Greg DalyGreg Daly considers aspects of how the Rising was commemorated on its 50th anniversary
Far from being a triumphalist affair, glorifying in the Rising’s heroism and worrying at old wounds, the Republic’s 1966 celebrations were always intended as a bridge to the future for an outward-looking country that aimed to take a seat as an equal partner in the European Economic Community at a time when wages were growing and living standards were improving.
Although the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar in March 1966 raised fears of IRA violence during the golden jubilee, the celebrations passed off peacefully, which did not stop Ian Paisley organising a 5000-strong demonstration against the North’s unofficial commemorations and a thanksgiving service for the defeat of the 1916 rebels; within two months of the anniversary, the UVF declared war on the IRA.
In Dublin, meanwhile, efforts were made to ensure the Rising would be celebrated in an inclusive and forward-looking manner, but insofar as the opening of the Garden of Remembrance on April 11, 1966 was intended to be an ecumenical event, albeit one in which Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would be the only religious leader to bless the site, it proved something of an embarrassment.
Ceremony
The leaders of Ireland’s Jewish, Quaker and Methodist communities excused themselves from attending, while the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr George Simms, and Revd William McDowell representing the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly found themselves accidentally excluded from the ceremony.
The two men were picked up by a state car after Dr Simms had preached at a commemorative service at St Patrick’s cathedral, but arriving three minutes late, the clergymen found themselves locked out.
The Sunday People claimed “the man with the key could not be found”, but the clerics’ absence was mainly due, rather, to a wish to be discreet. The garden had an elaborate gate that opened with the pressing of a button, taking half a minute to do so. At the start of the ceremony, President De Valera had been presented with a ceremonial key, modelled on the oldest key known in Ireland, which he had used to press the button to open the gates. For the episode to have been repeated for their belated benefit would, the Protestant ministers evidently felt, have turned the ceremony into something of a farce.
Intended as a symbolic detail in a ceremony intended to signal the transformation and modernisation of Ireland, the faux-antique key harking back to Ireland’s past while the electrical gate reflected a technological future, the incident instead ended up as emblematic of a very different reality: the public commemoration of the Rising’s fiftieth anniversary was an almost exclusively Catholic phenomenon.
Given the religiosity of most of those who took part in and led the Rising, and the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of society in the Republic of 50 years later, this was perhaps inevitable.
Twelve centres outside Dublin hosted official commemorations. Although the army authorities oversaw the planning of these celebrations, establishing local committees and contacting Old IRA members and relevant groups, the celebrations generally lacked a martial flavour, and were notably less militaristic than the 2006 commemorations for the Rising’s 90th anniversary.
Official celebrations around the country focused on community and sporting organisations, typically entailing Masses, parades, cultural and sporting events, and lectures.
Readings of the 1916 Proclamation were encouraged, but orations and speeches were not, as speeches and graveside orations had long been associated with republicans; as one-time IRA Chief of Staff Hugh McAteer observed at a Letterkenny commemoration, the 1916 rebels “apparently may be admired but must not be emulated”.
The committees which organised the official celebrations were in the main made up of men who were respected members of their community – GAA members, Knights of Columbanus, teachers, bank managers, and farmers, for example – and had been in, or were somehow linked to, the Old IRA.
Many veterans of the Rising and its aftermath were still alive during the 1966 celebrations, so there was little need to exaggerate the Rising’s importance; attempts to claim it for causes alien or at best tangential to its aims were never likely to succeed.
Not all local commemorations were official; several places saw two parades taking place, with unofficial parades as likely as official ones to feature commemorative Masses and prayers at cemeteries.
Joseph Clarke, who had served under de Valera during the Rising and been courier for the first Dáil, refusing to attend the official ceremonies, insisted at Glasnevin Cemetery, which he attended as part of an unofficial parade, that “if the men they killed in ’16 were alive today, they’d be up here with us. Our parade is much closer to what they fought for than the one in O’Connell Street”.
Some linked with the Rising evidently shared Clarke’s views. Seán MacDiarmada’s sisters, for instance, shunned the official Kiltyclogher ceremony in favour of the larger parade organised by the National Graves Association, and Pearse’s sister Margaret threatened to bequeath St Enda’s school to a religious order rather than to the State.
Parade
Many others, however, didn’t, with 600 veterans on Easter Sunday in the viewing stand on O’Connell Street to watch the military parade and the subsequent people’s parade.
The Federation of the Old IRA had opted to watch the parades, rather to participate in them, because of its members’ age.
A further 200,000 people gathered to watch the parade in Dublin, many more watching it on Teilifís Éireann (TÉ), then just four years old but providing coverage to 98% of the country, with roughly 55% of homes owning televisions.
TÉ was well placed to commemorate the anniversary, having since its foundation conducted interviews with more than 70 survivors of the revolutionary period.
In making programmes that would depend on these interviews, Roibéárd Ó Faracháin, Radio Éireann’s Controller of Programmes, said “while still seeking historical truth, the emphasis will be on homage”.
RTÉ’s commemoration began with the 19 Thomas Davis lectures on Radio Éireann entitled Leaders and Men of the 1916 Rising, while The Course of Irish History aired on TÉ; both programmes included historians with critical views of the Rising.
Twelve radio plays were broadcast on historical topics, and two documentary series called On Behalf of the Provisional Government and The Week of the Rising were broadcast on television and radio respectively, with two Rising-related pageants – medieval dramas, popular in the early 20th Century – performed at Croke Park and Casement Park being broadcast on TÉ.
During Easter Week alone, RTÉ broadcast over 53 hours of material about the Rising, the centrepiece of the commemoration being Insurrection, a week-long dramatic reconstruction of the Rising as though broadcast as a contemporary live event.
Featuring mock reportage, talking heads, and Ray McAnally as a studio anchor, it was a hugely ambitious project, seeming at the beginning, according to its writer Hugh Leonard, “as gallant and doomed as the Rising itself”.
Seemingly doomed from the start, Insurrection proved a spectacular triumph, and the range and quality of Rising-related programming during 1966 showed RTÉ as a flagship for the Ireland Lemass wanted to show the world, looking forward and beyond its horizons, whilst remembering and honouring how it had come to be.
With the subsequent outbreak of the Troubles in the North, such remembrance would become increasingly complicated.