Courtney McGrailFr Séamus Murphy SJ
The Easter Rising passes none of the ‘just war’ criteria, it had a pagan love of war and blood-sacrifice, and it attacked important political common goods.
In this article, I focus only on the major criteria.
First: Non-combatants must neither be targeted nor knowingly endangered.
On the first day of the Rising, the Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army (ICA) members deliberately killed some civilians and unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police constables.
They staged the Rising in the most densely populated part of Ireland, even choosing the South Dublin Union, full of sick and elderly like its descendant St James’s Hospital, as one place to fight. There were far more civilian (260) than rebel (82) or combined military and police (142)deaths, and responsibility for their deaths lies primarily with the leaders of the Rising.
Second: Do not start a war with no hope of success.
Shortly before the Rising, Eoin MacNeill, chief of staff of the Volunteers, fearing that Pearse and Clarke were going to rise, wrote telling them that a rising would have no chance of success and therefore would be wrong. But Pearse and co were beyond reason by then.
On Easter Monday, they knew most of the Volunteers would not be mobilising, but they didn’t turn back.
In winter 1915, Connolly had become irrational to the point of threatening to lead his much smaller ICA out without the Volunteers. It was all Pearse and Clarke could do to get him to wait until they were ready.
Third: Only a competent authority, government or popular representatives, has the right to start a war or insurrection.
Ireland was well-used to elections, and John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had every right to say that it represented the Irish (nationalist) population.
With no authority, the Rising’s leaders declared a republic, nominated themselves as its government, and shot anybody in their way.
As is clear from what Pearse, Connolly and Clarke stated at the time, democratic elections were beneath them. They believed that the people did not want an independent republic: they were determined to start a chain of events that would, by political emotional blackmail, compel the Irish people to ‘want’ it.
Nor did they represent the Volunteers or even the IRB in full. As Pearse himself admitted, they subverted the Volunteers, lying to Eoin MacNeill about their plans. They excluded IRB leaders (like Bulmer Hobson) who did not agree with them.
No authority
At the end of the day, they represented nobody but themselves. Many years later, Éamon de Valera, sole surviving commandant of the Rising, admitted that they had had no authority for the rising. Nor were they honest with those they led on Easter Monday: many Volunteers and ICA members did not realise that they were going to fight.
Up to the end of Easter week, they continued to tell their men that they were winning, knowing it was false. In short, the Rising’s leaders were accountable to nobody.
Fourth: War requires a just cause: armed aggression (e.g. invasion), or governmental policies (e.g. genocide) threatening the civilian population.
Nothing like that was happening in Ireland in 1916. ‘Just war’ thinking assumes that war is, at best, a necessary evil. But Pearse thought the massive bloodshed of World War I going on since 1914 was the most wonderful thing that had happened in Europe for centuries.
The Proclamation makes it clear that the Rising was intended to open another front of that war in Ireland. His essay Ghosts is enthusiastic about those in Irish history who had risen against the English, and dismisses non-violent social reformers like Edmund Burke, Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt or Jim Larkin. The Rising’s leaders believed that Irish blood-sacrifice was necessary, not just for independence, but also for revitalising the soul of the Irish, corrupted by messy democratic ‘politics’.
Does it need to be argued that such thinking is morally sick? As in Northern Ireland recently Sinn Féin’s political target was the SDLP, so the IPP and Home Rule was the Rising’s target. Militarily insignificant, the Rising had no political effect on Britain, strengthened extreme northern unionists, and was politically devastating for the IPP, as Redmond and many others understood at once.
In the Rising, the unelected gunmen defeated the elected representatives. That wrought dreadful long-term damage to Irish political culture, as regards democracy, peace, politics rather than violence, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and pluralism. Catholic social thought holds that those are important socio-political common goods.
A good is common when it requires everybody’s participation.
The good of a republic is its enabling and encouraging all to participate in our common political life, and this is good not just as a means but as an end. It involves dialogue, arguing, negotiating and compromising, on the basis that self-government requires hearing all views equally.
The practices and culture of Irish parliamentarianism since Daniel O’Connell promoted those goods. The 1916 Rising rejected such participation, reducing republicanism to no more than driving the British out.
Much of Irish history since 1916 has been about trying to repair the damage. It is sobering to think that in Ireland political violence killed far fewer people in the 19th Century than in the 20th.
British-Irish reconciliation is a common good. So is nationalist-unionist mutual recognition as equally Irish, along with political institutions to give it effect. Redmond and the IPP were reluctantly moving towards that in 1914, desperately trying for Home Rule and no partition.
Their accepting that concessions had to be made to unionists gave the Rising’s leaders their excuse to scream “Betrayal!” (as Pearse does in Ghosts), fan hatred of the British and dismiss unionists (as the Proclamation does), and start shooting. A few years later, the Rising’s heirs painfully discovered that northern unionists could not be driven out nor partition wished away, as civil war engulfed the south and some ethnic cleansing took place on both sides of the new border.
In the 1998 Good Friday agreement, unionists and nationalists finally recognised each other’s right to exist. That does not mean that the process is over; it is rather a beginning of a project that we all, nationalists and unionists, must work at. For that task, the Rising’s model is not just irrelevant but destructive.
We can acknowledge the sincerity of the Rising’s leaders, forgive their mistakes, and move beyond their pagan worship of sacrificial war. Failing to do so will be our fault – not theirs. The Rising’s leaders wanted to break from the past. We should do the same.
Fr Séamus Murphy SJ is an Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago.