<\/p>\n Is it your English blood that is the cause of that, I wonder. I suppose there are two Pearses, the somber and taciturn Pearse and the gay and sunny Pearse. I don\u2019t like that gloomy Pearse. He gives me the shivers. And the most curious part of the story is that no-one knows which is the true Pearse.[9]<\/u><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n His father Jim was himself a divided man \u2013 an Englishman living in Ireland, a free-thinker whose livelihood came from the Church, a pamphleteer whose tracts included The Follies of the Lord\u2019s Prayer who died \u201cfortified by the rites of the Roman Catholic Faith.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn you, our dead enigma, all the strains\/Criss-cross in useless equilibrium.\u201d Seamus Heaney\u2019s lines in memory of the poet Francis Ledwidge, killed in France in July 1917, might apply to the men of 1916. All the strains crisscrossed on Easter Monday. All the deaths were enigmatic.<\/p>\n Too much may be made of this, of course. Which life does not have its complications, its angularities, its contingencies? These were human beings, not stock characters in a creaky Irish play. Reducing them to representative types \u2013 the Gaelic Leaguer, the Marxist autodidact, the Romantic poet \u2013 avoids the duty of understanding them. On the other hand, they did play their roles uncommonly well and, in the end, seemed almost to be doing impersonations of themselves, the masks hard to separate from the men. Swept along by the scripts they had written for themselves, they faced their appointment with destiny, going into battle, said Joyce Kilmer, \u201cwith a revolver in one hand and a copy of Sophocles in the other.\u201d[10]<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n So, the strains crisscrossed in Easter week. One way of reading 1916 is to see it as the resolutions of these tensions, ending at a stroke the misgivings and soul-searchings in a supreme act of will which was not a demand for freedom but a personal expression of it. For Pearse and Plunkett, the Rising almost had the status of a work of art, its symbolism so obvious that even the most literal-minded reader could understand it. \u201cI do not think the Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in a similar fashion,\u201d Michael Collins later wrote. \u201cLooking at it from the inside, it had an air of Greek tragedy about it.\u201d[11]<\/u><\/a> But even as Collins repudiated its artistry, he still saw it as art. Perhaps, in fact, there was a different aesthetic at work. Think for example of Schiller\u2019s distinction between na\u00efve and sentimental poetry. The first is unselfconscious, innocent, and childlike. The second is troubled, disturbed, and self-aware. Sentimental artists, as Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, make an art \u201cout of their own alienation, their own inability to identify fully with their times or with their milieu.\u201d[12]<\/u><\/a> In that sense, some of the men of 1916 were sentimentalists, creating in their imaginations an Ireland uncontaminated by capitalism or colonialism so that they, too, could be purified and made whole when that Ireland achieved its freedom.<\/p>\n What that freedom would look like, of course, was never entirely clear. It was enough, for the time being, to defeat the enemy. The details could be sorted out later. Oceans of ink have been spilt comparing Connolly\u2019s Ireland to Pearse\u2019s; and rightly so, for serious matters were at stake. But an air of unreality hung over these debates before the Rising and, once it had started, an air of surrealism. As the bombardment of the GPO was getting under way, Pearse and Plunkett wondered whether Germany, their soon to be victorious ally in the war, would annex Ireland once the war was over. No, they thought. The better idea would be to establish an independent Ireland under Prince Joachim of Prussia, which \u201cwould encourage de-Anglicization because Joachim would favor the Irish language over English, since making the country German-speaking would be impossible. After the first generation or so, [Joachim] would have become completely Irish.\u201d[13]<\/u><\/a> This was \u2013 let us speak charitably \u2013 a fairly unhinged conversation.<\/p>\n By then, it was too late. Within days, defeat awaited, then surrender, then trials whose verdicts were foreordained, then a series of executions whose cruelty and stupidity stunned the world. The conclusion of George Bernard Shaw has been the conclusion of most historians: \u201cIt is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may only have been a minor poet\u2026The military authorities and the English government must have known that they were canonizing their prisoners.\u201d \u201cYou are letting loose a river of blood,\u201d said John Dillon in the House of Commons. \u201cIt is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had the majority on your side. It is the fruit of our life work\u2026and now you are washing away our whole life work in a sea of blood\u2026It is not murders who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would be a damned good thing for you, if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as those men in Dublin \u2013 three thousand men against twenty thousand with machine guns and artillery.\u201d[14]<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n Dillon was right. Not even those who found fault with the insurgency faulted the insurgents as they faced their deaths. \u201cI have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across,\u201d Brigadier-General Blackader said of Pearse. \u201cThere must be something wrong in the state of things that makes a man like that a rebel. I don\u2019t wonder his pupils adored him.\u201d[15]<\/u><\/a> Connolly\u2019s last meeting with his wife was extremely poignant. The rest of them made their farewells in suitably dignified ways.<\/p>\n Their legacy has been disputed ever since. How could it be otherwise? The way Irish people view these seven men is the way they view themselves and the country bequeathed to them by their lives and deaths. But an Ireland that can remember both the GPO and the Somme a hundred years on has at least partially fulfilled the promise of the Proclamation to guarantee \u201creligious and civil liberty\u201d and to cherish \u201call of the children of the nation equally,\u201d oblivious of differences. Such an outcome has taken too long and has entailed too much bloodshed along the way. But perhaps, almost in spite of ourselves, we are beginning to learn our history lessons. That is surely worth celebrating, perhaps even in an English-speaking Irish pub in Spain.<\/p>\n [1]<\/u><\/a> For references in this paragraph, see Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), pp.49, 65, 129, 166, 187, 220.
\nby Dr. Dermot Quinn, Professor of History
\nSeton Hall University<\/p>\n![\"Pease](\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/files\/2016\/10\/pearse-surrender.jpg\")
I was in Madrid recently giving a talk on G.K. Chesterton when I came across a sign which said more than it intended. About three hundred yards from the Prado, above a place called St. James\u2019s Gate, it read simply: \u201cIrish Pub: Practice Your English Here.\u201d So much history in six words. (Add another three words \u2013 St. James\u2019s Gate \u2013 and you get more history. Saint James\u2019s Gate in Dublin, home of Guinness, is where pilgrims began their walk to Santiago de Compostela in the middle ages.) Was it for this that Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, MacDiarmada, Ceannt, MacDonagh, and Plunkett gave their lives in 1916? The teetotaler Patrick Pearse for whom nothing mattered more than the Irish language carrying with it, he said, \u201cIrish music, Irish art, Irish dancing, Irish games and customs, Irish industries, [and] Irish politics.\u201d The Marxist James Connolly, another teetotaler, who demanded for Ireland a socialist republic because without one \u201cEngland would still rule\u2026She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and industrial institutions she has planted in this country\u201d? The Anglophobic Tom Clarke, his loathing for England well-honed in a prison cell for fifteen years, who thought it \u201cgrand” whenever England got a \u201cslating\u201d? The easy-going Eamonn Ceannt, who insisted, good Gaelic Leaguer that he was, that the shamrock was not for drowning but to be worn proudly and \u201cunsullied\u201d? The charming and amiable Sean MacDiarmada, whose party-piece was to recite all seventy lines of Father Michael Mullin\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Celtic Tongue\u201d: \u201cSons of Erin! Vain your efforts \u2013 vain your prayers for freedom\u2019s crown\/Whilst you crave it in the language of the foe that clove it down.\u201d Perhaps Thomas MacDonagh, poet, academic, and whiskey-drinker, might have forced a smile at the paradox of an English-speaking Irish pub in Spain. \u201cHe is more a European,\u201d recalled his student Desmond Ryan, \u201cand cannot get to the heart of Gaeldom so profoundly as Pearse. There are moments when the native speakers and the Gaeltacht bore him stiff, and he returns to Elizabethan poetry and France and Greece and Rome.\u201d As for Joseph Plunkett, cosmopolitan, literary, gifted in all sorts of ways, he would surely have seen the sign for the conceit that it was, an Irish bull in a Spanish bullring. His literary hero, in fact, was G.K. Chesterton and so we may presume in him a taste for paradox. \u201cNow Gilbert you know you\u2019re our man\/The only one equal to seven\/Tho\u2019 you stand on the earth yet you span\/With your hands the four quarters of Heaven.\u201d[1]<\/u><\/a> Irish history would have taken a different turn if the enormous Chesterton \u2013 the one equal to seven \u2013 had issued the orders that Easter Monday. Instead, Pearse and the rest of them signed the proclamation and, with it, their death warrants.<\/p>\n![\"1916](\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/files\/2016\/10\/easter1916A.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"1916](\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/files\/2016\/10\/easter1916C.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n[2]<\/u><\/a> \u201cArtists show mixed feelings are the heritage of the Rising\u201d in The Irish Times July 30, 2016, p.8.
\n[3]<\/u><\/a> Declan Kiberd, \u201cActing on Instinct\u201d in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5899, April 22, 2016, p.15.
\n[4]<\/u><\/a> Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), p.202.
\n[5]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.277.
\n[6]<\/u><\/a> Kevin L. Morris (ed.), The Truest Fairy Tale: An Anthology of the Religious Writings of G.K. Chesterton (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2007), p.14.
\n[7]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.209.
\n[8]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.186.
\n[9]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.117.
\n[10]<\/u><\/a> Briona Nic Dhiarmada, The 1916 Irish rebellion (University of Notre Dame Press: South Bend 2016), p.159.
\n[11]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.319
\n[12]<\/u><\/a> Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), p.223
\n[13]<\/u><\/a> Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: The Lives and legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (Oneworld: London 2016), p.318.
\n[14]<\/u><\/a> Briona Nic Dhiarmada, The 1916 Irish rebellion (University of Notre Dame Press: South Bend 2016), p.161.
\n[15]<\/u><\/a> Briona Nic Dhiarmada, The 1916 Irish rebellion (University of Notre Dame Press: South Bend 2016), p.148.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Easter](\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/files\/2016\/10\/easter1916B1.jpg\")
Easter 1916 Remembered<\/strong>
\nProfessor Dermot Quinn reflects on the character and legacy of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin on the centenary on the event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[47,48,56,51,55,50,53,54,52,49],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-irish-history","tag-dermot-quinn","tag-easter-rising","tag-g-k-chesterton","tag-james-connolly","tag-joseph-plunkett","tag-patrick-pearse","tag-sean-macdiarmada","tag-thomas-macdonagh","tag-tom-clarke","tag-world-war-i"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}