David Quinn
President Higgins’ view of post-independence Ireland is a caricature, writes David Quinn
How should we remember 1916? What does justice to all the different strands of the Easter Rising? President Michael D. Higgins has spoken of the need for “ethical remembering”, by which he means a form of remembering that takes account of all the different ideas and traditions at work in the events of that seminal year in our history.
I’ve written elsewhere in a critical way about President Higgins’ own ‘remembering’ of the Easter Rising and subsequent developments. But there is a lot more to be said on the matter.
In a speech he delivered in the Mansion House, Dublin on March 28 at a symposium called ‘Remembering 1916’, President Higgins spoke of the need to ‘ethically’ remember what happened.
He spoke of “the overlapping loyalties and passions held by the men and women of the time, the influences of the Enlightenment, romanticism, mysticism, suffragism, socialism, pacifism.”
Notice what is missing from that list; religion. That is a very big oversight given the very deep religiosity of many of those who took part in the Rising.
But he goes further than that because he also paints a picture of post-independence Ireland that is, frankly, simplistic and reductionist. He belittles the place of religion in that society. He can bring himself to say nothing good about it.
Challenge
It is hard to know if Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has something like this in mind when he spoke at the launch of The Irish Catholic’s book 1916: the Church and the Rising.
He said: “One final note and challenge! The theme of how the dream of 1916 has been realised over the past 100 years has been developed in many of the speeches of President Michael D. Higgins in these days. In these challenging speeches he has made reference on a number of occasions also to the negative role played over the past 100 years by an, at times, narrow and over dominant Church within Irish political culture.
“Like every other component of Irish society, the Catholic Church in Ireland also is called to carry out an honest appraisal of its place in Irish society in the future. Seeking power and privilege and narrow judgementalism is not the way to a true witness in society of the message and teaching of Jesus Christ.
“Perhaps we should be looking more closely at the quiet and unsung and yet extraordinary, sensitive, caring and courageous work of those Dublin priests of 1916 and I thank the authors of this book and The Irish Catholic for recording their memory so well.”
In his Mansion House speech, President Higgins spoke of how the socialist tradition at work among some of those who took part in the Rising was “consciously repressed” in the following years.
He then made very short work of the Ireland that emerged after 1922.
He stated: “A property-driven conservatism thus grew into the dominant ideology, at the expense of any wide-ranging social transformation of an egalitarian kind. The fetishing of land and private property, a restrictive religiosity, and a repressive pursuit of respectability, affecting in particular women, became the defining social and cultural ideals of the newly independent Ireland.”
This is his sum-total reference to ‘religiosity’ of the time. Is that really all there is to it? Can the religiosity of the time really be reduced to that?
Yes, there was a very repressive side to religion as it was found in Ireland but millions of Irish people took enormous comfort from their faith including many of the rebels of 1916, and that includes many of the figures President Higgins lauds on the left.
For example, he mentioned in his Mansion House address the various factories around the country that established short-lived soviet committees shortly after the Rising. He neglected to mention that these committees would sometimes begin their meetings with the Rosary. That wasn’t happening in the Soviet Union.
It is also ridiculous to assume that had we become a socialist republic in 1922 it would not have been repressive. President Higgins would be extremely hard pressed to name a socialist republic from the first half of the 20th Century that was not brutally repressive and censorious in a way that far exceeded anything done in Ireland.
He would protest, of course, that he does not mean those kinds of socialist states, but they were the only ones on offer for a long time. In addition, much more recently President Higgins has commended revolutionary movements in Latin America that have not been noted for their respectful attitudes towards democratic ways, to put it mildly.
So while it is all very commendable to call for an ‘ethical remembering’ of 1916, and to complain of the ‘conscious repressing’ of certain political aspects of the Rebellion, it is not so commendable to then pass over in near total silence the animating and motivating religious faith of many of the leaders of the Rebellion, including many of the founders of independent Ireland?
Is it good enough to portray religion as simply a ‘repressive’ force?
Might this not also be called a ‘conscious repressing’ of a very important passion at work in the minds and hearts of many at the centre of the Rising? Indeed, isn’t Ireland (‘Official Ireland’ at any rate) not engaged in an overall effort to repress the religious aspect of Irish culture and history, to reduce religious faith to the status of an ornament, or a private hobby?
Michael D. Higgins does not have to have a religious faith of his own to make sure that in his ‘ethical remembering’ of 1916, and in his role as the First Citizen of this Republic, he ensures that religion is given its due and proper recognition in the 1916 commemorations.
Dublin archdiocese itself held an event last September called ‘The Priests of 1916’. Whereas RTÉ’s recent dramatisation of the Rising could only carp at the Church and show the then Archbishop of Dublin worrying about damage to Church property, in reality priests and religious were risking life and limb in the fighting to minister to the wounded and dying.
Self-sacrifices
A truly ‘ethical remembering’ of the Easter Rising would have included this. Our First Citizen, the President, who is supposed to represent us all, would have given this due prominence, and he should have recognised the enormous self-sacrifices many people made for the new Irish State in the name of their religion as well as Ireland.
In other words, the events of 1916 and years following it aren’t really being ‘ethically remembered’ at all when the deep religious faith of so many of its participants, and the founders and builders of the Irish Republic are airbrushed out of the picture. That is neither truly ethical nor a true act of remembrance.