Greg Daly
Greg Daly investigates some recent arguments against the Easter Rising
“No one is ever told,” Aslan cautions Lucy Pevensey in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, “what would have happened”.
It’s an observation that could fruitfully be borne in mind by those who proclaim that had the 1916 Rising never happened, Ireland would have attained independence anyway, and would have done so in a way marked by peace, prosperity, and pluralism, without the scar of partition.
John Bruton has made a commendable case in recent times for the rehabilitation of the reputation of Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) leader John Redmond, but he surely goes too far when he ventures that “Ireland would have reached the position it is in today, an independent nation of 26 counties, if it had stuck with the home rule policy and if the 1916 rebellion had not taken place”.
While Mr Bruton’s advocacy of constitutionalism and consistent rejection of political violence is admirable, and far from those who would condemn political violence while celebrating its advocates, it is difficult to see it as other than wishful thinking.
It was the dominion status that the 26-county Irish Free State won through the War of Independence, itself the child of the British reaction to the Rising and the 1918 conscription crisis, that allowed it independence in foreign policy and defence and ultimately ensured it was for Irish people to decide whether their infant state would be dragged into the Second World War less than 20 years later.
Customs
In contrast, as the late Garret Fitzgerald wrote in 2007, “home rule as enacted left Britain in control of peace and war for Ireland, with the British army remaining on Irish territory, and the levying of customs retained in British hands”, adding that any Irish home rule government would also have had very limited taxation powers.
Dominion status allowed Ireland to agitate alongside Canada, Australia and other far-flung colonies in calling for greater independence still, calls that were enshrined in the 1931 Statue of Westminster that barred London from legislating for the dominions. Within five years, de Valera had reduced the Crown’s presence in the Constitution to a passing reference, and in 1948, John A. Costello announced at an Ottawa press conference that Ireland was to repeal the External Relations Act, making Ireland a 26-county republic in letter, as well as in spirit.
Those who have watched London’s unwillingness to allow Scotland’s parliament abrogate any further powers to itself, as though willing to test Charles Stuart Parnell’s claim that “no man has the right to the fix the boundary to the march of a nation”, may find it difficult to believe that a 20th century British parliament would have allowed a semi-autonomous part of the UK so easily to attain full independence.
It may well be correct to hold, as was claimed in The Irish Times last week, that “the Rising itself was an immoral and anti-democratic act”, but it is clearly a nonsense to claim that “the outcome of such ill-thought out unilateral violence was two sectarian states on this island, a Protestant state for a Protestant people and a Catholic state for a Catholic people”.
Part of the problem with this claim is that it maintains that the 1916 signatories, in envisaging their Irish Republic, had no interest in the approximately 25% of Ireland’s then population who were not Catholics, in a putative state where, it says, citing Pearse’s Ghosts, “marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholicity, of apostolic succession” would identify “the predominant ethos”.
Leaving aside how the Nicene Creed, wherein the phrase “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” originates, is acknowledged by Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists as much as by Catholics, this glosses over how the 1916 Proclamation explicitly sought to reassure those who feared Catholic domination, guaranteeing “religious and civil liberty” and “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”.
In any case, partition on sectarian grounds had looked inevitable since at least 1914, when that year’s Government of Ireland Act was given royal assent with the proviso that it would not be implemented until special arrangements were in place for Ulster. It is difficult to see how any resolution to the Ulster Question could have led to anything other than the two states The Irish Times respectively calls “a failed political entity” and – for most of the 20th Century – “a failed economic entity”.
It is worth remembering this when considering last week’s claim by Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Michael Jackson, that the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme “helped create the fault-line which give us our fractured identities in Ireland, as Northerners and Southerners”, continuing, “They have helped to cement not only political but psychological differences. They have been used to create ‘the two communities’.”
There is some truth to the idea that these iconic events helped “cement” differences in Ireland, especially as this was an era that valorised martial bravery and held battlefield self-sacrifice as almost holy, an attitude perhaps best crystallised in John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields, which ends by condemning as traitors those who would negotiate away that which others had died to achieve.
Nonetheless, to say the Rising and the Somme somehow helped create an as-yet unformed “fault-line” between Irish nationalists and unionists, the former typically Catholic, the latter typically Protestant, is clearly untrue. That Ireland had ‘two communities’ was all too clear before that date.
Six days before an inflammatory speech in Belfast against 1886’s Home Rule Bill, the leading Conservative Lord Randolph Churchill told Lord Justice Fitzgibbon that he had decided some time earlier that if Prime Minister William Gladstone began to work for Irish Home Rule, “the Orange card would be the one to play”.
Churchill’s message, distilled into ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, and playing on fears that Home Rule would mean “Rome Rule”, found a ready audience among Ulster’s Protestants, which it could hardly have done if the ‘two communities’ hadn’t been a reality by 1886.
A quarter of a century later positions were deeply entrenched, and September 1912 saw the signing of the ‘Ulster Covenant’, with 237,368 men swearing to “use all means which may be found necessary” to defeat the parliamentary project – described as a “conspiracy” – to introduce Home Rule to Ireland.
A devolved parliament in Dublin would be, they believed, “subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire”.
The impending introduction of Home Rule had led to increased militarisation across the province, and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was formally established in January 1913. Arms were smuggled into Ulster throughout 1913, 4,500 rifles being seized that summer, and although the 100,000-strong UVF was never an especially unified organisation, bonding together in a patchwork fashion grassroots units across the province, it was quite clearly a paramilitary mass movement, representative of one community and willing to declare war rather than risk domination by another.
The UVF threat of war, compounded by the so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ of March 1914, when British officers made it clear they would resign rather than enforce parliament’s will in Ulster, and the successful smuggling from Germany of 25,000 rifles in the Larne Gun-Running, meant that Britain’s ‘Irish question’ in many respects became an ‘Ulster question’.
The outbreak of the First World War postponed the issue, of course, but the subsequent War of Independence did not. It was hardly by chance that London agreed to a truce only in July 1921, a month after partition had become a reality and the Parliament of Northern Ireland had been inaugurated in Belfast. The territory of the Irish Free State, in practical terms, would be what remained after the Ulster Question had been – to British eyes – resolved.
The Rising may have been immoral and anti-democratic, but to suggest that Ireland would have achieved peaceful independence without it is, surely, a fantasy.