Citizen Army men on the roof of Liberty Hall during Easter Week. Photo Credit: Robert Hunt/ Windmill Books/ UIG via Getty Images. The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916
by Fearghal McGarry (Oxford University Press, £20hb)
Joe Carroll
This is a special ‘centenary edition’ of Dr McGarry’s book which was first published in 2010 and earned the accolade then as “the finest account yet of the 1916 Rising”. Since then, new books on the Rising are almost overflowing from Eason’s bookshop beside the GPO where it all started. But this impressive book remains the best to be had.
The Rising has now been impressively commemorated by the State and exhaustively examined by historians and commentators. Rising fatigue is understandably setting in. But while we know virtually every detail about what happened in the streets of Dublin that fatal week, are we any the wiser about why it happened the way it did and what motivated the surprisingly small number who did the fighting?
The McGarry book took full advantage of the first-hand accounts of the participants stored in the 1,772 files of the Bureau of Military History now available online. It was the Rising “from within and below”. To read his book is to live the Rising through the eyes of the rebels from the safety of your armchair as the GPO becomes a Wagnerian inferno and the machine guns rake O’Connell St.
Of course the accounts of the participants had to be put in the context of the time and assessed against the backdrops of Dublin Castle, Westminster, Tom Clarke’s tobacco shop in Parnell St (then Great Britain Street) where the Rising was secretly planned, Liberty Hall, Berlin and New York.
McGarry fills in the gaps drawing on reliable secondary sources.
But still the big questions remain. How were many Volunteers, under the ostensible leadership of Eoin MacNeill, drilling with their outdated rifles and pikes, fooled by the Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood into a precipitate insurrection to pay the debt due to the “dead generations”?
How influential was the cabal within the IRB itself which called the shots, as it were? Did Pearse’s dedication to “blood sacrifice” justify the 450 deaths, 2,000 wounded and massive destruction of property? Was it just the execution of the signatories of the Proclamation which turned Home Rule supporters into clamouring for a full Republic two years later?
McGarry points out in a new preface to his book that commemorations tell us less about the historical events recalled, than about the period in which they occur. Contrast the furtiveness of the 75th anniversary in 1991 when some relatives were locked out of the GPO to the present “decade of centenaries” and the recent unveiling of the wall of the fallen in Glasnevin with the names of rebels, British soldiers and civilians who died.
But then in 1991, the Provisional IRA was killing in the name of the 1916 rebels. One had to tread carefully with commemorations.
Partition
It is interesting that former Taoiseach, John Bruton, is still arguing publicly that 1916 was unnecessary and that Home Rule, albeit in a partitioned version, was available after World War I without any blood being shed. As for partition, he points out that it is still there in spite of 1916, the 1921 Treaty and 1949 declaration of a Republic.
In his new preface, McGarry writes that while commemorations during the Troubles in Northern Ireland were “characterised by polarised and largely ahistorical debates about the morality of republican violence,” in recent years there has been a willingness to “consider overlooked facets of the Rising such as the Irish identity of many of those who fought for the British Crown”.
Likewise, acknowledging the rebels’ idealism does not necessarily mark one out as a “sneaking regarder”.
The piety and Catholicism of the rebels is addressed by McGarry as well as the differing attitudes of the clergy towards the Rising. Michael Collins is quoted as using an expletive at the praying of the Rosary in the GPO which went on a lot of the time. Pearse was not alone in viewing the Rising in religious terms. One rebel is quoted as saying it did not matter if he had not been to Confession as “I believe I would go straight to Heaven if killed here”.
The form of republicanism which triumphed after 1916 did not reflect the more secular ethos of 19th-Century Fenianism with its call for “no priest in politics”, McGarry observes. Éamon de Valera, the only 1916 commandant to escape execution conceived of his country as “a Catholic and Gaelic nation” according to his official biographers. But then he had kept his distance from the IRB. A lot has changed in 100 years.
Photo Credit: Robert Hunt/ Windmill Books/ UIG via Getty Images.