‘The Ireland of our ideals’ paper delivered at ‘Proclaiming the revolution’ conference – Brian Hanley January 26, 2016

Posted by guestposter in Uncategorized

Many thanks to Brian for allowing the following to be reproduced here…

‘The Ireland of our ideals’ paper delivered at ‘Proclaiming the revolution’ conference

NUI Galway

22 January 2015

Good morning. Firstly I would like to thank Dr. Mary Harris and the History Staff at Galway for the invitation to open this conference. I want to begin with a quote which I think exemplifies the bloody, sacrificial and sectarian thinking that was pervasive among nationalist leaders in 1916:

‘’’It is heroic deeds … that give life to nations – that is the recompense of those who die to perform them … It was never in worthier, holier keeping than that of those boys, offering up their supreme sacrifice with a smile on their lips because it was given for Ireland. May God bless them! And may Ireland, cherishing them in her bosom, know how to prove her love and pride and send their brothers leaping to keep full their battle-torn ranks and keep high and glad their heroic hearts … No people can be said to have rightly proved their nationhood and their power to maintain it until they have demonstrated their military prowess (and) The Irish … are one of the peoples who have been endowed in a distinguished degree with a genuine military spirit, a natural genius and gift for war… But they have brought another quality into the field which is equally characteristic … that is, their religious spirit … the Irish soldier, with his limpid faith and his unaffected piety, his rosary recited on the hillside, his Mass … under shell-fire, his “act of contrition” … before facing the hail of the assault … though Irish blood has reddened the earth of every continent, never until now have we as a people set a national army in the field.’

Here we have heroic sacrifice in battle giving life to nations, people earning their manhood on the battlefield, men dying with a smile on their lips because it was for Ireland; their brothers leaping into the ranks to replace them and the association between this military prowess and devout Catholicism going hand in hand. John Redmond wrote those words after visiting the Western Front during November 1915, where at one point the Home Ruler leader was allowed fire what was described as a ‘huge gun’ at the German lines.

Now my brief this morning is to discuss the world of radicals, separatists and republicans. But I think to understand them we also need to understand the political, cultural and social milieus they operated in. And despite all our claims to be better informed that ever about that generation, much of the opening salvoes in this year’s debates have been very familiar recitations about blood sacrifices, holy wars, undemocratic fanaticism and all the rest.

And really what we are presented with is caricature, usually divorced from any context, sometimes from people who should know better and sometimes admittedly from people who will never know better. To read some of the commentary, John Redmond’s movement seems something like a combination of modern day Fine Gael and the Northern Ireland Alliance party. The mass of Irish nationalists were seemingly content with Home Rule and literally everything changed because of Easter Week, where a tiny unrepresentative minority became successful only because of the miscalculations of the British.

There seems to be little awareness that political, communal and sectional strife were well established in Ireland before 1916 and that violence was part of political life. People were shot during election campaigns; street fighting was an established part of electioneering; hundreds of Catholics were driven from their workplaces in sectarian riots in Belfast during 1912; suffragettes were beaten up for campaigning for the vote; strikers and their supporters were batoned and sometimes killed, not only in the Dublin Lockout but in disputes in Sligo and Wexford as well, and civilians shot dead by troops on Dublin’s Bachelor’s Walk in 1914. All that happened before Easter 1916, the event that supposedly introduced violence into Irish politics.

More importantly I also want to question the view that the separatists were a tiny, unrepresentative group. They were a minority certainly but not an isolated one; many of their ideas were shared by supporters of Home Rule. There were few nationalists who would have disagreed with the young John Redmond’s characterization of the British Empire as ‘a greedy and bloodthirsty oppressor of the weak.’ While they expected that their representatives should do their best to get what they could from Westminster, they would also have been aware that there was no ‘act of justice or reform which has not been extorted in one way or another from the British parliament by force or fear’, indeed that ‘no single reform … has ever been obtained by purely constitutional methods.’ That’s John Redmond again. While disagreeing with some of the methods of the Fenian bombers of the 1880s they might have nodded their heads when support was sought for men who were ‘our kith and kin … men who sacrificed everything that was most dear to them in an effort to benefit Ireland. What do we care whether their effort was a wise one or not, whether a mistaken one or not?’ John Redmond, (coming close to being a sneaking regarder there?) Indeed in 1897 the welcome home rally for one of those men, Tom Clarke, was chaired by Redmond’s brother William. Even as late as 1912 Clarke would acknowledge the work done by John Redmond for his release, including numerous visits to him while in jail.

But of course Redmond’s views on Britain and the Empire changed. But did anyone else’s? It was characteristic of Redmond’s party that they promised self-government would mean a great deal more than the reality: Limerick MP William Lundon could claim that they did not seek ‘a little parliament in Dublin that would pay homage to the big one, but a sovereign and independent one and if he had his own way he would break the remaining links that bound the two countries … he was trained in another school in ’67 and he was not a parliamentarian when he walked with his rifle on his shoulder on the night of the 5th of March.’ (A reference of course to the Fenian rising of 1867).

Willie Redmond asserted in 1910 that under Home Rule ‘the aspirations of our race will be realised, and … the struggle of the men of ’98, of ’67, of ’48 and of Parnell will be rewarded.’ The language of the Home Rule movement was about ‘Ireland a Nation’ or ‘A Nation Once Again’, about images of Emmet, Tone and the Manchester Martyrs, about opposing British army recruitment, celebrating Boer victories, opposition to the playing of ‘God Save the King’ at the National University graduations and so on….(a campaign led by Tom Kettle)

A final illustration of this:

At the end of March 1912 over 100,000 people gathered in Dublin in support of the new Home Rule bill. Redmond’s deputy, John Dillon, told them that ‘we have undone, and are undoing the work of three centuries of confiscation and persecution … the holy soil of Ireland is passing back rapidly into the possession of the children of our race … and the work of Oliver Cromwell is nearly undone.’ He continued to cheers to exclaim that the Irish were ‘are no longer a starving and oppressed people’ but ‘by a long, a bitter, and disciplined agitation (cheers) by imprisonment and suffering’ … had finally ‘overthrown the most accursed and withering blight that ever cursed any country in the world.’

Now undoing the work of Cromwell suggests far more than limited self-government. As the separatist Laurence Nugent put it: ‘let it be understood that outside of the professional politicians, Home Rule meant to the ordinary citizen freedom for Ireland without any qualifications.’

So when Augustine Birrell asserted at the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in 1916 that ‘The spirit of what today is called Sinn Feinism is mainly composed of the old hatred and distrust of the British connection, always noticeable in all classes and in all places, varying in degree and finding different ways of expression, but always there, as the background of Irish politics and character’ I think he was correct. Most Irish nationalists simply did not regard British rule as legitimate.

As the Land League alphabet put it succinctly

‘E is the English who have robbed us of bread

F is the famine they gave us instead’

We are talking about a country only 70 years removed from that catastrophe. At a conference in Kilmainham in 2012 Professor Paul Bew made the point that if the growing movement for Scottish independence was attributed in part to the impact of the Poll Tax on Scotland than what did we imagine the effect of the Famine might have been.

What did might mean in 1916? Eamonn Broy, then a policeman in Dublin’s Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street Garda station) described how during that week ‘several loyal citizens of the old Unionist type called to enquire why the British Army and the police had not already ejected the Sinn Féiners from the occupied buildings. Whilst a number of that type were present a big uniformed D.M.P. man, a Clare man, came in. He told us of having gone to his home in Donnybrook to assure himself of the safety of his family. He saw the British Army column which had landed at Kingstown marching through Donnybrook. “They were singing”, he said, “but the soldiers that came in by Ballsbridge didn’t do much singing. They ran into a few Irishmen who soon took the singing out of them”. We laughed at the loud way he said it and the effect on the loyalists present.’

The reality was that for all the talk of a United Kingdom, Ireland was thought of, and ruled like, a colony. It was not Canada, nor New Zealand or Australia, or even South Africa. It was not a settler state where the majority of citizens identified with the ‘mother country.’ That is the reason why it was India that was continually referenced in debates in Britain about Irish self-government. That was why Home Rule MPs could be dismissed in Westminster as ‘eighty foreigners.’ In 1874 Benjamin Disraeli, no less, had claimed that Ireland was ‘governed by laws of laws of coercion and stringent severity that do not exist in any other quarter of the globe.’ Over 100 such acts were passed during 19th century; the suspension of civil liberties and of the subject’s right to protection from arbitrary state power in Ireland was almost permanent. At the executive level Ireland retained (unlike Scotland or Wales) a Civil Service and policy administration that was wholly separate from that of England’s. As a result, the actual head of the Irish bureaucracy was a minister of the crown. Like India, the British administration in Ireland was headed by a viceroy (the Lord Lieutenant) and he and the Chief Secretary and Under Secretary were appointed to run Ireland. Such officialdom as characterized in the words of one observer by ‘a gentle, quiet, well meaning, established, unconscious, inborn contempt.’

The problem was of course that Irish society had changed drastically since the Famine. The Catholic rural and urban bourgeoisie was on the rise and things were certainly changing, but not by 1914, fast enough, (as I think Fergus Campbell shows very well in his book on the Irish Establishment). It probably helps explain some of the attitudes of the Dublin Police that constables were forbidden from being members of any secret society, except the Freemasons. It was quite clear that anti-Catholic sectarianism remained deeply embedded into structure of British rule and Irish society itself. It was expressed quite openly during debates about self-government. When T.W. Russell MP warned that ‘if you set up a Parliament in College Green … the wealth, education, property and prosperity of Ulster will be handed over to a Parliament which will be elected by peasants dominated by priests, and they again will be dominated by the Roman Catholic Church’ he was not demanding a secular state; he was objecting to ‘peasants’ and Catholic peasants at that, electing a parliament. The fact that by 1914 as David Fitzpatrick puts it ‘a private army ruled in Ulster with the acquiescence of the state’ further reinforced nationalist alienation. (I do not believe by the way, that the UVF’s revolt caused the Rising; the IRB believed in breaking the connection, UVF or not. But the Unionist rebellion and Tory support for it radicalized a broader layer of nationalists).

So when the IRB’s Irish Freedom asserted in October 1911 that ‘Our country is run by a set of insolent officials, to whom we are nothing but a lot of people to be exploited and kept in subjection. The executive power rests on armed force and preys on the people with batons if they have the gall to say they do not like it’ the statement had enough truth in it for it to resonate with many people.

And British rule ultimately rested on force and everyone knew it. This is the context for discussing violence, sectarianism, the lack of mandates and dismissal of democratic norms, in a society in which 15% of the population had a vote in national elections…

To the Land League alphabet again

‘Q is the Queen who’s use is not known

‘R is the rifle that props up her throne’

It is also clear that it was an imperial question. When Sir Henry Wilson warned that that if you lost Ireland, you lost the Empire, he was stating a widely held view in Britain. Indeed other subjects of the British Empire knew this as well and took a deep interest in Irish politics. I couldn’t help thinking of how an Indian or an Egyptian nationalist might have reacted in 1916 on hearing about the Rising; do you think it was by lamenting that it was sad to hear that the Irish had moved to the right? Of course we know that it gave a powerful boost to movements for independence.

But finally the separatists … and here I have to stress debts to John Dorney, Patrick Maume and many more who have written illuminatingly on this subject. And there will be no doubt greater insights in the following presentations today. In November 1913 Patrick Pearse wrote that ‘There will be in the Ireland of the next few years a multitudinous activity of Freedom Clubs, Young Republican Parties, Labour organisations, Socialist groups, and what not; bewildering enterprises undertaken by sane persons and insane persons, by good men and bad men, many of them seemingly contradictory, some mutually destructive, yet all tending towards a common objective, and that objective: the Irish Revolution.’ It is actually a very good summary. And some of the people involved do indeed seem eccentric, but then we might consider how Francis Sheehy-Skeffington responded when he was described as a ‘crank’; ‘Yes’ he said, because a crank was ‘a small instrument that makes revolutions.’

The term minority can conjure up images of a tiny fringe but the separatist movement was deeply embedded in nationalist Ireland. In my view it is a mistake to compartmentalize: what is striking about the milieu is the level of interaction. In recent articles discussing 1916 both Professor John A. Murphy and Felix Larkin have asserted that Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin played ‘no part’ in the Rising. In both cases this is part of a polemic against contemporary Sinn Féin but it is quite a common view and one I admit to having held myself in the past! But on mature reflection … I would suggest now that Sinn Féin movement played a key role in the Rising and among the separatist movement more generally. Eamonn Ceannt was a member of Sinn Féin as was Michael O’Hanrahan. Seán MacDiarmada had been an organizer for the party. Sinn Féin’s leader on Dublin Corporation, W.T. Cosgrave was ‘out’ as was his colleague Seán T. O’Kelly. And certainly there were dozens of Sinn Féin members or ex-members among the rank and file of the rebels, Padraig Ó Maillie in Galway being just one example. Sinn Féin was a coalition, in which republicans and non-republicans, IRB members and labour activists could all find a home. Richard O’Carroll and Peadar Macken, both Irish Volunteer officers killed during the Rising, could at various stages be union officials, members of the Gaelic League, the IRB and Sinn Féin. WP Partridge, Michael Joseph ‘the O’Rahilly’ and many others had also been active in the party. Because of Griffith’s reactionary politics on a number of issues it is tempting for modern republicans to dismiss him as being of little importance. But he was a central figure. Most of the separatist leadership did not hold his non-involvement in the Rising against him, considering that his writings had helped radicalize a generation. Erskine Childers of all people, dismissed as a ‘damned Englishman’ during the Treaty debates, would still write that Griffith was ‘the greatest intellectual force stimulating the tremendous national revival which took shape in Easter Week.’ His ideas have remained important to political formations that never considered Griffith an influence. (In fact some of Griffith’s allies transferred their support to Fianna Fáil in the late 1920s because they considered Cumann na Gaedheal to have abandoned his ideas). Despite Griffith’s denunciations of the ITGWU during the Lockout, James Connolly was inviting the man he called his ‘good friend’ onto anti-war platforms by October 1914. The separatist milieu was very fluid; Padraig Pearse was never a member of Sinn Féin but he was the main speaker at Sinn Féin events commemorating John Mitchel during 1915. Here we have to remember that most people who are not activists do not distinguish very clearly the differences between organizations. Perhaps most significantly, the term ‘Sinn Féiner’ was widely used to describe any radical nationalist. Hence Eoin MacNeill’s Irish Volunteers were referred to by both the authorities and the public, as the ‘Sinn Féin Volunteers.’ So in that sense 1916 was a ‘Sinn Féin rebellion’ if we see it as a movement, rather than a party.

There is a world encompassing all strands of radicalism, in which people are often members of several organizations at the same time; in which activists know each other personally; in which they read each other’s newspapers (of which there were dozens) and go to each other’s meetings. They attend social events and ceilis, go out with each other and marry each other. There are the veterans of the campaigns against royal visits and the Boer War, the movement for suffrage, the radical theatre, the Land League, the Gaelic League, the GAA, the labour movement and the various military organizations. As in every movement personal likes and dislikes played a role in decision-making. Personal contacts influenced choices: Thomas Pugh of the Socialist Party of Ireland joined the Volunteers rather than the ICA because Richard Mulcahy asked him to. It was not all one big happy family and serious differences existed; but what strikes me is the fluid nature of the movement.

In October 1914 the Irish Neutrality League was launched in Dublin. James Connolly became it’s president while Arthur Griffith, trade unionist William O’Brien, Boer War veteran Major John MacBride, Countess Markievicz and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington were all on the platform. Connolly noted that present were ‘men drawn from all classes. There were labour men there, and men who could by no stretch of the imagination be called labour men. There were Home Rulers and Republicans, socialists and Sinn Féiners. They had members of the sane section of the Volunteers … (the) Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan (and) the various Franchise Leagues’ all of them united in the belief that ‘the interests of Ireland were more dear to them than the interests of the British Empire.’

There are a number of elements in the movement that are significant. One is the activity of women, who of course had no vote at all, in national elections at least. (I say of course, but to read some of the popular commentary about democracy again….) The lines ‘Irish men and Irishwomen’ do not come from nowhere. The promise of universal suffrage was significant in a time when John Dillon could declare that ‘Women’s suffrage will, I believe, be the ruin of our Western civilisation. It will destroy the home, challenging the headship of man, laid down by God. It may come in your time – I hope not in mine.’ Only one branch of the Home Rule United Irish League even allowed women to become members. But Griffith’s Sinn Féin supported suffrage, and Griffith had backed Jennie Wyse Power’s suggestion that dual membership of Sinn Féin and the Irish Womens’ Franchise League be allowed to party members; the IRB’s Irish Freedom applauded the Suffragettes who disrupted the visit of Herbert Asquith to Dublin as ‘fighters for freedom.’ Of course for many male activists women’s rights and feminism were not important (and indeed some were hostile to them). But there is surely a contrast here with the attitude of the Home Rule party, whose supporters stripped and battered Francis Sheehy Skeffington when he tried to protest at the 1912 Home Rule rally.

I will not attempt to describe the variety of women’s activity, as others will do it much better. There is as challenge of course to recreate the world of the less-well known, of those from outside Dublin, of those who did leave diaries or write memoirs and those who because of their class or status have been voiceless.

Nevertheless the level and breath of women’s activity is remarkable and surely significant in terms of Irish or indeed any society at the time

Three years before the Rising Dublin was divided starkly by the Lockout: the question was which side are you on? Pearse wrote that ‘if I were as hungry as many equally good men of Dublin are it is probable that I should not be here wielding a pen: possibly I should be in the streets wielding a stone … my instinct is with the landless man against the lord of lands, and with the breadless man against the master of millions. I may be wrong, but I do hold it a most terrible sin that there should be landless men in this island of … fertile valleys, and that there should be breadless men in this city where great fortunes are made and enjoyed.’

In Dublin the Home Rulers (despite considerable antagonism with Martin Murphy himself) knew what side they were on. You can see that clearly on Dublin Corporation, dominated by Redmond’s party in a city which was notorious for its poverty, low wages, tenement slums and infant mortality. In contrast seperatists tended to instinctively take the workers side in 1913 and to promise to end corruption and jobbery in Dublin’s politics. (Someone like Cosgrave, seen as a conservative in retrospect, was a reformer on Dublin Corporation).

Of course again there were contradictions: there was sympathy for the workers but wariness about Larkinism. So Sean MacDiarmada would write during 1913 that ‘socialism and the sympathetic strike are dangerous ruinous weapons in Ireland at the present time.’ But Eamonn Ceannt, an activist in the Dublin Municipal Officers Association and Sinn Féin publically challenged Griffith over his position on the strike. In general however separatists tended to see such intense class antagonism as a consequence of British rule and Irish Freedom would claim that while an ‘independent Ireland would of course have disputes between capital and labour … they would be fights to re-adjust a balance, not a fight to the death.’ But labour struggles also radicalized nationalists such as Patrick Colgan from Maynooth who explained that it was ‘the fight put up by the Dublin workers in 1913. It was the first time I commenced thinking along physical force lines.’ It did not make some separatists more left-wing necessarily (and being active trade unionists did not make them socialists) but the Lockout encouraged them to think about confrontation with the state.

Irish society was intensely aware of class, as Ernie O’Malley put it ‘In the towns tuppence-ha’penny looked down on tuppence, and throughout the country the grades in social difference were as numerous as the layers of an onion.’ And this was reflected in the separatist movement. In Dublin, at least, unskilled workers (a very large percentage of the city’s workforce) were underrepresented in the republican movement with the exception of the Citizens Army (which was much smaller in 1916 then it had been in 1914). But there were considerable numbers of civil servants, teachers, students and skilled workers involved. At the first meeting of Dublin Trades Council after the Rising they mourned the loss of three members, Peader Macken of the Painters union, Richard O’Carroll of the Bricklayers and of course James Connolly; Macken and O’Carroll were Volunteers, not Citizens Army. There was also a significant IRB presence among the Dublin Corporation workforce: Eamonn Ceannt was clerk in the Treasurer’s office, Martin Conlon in the sanitary department, and Harry Nicholls, a civil engineer, while Sean Connolly was a clerk in the motor tax office. Many of them were active in the Dublin Municipal Officers Association, of which Nicholls would become president after his release from Frongoch. There was also an IRB influence in the city’s Fire Brigade. (Both Las and Donal Fallon have written about this recently).

But overall the separatists were not a movement of the poor in urban Ireland. I think the considerable tension between the urban poor and republicans which was a feature of those years needs more investigation. I think it was not just about the relationship with the British Army or the disruption caused by the Rising. In Limerick in 1915 after a Volunteer parade was literally ran out of town (recently reenacted by the Rubber Bandits), Tom Clarke reputedly remarked that he had ‘always wondered why King William couldn’t take Limerick. I know now’. But you see incidents like this right across Ireland during 1914-18 in towns from Ennis to Longford.

But of course it is not all about Dublin, this was a national movement, affected by regional differences: ‘As Ernie O’Malley would assert about the 1919-21 IRA: ‘Each county was different; the very map boundaries in many places seemed to make a distinction.’ The make up and culture of the movement varied from Belfast to Cork and from there to Limerick and Galway and so on. The importance of rural labour and the tradition of land agitation was significant in many areas. You may be familiar with the testimony of Chief Inspector Clayton of Galway East after the Rising when he was asked of the rebels ‘’were there any people of superior class or education among them?

Clayton answered ‘None … one of the leaders was a blacksmith, and the Colonel of the Irish Volunteers was a publican. They were all shopkeepers and farmers’ sons.’

He was then asked were ‘none of them of the literary type? And replied

‘None.’ (But don’t tell Ryan Tubridy or Robert Ballagh that…though I think I’d follow a blacksmith quicker than a poet).

But experience of landlordism and land agitation was not confined to those living outside the towns. Significant numbers of those involved in radical politics in the towns were from the country. Joseph and Seán Connolly, for example, were members of the Citizens Army from Gloucester Street in Dublin’s inner-city but their father’s family had been evicted in Co. Kildare a generation before. This also applied of course to the large number of activists who lived outside Ireland; to the members of the IRB, the Volunteers and other organizations in Britain and America.

There were many varieties of separatist. On St. Patrick’s Day 1916 there was a major Volunteer mobilization in Dublin. Many of the participants went to mass that morning. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral Harry Nicholls and George Irvine also attended the morning service, in uniform and carrying their rifles. Protestant rebels form another strand within the movement and there were far more of them than the well known Ernest Blythes and Countess Markievicz’s; people such as Seamus McGowan, Fred Norgrove, Arthur Shields or Nellie Gifford. The Gaelic League was the gateway to radical politics for some: one branch of the League in Dublin, the Five Provinces was nicknamed ‘crave na cuig protastunach’ (thanks to Peter Rigney for that piece of information). Other Protestant activists came from Home Rule or even Unionist backgrounds such as Erskine Childers, Robert Barton or Captain Jack White. A significant number of these activists converted to Catholicism: Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Aodh de Blacam, Grace and Muriel Gifford, Roger Casement and Cathal McDowell for example (McDowell became a Catholic in Boland’s Mills). And given their differences in class background and identity we should be wary of generalizing; but when people are dubbing the Rising a ‘Catholic’ rebellion they might at least mention that non-Catholics from a variety of backgrounds were also involved in it.

Religion of course was also inseparable from the question of Ulster and partition. What did the separatists think? Well one strand were the optimists, So Bulmer Hobson in 1905 would assert that ‘Protestant Ulster is awakening to the fact that its grandfathers dreamed a dream, and its fathers tried to forget it- but the call of it is in their ears.’ The spirit of the United Irishmen in other words. The view after 1912 that Unionist mobilization would ultimately force them to confront Britain and thus recognize their Irish nationality was very widespread. As Eoin MacNeill put it ‘A wonderful state of things has come to pass in Ulster… it is manifest that that all Irish people, Unionist as well as Nationalist, are determined to have their own way in Ireland. On that point, and it is the main point, Ireland is united. Sir Edward Carson may yet, at the head of his Volunteers, “march to Cork”. If so, their progress will probably be accompanied by the greetings of ten times of their number of National Volunteers, and Cork will give them a hospitable and memorable reception. Some years ago, speaking at the Toome Feis, in the heart of “homogenous Ulster”, I said that the day would come when men of every creed and party would join in celebrating the defence of Derry and the Battle of Benburb. That day is nearer than I then expected.’ The first Irish Volunteer meetings in Cork did indeed end with cheers for the UVF- at which point the Hibernians started throwing chairs.

While Arthur Griffith had initially argued that the Unionists were dupes of British Toryism, he saw the Ulster Covenant as an application of Sinn Féin principles to Ulster, and called on nationalists to resist British government moves against the UVF. The IRB’s Irish Freedom too declared in June 1914 that ‘Ulster must not be coerced’ and promised that in a free Ireland ‘Ulster’s specific interests (would) not interfered with.’ (There are strong echoes here of both Official and Provisional Sinn Féin’s appeals in the early 1970s).

Patrick McCartan, a leading figure in the IRB and Sinn Féin in Tyrone took the rhetoric seriously and lent his car to the local UVF during the Larne gunrunning; the Home Rulers were not slow to remind Sinn Féin of that in 1918.

So separatists generally disclaimed sectarianism and blamed their rivals in the Hibernians for whatever anti-Protestant prejudice that existed. They were often slow to accept that northern Catholics might feel differently. In 1914 Pearse complained that the Redmondites were now arming the Volunteers ‘not against England, but against the Orangemen … those of us in the south and west who have guns (are asked to) send them north for use by the Catholics there to defend themselves when the “massacre” breaks out (the inverted commas were Pearse’s). The whole tone of the movement has changed.’

Republicans refusing to send guns to Belfast, eh?

Instead Pearse contended that ‘One great source of misunderstanding has now disappeared: it has become clear within the last few years that the Orangeman is no more loyal to England that we are. He wants the Union because he imagines it secures his prosperity; but he is ready to fire on the Union flag the moment it threatens his prosperity. The position is perfectly plain and understandable. Foolish notions of loyalty to England being eliminated, it is a matter for business-like negotiation … The case might be put thus: Hitherto England has governed Ireland through the Orange Lodges; she now proposes to govern Ireland through the A.O.H. You object; so do we. Why not unite and get rid of the English? They are the real difficulty; their presence here the real incongruity.’

We can discuss how naïve or idealistic this view was certainly but can it be called sectarian? It was the Home Rulers who wanted Ulster coerced not the republicans. As John Dillon explained in Belfast during 1915 ‘When the war is over … the section of the Irish nation which has done best on the battlefields of France will be strongest in the struggle which may be thrust upon us … we shall never consent to divide this island or this nation.’ In effect a promise of civil war.

However it is impossible to understand the separatists without reference to cultural nationalism or religion. The devotional revolution and the rise of the Irish-Ireland idea were all reflected in their ranks. Hence in 1867 the Fenian Proclamation of the Republic could declare ‘in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State’ while the 1916 Proclamation opens with appeals to ‘God.’ The Fenians could assert that they intended ‘no war against the people of England; our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Iris … as for the workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms.’ But Seán MacDiarmada would worry during the Lockout that ‘all the talk about the friendliness of the English working man and the Brotherhood of man, the English food ships etc. have a very bad unnational influence…’ Many separatists would echo Cork man JJ Walsh’s claim that ‘from childhood I had hated England and everything English’ and Walsh, who was a significant figure in the GAA, would also assert that because for Gaels ‘contamination with the alien and all his works were taboo’ the ‘nucleus of the material that might one day strike a blow at the ancient foe’‘ was found exclusively in the ranks of that Association. But then you find someone like

Oscar Traynor, a Dubliner, the son of a Fenian who was goalkeeper with the Belfast Celtic (soccer team) in 1914 and who would claim that there was ‘a long list of patriotic Irishmen who … played Rugby, or Soccer or Cricket, and not only played it, but did so with distinction’; perhaps the captain of the combined masters and students rugby team at Rockwell College was among them or certainly some of the Volunteer companies in Limerick that were drawn from rugby clubs. And far more could be said on the importance of the Gaelic League and cultural matters in general. The Keating branch in Dublin’s Parnell Square included a whole host of the movement’s northside activists for example. But the social function of this movement was very important I think; ceilidh, music, theatre: a place to meet people; many of those who regularly attended Gaelic League events had very rudimentary Irish and of courser almost all the Bureau Witness statements are in English …. as are every internal IRA document I have ever seen.

But there is no doubting either the importance of personal religious belief and the influence of Catholic education on the revolutionaries. Marie Perolz of the Citizen Army would remember that it was the ‘Presentation nuns made a rebel of me.’ Given that the popular perception, which tends to be reinforced by the way the Citizens Army are depicted in novels like Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry or the current series Rebellion, (that they are the secular alternative to the pious Volunteers) it is perhaps significant that when Countess Markievicz converted to Catholicism she claimed she was inspired to do so by the nightly rosaries said by the Citizens Army in the College of Surgeons and asserted that ‘it was Michael Mallin and Councillor (WP) Partridge (that) made me a Catholic’. Mallin himself, the ICA Chief of Staff, asserted while awaiting execution that ‘Ireland will come out greater and grander but she must not forget she is Catholic: she must keep her faith.’ And this reflects the reality of Irish society, that fact as Todd Andrews remembered ‘we (Catholics) all had a common bond, whatever our economic condition, of being second class citizens.’ There were of course great differences of wealth and power within Catholic Ireland and wealthy Catholics could exaggerate the extent to which they were excluded but there was an essential truth in this claim. And because the majority of rebels were Catholic doesn’t make them sectarian; but neither were they secular. Certainly separatists were delighted when clergymen made statements aided their cause. They widely circulated in pamphlet form anti-British and anti-Redmond statements made by Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick in late 1915 for example.

Lastly separatists shared a belief that a fight was necessary and inevitable. As Kitty O’Doherty put it; ‘I knew that it was coming. It was always: “Good-bye, and here’s to the day.’ Here the World War was crucial. The war made the idea of an insurrection far more practical than it would have been in peacetime. Pearse may have talked about getting used to the sight of arms, but it was the British state that put arms into the hands of hundreds of thousands of Irishmen after 1914 and propaganda glorifying death and sacrifice was not norm. So for a variety of reasons; whether the memory of perceived missed opportunities in the Boer War for Tom Clarke; for James Connolly despair at the failure of international socialism to, in their own words, ‘make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination’; for others the existence of potential ‘gallant allies in Europe’ to provide arms and support. There is no doubt that the promise of German aid was crucial to convincing skeptics that a Rising was possible. In popular terms it was reflected in the Citizen Army singing ‘The Germans are winning the war me boys’ on their route marches and the popularity of ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ at separatist gatherings. My view would be that this alliance was a fairly obvious pragmatic move; it is neither the ‘ta daa!’ moment that some critics of the Rising imagine- at least some of whom seem to be unaware that Germany in 1916 was not Germany in 1939. But the line about ‘gallant allies in Ireland’ is not insignificant; it also carried consequences in the event of victory. (It certainly should not be dismissed by people who claim that every other word in the Proclamation is sacred).

However most importantly before the Rising radicalization was apparent across much of nationalist Ireland and growing: you can see that in the reaction to the threat of conscription, the votes for Labour and anti-conscription nationalists in Dublin by-elections, in the increasingly critical tone taken by the Bishops, in the militancy of the MacNeill leadership of the Volunteers, promising in July 1915 ‘resistance to any partition or dismemberment of Ireland (and) resistance to any scheme of compulsory military service under any authority except a free National Government…’

There were substantial differences in how people thought that fight would occur. And that was reflected in the interesting number of ‘no-shows’ in 1916. You have people who spent most of their adult life preparing to strike a blow, but who in the end, do not take part in the Rising. Some had political or practical objections: Bulmer Hobson for instance. But others simply did not turn up and we don’t know why. How many? IRB member George Lyons estimated that about 75% of the Dublin membership turned out on Easter Monday, in comparison to about 25% of the non-IRB Volunteers in the city. But non-IRB members, and people with only a vague idea of what was about to happen, did fight in Easter Week. Some like Leslie Price and Bríd Dixon, having received orders to demobilize made their decisions on the spur of the moment: ‘I decided that we were not going home. Here was something that would never happen in our lives again.’

The insurrection that took place may not have been the one many activists thought would happen: there were real differences about tactics. Hobson had made the point years earlier in his Defensive Warfare that ‘we must fight not to make a display of heroism, but fight to win.’ But the rhetoric of the Volunteer leadership, including Eoin MacNeill, promised action. In April 1916 he declared that ‘If our arms are demanded from us, we shall refuse to surrender them. If force is used to take them from us, we shall make the most effective resistance in our power. Let there be no mistake or misunderstanding on that point … we shall defend our arms with our lives.’

Sometimes Hobson and MacNeill are used to make a case against the Rising by people who present them as almost being pacifists: but both men believed in an armed struggle, which they hoped would have a popular base, though it would still not have had any kind of electoral mandate. If the British had moved to introduce conscription in 1916 and MacNeill had called out the Volunteers, their rising would have been bigger, more national and more bloody, and the majority of people would still not have been consulted beforehand. So I don’t think people should cry crocodile tears for Hobson and MacNeill and then bemoan the ruthlessness of the IRA after 1919.

Finally on the ideology of the rebels themselves. The proclamation provided a guide to strands of thinking within the movement but as the vast majority of those involved never saw it until the Rising began we have to go beyond that to discuss their ideas. Michael Staines would remember that ‘at a meeting of the General Council of the Volunteers … shortly before the Rising, there was a discussion as to the reason we were declaring a Republic. I think it was Sean McDermott who pointed out that France, which had helped us in the past, was a Republic, and that America, where many of our kin were also a Republic. Those present at the meeting had an open mind-they desired freedom for the country and they considered the simplest way to let the outside world know of that desire was to declare a Republic. It was generally agreed that when we got our freedom it was solely a matter for the people themselves to decide their form of government.’ That very pragmatic view was echoed by the single most important political figure to emerge from the Rising, Eamon de Valera, when he declared during 1917 that ‘we want an Irish republic, because if Ireland had her freedom, it is, I believe, the most likely form of government. But if the Irish people wanted to have another form of government, so long as it was an Irish government, I would not put a word against it.’

How that translated into popular terms is another story. By 1918 the separatists had become a mass movement. And success brings other challenges. One notable feature of Rising generation – or at least GPO garrison- was the very large number (41%) who were neutral in the Civil War (there also a small number who dropped out after 1916). Vast numbers of new people arrived on the scene between 1917-1919 and then again in 1921. Not all of them shared the same preoccupations or the same interests as those who were active before 1916. By 1918 we see the slogan ‘Faith and Fatherland’ being used to commemorate the Rising: before 1916 separatists would have associated this term with the hated ‘Hibs.’ Some might interpret the Rising to mean, as two Dundalk men, somewhat the worse for wear, were arrested for shouting in Warrenpoint during October 1916, that we would soon have ‘An Irish Republic and a Fenian King.’ In August 1917 Tom Ashe, president of the IRB and one of the heroes of the Rising (and soon to be a republican martyr himself), told supporters that “we look away in the distant ages of the past to the figure of the King who died in the battle of Clontarf, and we think of the Ireland which he ruled; and the Ireland of our ideals is a similar one.” This I think raises all kinds of questions about what republicanism meant in popular terms … But my brief was to discuss the men and women of 1916!

To conclude: British rule had very little legitimacy in nationalist Ireland. That is why the Rising was ultimately successful, not because a passive, cowed population were awakened by a blood sacrifice. Most nationalists more or less accepted that Britain’s overwhelming power made change unlikely, but to assume that they were becoming happy west Britons, as some hoped, and the more pessimistic feared, is incorrect. National self-determination was the question of the age. The generation that carried out the Rising made it seem possible that Britain could be challenged, that its power was not unassailable and that the questions of Irish self-determination would have to be dealt with. That was their achievement.