Dr Martin ManserghIreland has never embraced the French republican model, writes Martin Mansergh
A few weeks ago, in preparation for an address in Dublin City Hall on Tom Clarke, a prime mover of the 1916 Rising, I visited the Protestant church, now a community centre, in Clogheen, Co. Tipperary, where his parents married in 1857.
His father was a soldier, a Protestant from Co. Leitrim, his mother a Catholic in domestic service in Clonmel. Their son Tom was brought up a Catholic, and first experienced the sharp edge of sectarian tension when the family moved from being stationed in England to Co. Tyrone, which contributed to him becoming a Fenian.
Two miles to the west of Clogheen is Shanrahan cemetery, where Fr Nicholas Sheehy is buried. His execution in 1766 at the hands of a vengeful group of Tipperary landlords was a notorious travesty of justice. The local GAA club is named after him. His memorial was refurbished in 1898, the centenary of the 1798 rebellion, harbinger of the separatism that would culminate in the 1916 Rising. Inscribed in large letters is written ‘For Faith and Fatherland’.
This was also the spirit of the 1898 centenary commemoration in Wexford, which highlighted another priest and martyr, Fr John Murphy. He was, for some weeks, a leader of rebel forces, before being captured and put to death in Tullow, Co. Carlow.
No historian suggests that the 1916 Rising should be interpreted as having been ‘for faith and fatherland’, and no priest was prominent in the fighting. However, priests ministered to the condemned in their final hours, even marrying one of them, Joseph Plunkett, to Grace Gifford, and faithfully recorded their experience for pious and patriotic reflection. In his last letter to his wife, one of the leaders Éamonn Ceannt, wrote: “I have one hour to live, then God’s judgment and, through his infinite mercy, a place near (family members listed) and all the fine old Irish Catholics who went through the scourge of similar misfortune from this Vale of Tears into the Promised Land.”
Proclamation
Left to take its course, next year’s commemoration might either omit or minimise the religious and specifically the Catholic dimension of the Rising. Indeed, there are attempts to use the Republic’s ideals set out in the Proclamation in the contrary direction to promote secularism and to suggest that confessionalism, for example in education, is a betrayal of the Republic, on the assumption that Irish republicanism is modelled on French republicanism.
Patrick Pearse, the principal author of the Proclamation, and by profession a teacher and headmaster, wrote a great deal about educational matters, and sought radical reform of the education system other than teaching of religion. In his pre-1916 essay The Murder Machine, he wrote: “We may assume that religion is a vital thing in Irish schools.”
In a lecture in the Mansion House in December 1912, Pearse responded to some concerns expressed by Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick about the recasting of the Irish education system under Home Rule (“whose time is still in what grammarians call the future indefinite”): “Dr O’Dwyer is probably concerned for the maintenance of a portion of the machinery, valued by him as a Catholic bishop, and not without reason; and I for one would leave that particular portion untouched, or practically so”. When the Proclamation famously spoke of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”, it was a pledge of non-discrimination to the religious minority, not an early harbinger of Educate Together. If people wish to change, extend or even overturn the original meaning and resonance of historic phrases, they should acknowledge that that is what they are doing, and not seek to cover a contemporary secular agenda by spuriously invoking the authority of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation.
France
From the days of the United Irishmen in the late 18th Century, the principal inspirations for Irish republicanism were France and America. The Irish tricolour was brought back from France in 1848, and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity still feature in Irish political discourse.
The relationship between French republicanism and religion has been a troubled one. The massacres in the Vendée in 1793-94 of tens of thousands of peasants and their families, as much because they were attached to their faith as because they were royalist, were an indelible part of the Jacobin reign of terror.
Later, French anti-clericalism, particularly under the Third Republic, has made it more difficult for France to assimilate immigrant populations, many of whom are strongly attached to their religion. On the other hand, Article 44 of our Constitution repealed in 1972 used the formula of the preamble of the Concordat between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Vatican in 1801 (revoked in 1905), stating that Catholicism was the religion of the great majority of the French people.
In regard to the State’s attitude to religion, Irish republicanism has never taken its cue from French republicanism. The founding document, the Proclamation, in its penultimate sentence states: “We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God”. In the GPO, Desmond Fitzgerald was deeply unhappy with a note from a subordinate officer dated the first (or second etc.) day of the republic, “as that method of dating seemed to associate the Rising with the French Revolution, an association that was utterly repugnant to me”. He had long discussions adducing theological arguments in favour of the Rising with Joseph Plunkett, whose father, a Papal Count, had gone to Rome to make sure at least that Pope Benedict XV would not condemn the Rising under British pressure. Afterwards, Bishop O’Dwyer reacted forcefully and publicly to General Maxwell’s attempts to induce the hierarchy to do that.
A key motivating factor behind the drive for independence was the wish for cultural self-determination, including the shaping of Irish society to reflect more fully for the first time in centuries the religious beliefs and values of the people. There are mixed judgments on the subsequent experience.