National Hero

Maria, if I may make an obviously ironic–yet sincerely meant–comment: this is a heroic essay. Thank you for sharing it with us.

“It is easy to confuse what is with what ought to be, especially when what is has worked out in your favor.”

– Tyrion Lannister

That was great.

Just two little “nits”:

Lloyd George was not Prime Minister during the Rising, nor during the executions – it was still Herbert Asquith, who visited Dublin to confer with Maxwell and must have approved the death sentences, at least in principle. The Lloyd George episode must have taken place sometime between 1919 and 1921.

Sir John Maxwell’s previous posting was in Egypt, though he had served in France. As he was aware of British reverses in what is now Iraq, such as the surrender of Kut to the Turks, it may have steeled his spirit for “stern measures”.

not sure if its available outside the UK, but Brendan O’Carroll took a break from Mrs Brown’s Boys to do a programme on his family’s part in the uprising.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b074719c/brendan-ocarroll-my-family-at-war

which, from this Englishman’s view point, seemed a very even-handed programme.

It’s a lovely essay, but I find myself gently, sadly disagreeing with some of it.

“Only people who think about political violence in the abstract can cultivate any ethical equanimity about it.”

This is expressly not true. Plenty of people in the mud, and the blood, and the shit – or who have lost people in same – believe the process to have been necessary. We can attempt to disregard their feelings, but I’m not personally comfortably with that.

“Only people who think about political violence in the abstract can cultivate any ethical equanimity about it. Take a long look at your child or partner or beloved friend, and ask yourself if an idea exists that matters more than they do. Of course it doesn’t.”

This seems to be straw-manning a bit. Those who revolt may engage in the horrors for abstractions, but they often also do it to (hopefully) materially change lives for the better. Are we to say that the Haitian revolutionaries in 1789 were wrong in what they did, even if they fought partially for the abstract idea of freedom?

We can reject jingoism, militarism, and bad history without the above, I think.

@Seanohal 03.25.16 at 8:31 pm
>How many children died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many young American GIs lived because those bombs were dropped?

I wonder if I’m correct in reading this as ‘*Of course* the Easter Rising was moral, because after all, as we all know, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was!’, or whether my misanthropy and anti-Americanism have got out of hand this time.

“people before ideas” is a cliche that is:
1. An impossibility, taking as a premise either (a) that we could somehow avoid making any collective decisions which inflict suffering or death, or (b) that all collective decisions of significance could somehow be made non-politically, without ideas.
2. In practice, usually associated with a bias in favor of the status quo; the only way most of us can imagine that we are acting un-ideologically is by obeying the norms of our society unthinkingly.
3. An implicit valuation of people nearby/”like me” over people whose lives do not intertwine with mine; after all, the experiences of such distant people are necessarily abstract for me. I might support (by votes, taxes, employment, purchases…) a policy which involves starving them or blowing them up while remaining kind to each person who I meet as an individual. And many people do.

@OP
>Take a long look at your child or partner or beloved friend, and ask yourself if an idea exists that matters more than they do. Of course it doesn’t.
>The question isn’t whether the Easter Rising accelerated Ireland’s independence or made it happen at all; it’s whether it was worth the death of one bow-legged tenement child. Of course it wasn’t.

I see others have made more or less the same points, but posting anyway: whatever the merits of this specific uprising, one must bear in mind that people’s being unfree and not in control of their own destiny tends to lead to the misery and, ultimately, deaths of children, too (and examples from Irish history aren’t hard to find). In general, ‘ideas’ and principles stand for phenomena that affect humans in vital ways in the real world; they are not nothing, in spite of the fact that one can neither touch them nor love them in the same way as one can love the individual humans whose lives and happiness they are about. After all, even the idea and principle that you must care about the fate of other people’s children and loved ones is … exactly that, an idea and a principle (you can’t just trust your heart to care about everyone in the world who deserves it regardless of their personal connections to you). Whether specifically the benefits of the Easter Rising happened to outweigh its costs at that particular point in Irish history is a different matter – judging from the link at 7, MacNeill obviously had his reasons to think that a rebellion wasn’t the right decision at that moment, but it seems equally obvious that he wasn’t a Dostoyevsky-style ‘single tear of a child’ pacifist either.

In 1916, my great-grand father, Eoin MacNeill, was the head of a dissident army,

So you and Daragh are… some species of cousin? Second cousins?

(I vaguely recall Daragh mentioning over at LGM that he, also, was a great-grandchild of Eoin MacNeill.)

I’m out of my depth here. Just want to say that this brought tears to my eyes. Beautifully done. Thank you, Maria.

“Nothing is as cruel as the righteousness of innocence / With automatic weapons and a gospel of the truth.” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd0RHvFNPqA

I think also, one of the lessons is that preparing a defense is that it can turn into an offense terribly easily. When Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were planning their movement, they rejected self-defense as policy for exactly this reason.

@ Brett Dunbar, I suspect you are secretly awaiting your broken clock moment.

They hadn’t won an “extensive” form of home rule, certainly not when compared to what they got after the treaty. Violence won them the “extensive” part. Whatever the rights or wrongs of that fact .

Here’s a chunk of a paper I gave recently, developed from this: http://irishhistoriansinbritain.org/?p=210 My aim was to understand MacNeill’s position, rather than pass judgement (I don’t pay enough attention to his views on the North). It’s a bit preachy towards the end, but it gives you lots of MacNeill’s actual words. There’s a hyperlink to MacNeill’s memo on the blog.

MacNeill was a republican, he believed the Irish people had the right to bear arms, he was the Volunteer Chief of Staff – the highest ranked officer in the organization – and he considered the formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 to be a sovereign act by the Irish people. He believed the Volunteers had the right to resist by force any attempt of the British government to disarm them. He was also, of course, responsible for the notorious countermand of Easter Saturday. Most of the arguments we hear against the rising tend to be from those who believe the Home Rule campaign still had potential. MacNeill was not a home ruler. As such, no serious-minded republican, however moved by the heroism of Easter Week, should casually dismiss his arguments.

The memorandum runs to eleven handwritten pages. The exact circumstances of its composition are not known, but it seems to have been written in March 1916 in response to heightened Volunteer activity and MacNeill’s growing fear that the organisation was increasingly out of his control. His fears proved well founded. The rebellion began with something approaching a palace coup and constituted a gross act of insubordination by his officers.

In the memorandum, MacNeill made a strongly consequentialist case against rebellion, arguing that a rebellion would be ‘morally wrong’ if its principal instigators knew it stood little chance of success: those responsible for the act would thus ‘incur the guilt not only of that action itself but of all its direct consequences.’ To kill anyone under such circumstances would be ‘murder’. This raises complex moral questions of causation and consequence. Approximately 450 people died during the rebellion, over half whom were civilians. But it is generally thought that the civilian dead were mostly killed by the British—they were the ‘collateral damage’ of the suppression of the rebellion.

Should we say that those deaths were caused by, or were a consequence of, the rebellion and thus, by MacNeill’s reckoning, murder, for which all parties were responsible to one degree or another? Or would it be more correct to say that the deaths were caused by the British suppression of the rebellion, acts quite distinct from the relatively limited violence that commenced the rebellion? To put it another way, if the first stage of the rebellion was the occupation of various buildings in Dublin and the reading of the proclamation, should the rebellion be considered to have entered a new stage and, as a such a new moral phase, when the rebels began to resist the British response?

To answer these questions, which flow directly from MacNeill’s memorandum, invites us to consider what philosophers call moral luck: moral luck, good or bad, is at play when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgement despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control. Given that it is probable that the rebels believed they couldn’t win and that people were likely to die as a consequence of Britain’s probable determination to suppress their rebellion, did they become morally culpable for the deaths caused by their prolongation of Britain’s effort to suppress the rebellion? The implication of MacNeill’s position seems to be that they were. Moreover, if the rebels had defeated the British and realised their republic, MacNeill’s position seems also to have been that if this were achieved against their reasonable expectations, the moral status of their acts would not have been changed. In other words, he rejected what is sometimes termed ‘resultant luck’, by which the morality of an action is partially assessed in terms of how things turn out. Instead, MacNeill lays the emphasis on intention or will—and it seems plausible to suppose that, in this respect, MacNeill was knowingly Kantian.

The implication of MacNeill’s argument is that had Pearse simply read the proclamation and then had the Volunteers march home – or surrender – their action would not only have been politically less significant but their moral burden concomitantly lighter. The argument is made more complex, however, by the fact that some of the rebels mounted the rebellion because they wanted the British to hit back hard because they believed this would mobilise the people around a more separatist or republican nationalism.

Now, MacNeill was not entirely out of sympathy with this logic. He did recognise that a rebellion might be both productive and morally justifiable if its purpose was ‘to produce an ultimate effect on the national mind’—it could be justified as epiphanic—but he set the bar very high, arguing that a rebellion would be legitimate under these circumstances only if the destruction of Irish nationality was imminent. And given that MacNeill didn’t believe Irish nationalism was in such jeopardy, blood sacrifice, and its attendant collateral damage could therefore not be legitimised.

This reminds us that although MacNeill was a republican and a separatist, he was also a political pragmatist who, in contrast to the rebel leadership, did not condemn home rule as fundamentally at odds with Irish nationalism. He did, however, think that home rule had effectively been defeated, but, as I will come to in a moment, how he thought Irish nationalists should respond to this differed fundamentally to the rebel leadership.
MacNeill also argued that the potential success of the rebellion, in other words that which might make it legitimate in is view, could only be calculated in terms of its likely actual and immediate consequences, rather than ‘some future moral or political advantage which may be hoped for as the result of non-success.’ MacNeill’s position is that there is no moral case for taking the life of another on the grounds that this might trigger a succession of events that would retrospectively justify the original act. As such, he dismisses justifications of rebellion that are predicated on what moral philosophers term ‘resultant luck’. Instead, a rebellion could be only justified when based on ‘actualities’ rather than ‘instinctive feeling or premonitions or on the adoption of a priori maxims’. Feeling or instinct, MacNeill insists, gave no ‘justification for any deliberate course of action involving moral responsibility.’ A man who cannot give a ‘reasonable account’ of a proposed action must be allowing ‘instinct’ to override ‘judgement’. It cannot be morally justified to issue orders arrived at through instinct.
MacNeill moves from this abstract reasoning to deconstruct three a priori maxims that seem to be propelling his comrades towards an immoral action. They are, first, ‘it is essential that Ireland take action during the present war’, second, ‘Ireland has always struck the blow too late’, and, third, ‘in military matters the advantage lies with the side that takes the initiative.’ The first two of these claims reflect fairly distinct Fenian arguments; MacNeill, of course, wasn’t a Fenian, but the Fenians he worked with in the Volunteers had long looked upon the old adage that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ as a kind of instruction. MacNeill bluntly stated that to act on these terms, according to this maxims, without taking account of ‘actualities’ would be ‘proof of mental incapacity’—we should remember that the memorandum was a private document.
Why then do some of his comrades in the volunteers appear intent on rebellion? MacNeill’s answered this question with some of the most psychologically penetrating words written during the revolution, words which Charles Townshend has wryly referred as ‘a dose of professorial wisdom’:

‘To my mind, those who feel impelled towards military action on any of the grounds that I have stated are really impelled by a sense of feebleness, satisfying their own emotions or escaping from a difficult & complex & trying situation.’

Here, then, is MacNeill the stoic, arguing that the putative rebels must not give way to their impulses; but if MacNeill’s stoic demand that the rebels suppress certain instinctive or weak aspects of their selves in order to retain their moral virtue – remember how central was his fear that the rebels would commit murder – this was strongly predicated on his sense of the common good of the nation.

‘It is our duty, if necessary, to trample on our personal feelings and to face every sort of difficulty and complexity, and to think only of our country’s good.’

MacNeill’s argument now took a more practical turn, seeking to find a logical explanation in current events. He asks why the British had allowed the Volunteers to grow until they were capable of mounting a rebellion. MacNeill argued that a premature rebellion would divide nationalists against each other and give unionists in the North an excuse to mobilise, thereby creating the opportunity for the British to intervene to prevent carnage, justifying for the first time a strengthening of the British state in Ireland. This probably allowed Dublin Castle too much percipience.

Still, to avoid this happening, MacNeill argued that the Volunteers must continue to organise themselves, strengthening the ranks and demonstrating their resolve, all the while recognising that their purpose—and this is crucial—was not to fight but to ‘secure Ireland’s rights and liberties’.
This was both a vital aspect of MacNeill’s case against rebellion and a vital aspect of his understanding of what the Volunteers were for. He believed the existence of the Volunteers had fundamentally undermined Britain’s capacity to govern Ireland through the normal channels of civil society. And he was consistent in this, having argued along these lines in 1913 that the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force had effectively ended the Union. If the police could no longer suppress the Volunteers, if the civil authorities had been denuded of their by these sovereign acts, and Britain could only assert its former authority through military means, then the Union had effectively ceased to exist. MacNeill believed this had created a stalemate, giving the Volunteers further scope to extend their organisation, furthering undermining the capacity of the British state to exert control over Ireland. Thus, MacNeill’s case against rebellion did not rest on his judgement that the Volunteers were not yet sufficiently strong to mount a successful rebellion, but that it was plausible to suppose that to continue to strengthen the organisation could see the object of a rebellion met without the need for a shot to be fired—or for a murder to be committed. This takes us into the realm of the historical counter-factual, it is impossible to say whether MacNeill was right or wrong, but his thinking chimed with popular ideas about how the Irish Volunteers of 1782 helped bring Grattan’s parliament into being. MacNeill thus represented those currents of radical Irish nationalism that had very little to do with the Rising and everything to do with the Volunteer movement as a manifestation of the national will and an embodiment of an active Irish citizenry.
MacNeill was a democrat who was convinced that Irish public opinion was coming around to the separatist point of view. This made it all the more important that the separatists should not act as though they had a monopoly on truth but should continue to work for the outcome they sought. To do so effectively, they must ‘remember that what we call our country is not a poetical abstraction, as some of us, perhaps all of us, in the exercise of our highly developed capacity for figurative thought, are sometimes apt to imagine … What we call our country is the Irish nation, which is a concrete and visible reality.’ This is the other most quoted passage in the memorandum. Historians have tended to focus on the references to ‘abstraction’ and ‘figurative thought’, suggesting this passage offers significant insight into the mentality of the rebels, but these lines also imply much about MacNeill’s thinking, and the strand of opinion he represented. In his view, the Irish nation already existed, it did not need to be brought into being, it was not dependent on the existence of an independent Irish nation-state, and, most of all, a rebellion was not needed to bring it into being. Professor MacNeill, co-founder of the Gaelic League and a scholar of the Irish language, could be Irish in ways that most of his fellow volunteers found very difficult. It is not entirely inconceivable that he could overcome his own ‘sense of feebleness’ in the library and classroom…

Like many other historians, I have described the rebellion in print as a ‘gesture’ and I referred a little too casually to its ‘performative’ aspect; many have written about it as theatre, but MacNeill’s prompt to consider the actions of the rebels as morally assessable has made me question the dominance of this fashionable language of gesture and performance or the apparent theatricality of the rebellion. We need to be careful that our interpretative languages don’t obscure the degree to which men, predominantly, Irish and British, shouldered guns or manned artillery and shot at each other, often with the intention of killing. MacNeill, Chief of Staff of the Volunteers, would have been alert to how that nicely evasive phrase the ‘events of Easter Week’, pretty ubiquitous at the moment, can obscure the agency of the men and women on both sides who made themselves responsible for the fates of the several hundred civilians who died, martyred not for the cause but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wonderful as usual.

It’s important to understand this against the cataclysmic horror of the Great War. As the song has it “Twere better to die ‘neath an Irish sky, than at Suvla or Sud el Bar”. And while the notions of blood sacrifice were characteristic of the time, it’s worth pointing out that the conduct of the war on all sides was massively criminal by the standards of the 19th century, not just those of the 21st. In these circumstances, it’s scarcely surprising that the revolutions springing from the War were bloody and brutal.

>And the point of popular support is that you can make political changes violently too, if you prefer.

which might give people reasonable cause to doubt any promises you might be making to protect the rights of, e.g., the ethnic now-minority that remains resident on the island you wish to unify. The latent promise of violence ensures violence.

Well the latent threat of violence came from that minority initially, and their British allies. The free state largely did protect them, although the revolutionary period was to some degree sectarianised at the local level.

John Quiggin @ 36

“the conduct of the war on all sides was massively criminal by the standards of the 19th century..”

Sorry, but you obviously don’t know much about the actual conduct of war in the 19th century.

@ Brett Dunbar (31): It was from the Unionists that the Nationalists learned how amazingly effective the mere threat of violence could be. The Nationalists witnessed the rise of the Ulster Volunteers and the support the Unionist cause enjoyed in the British establishment and especially in the army. Ideally, the Unionists would like to kill off home rule altogether. They could not, but under the threat of civil war and mutiny in the army, the Liberal/IPP cabinet agreed to exempt the six counties than now make up Northern Ireland from home rule.

The third Home Rule Act came into being through a fortunate coincidence: the Liberals needed the Irish Party’s support to stay in power. It was obviously an unstable and transient configuration. On the other hand, the well-armed, disciplined, highly motivated Ulster Volunteers and their allies at all levels in Britain showed no sign of withering away. They were permanent. There could be no certainty that the Home Rule Act would not be repealed or further amended under pressure from these forces after the war.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ireland would have probably made greater progress as part of the Union – it would not have remained a clerical backwater for so long. But it was by no means obvious in 1916.

You all get that history does not have an arch? You can’t be ‘on the wrong side of history’. You cannot ‘rube history against the grain’. These phrases might be valid for pep-rallies, but no academic should be using them. They should not inform academic thought.

It’s ideological nonsense. History is not unidirectional. You can not ‘revert’. History is about chronology, and chronology alone.

I guess my position would be that anyone who didn’t think the European political order was illegitimate between1914-23 wasn’t really paying attention. Whether or not that excuses violence, I don’t know, but the context is important to understand it. I’m not sure i buy the idea that the young were necessarily solely naive or purists. A lot were idealists and moralists, certainly, pearse probably at the extreme end, but a lot were also pragmatists . And they were right, afaict, that the status quo had failed. Not only(or primarily) on the specific question of irish self governance, but on the carnage in Europe (and, although perhaps not to overstate its political relevance in this case, the moral abomination that was European colonialism )

History is about chronology, and chronology alone.

That seems a bit like saying “maths is about arithmetic, and arithmetic alone” or “geography is about naming capital cities”

As mentioned above the likelihood of Ireland getting meaningful Home Rule or any Home Rule is now accepted as extremely unlikely, at the time even Eoin MacNeill himself did not think it could happen (see Matt Kelly’s linked piece). Either violence or the threat of violence was going to be involved in gaining independence.

In fact Ireland got off remarkably lightly with the loss of life we had gaining independence considering the general pattern of imperial disengagements. As for
Ireland prospering in the UK there is no need to speculate on how much better we might have done – we had been part of it since 1800 and Dublin, despite being a wealthy city, had some of the worst slums in Europe around 1910.

So basically everything RF said.

The most dificult part of Maria’s essay for me is that it suggests that her views on the legitimacy of 1916 are unusual. Everyone from Ireland’s currently governing right wing party Fine Gael, though academia and especially the print and broadcast media are with her. Historical revisionism has been in the ascendant in Ireland for more than forty years (Matt Kelly’s thesis supervisor Roy Foster being the most well known).

So this mixture of liberal paternalism and nervous rejection of any hint of “armed struggle” is not a radical retelling, it’s the establishment position, has been for literally decades.

In fact the establishment discomfort at commemorating the 1916 rising it’s elicited a great deal of public ridicule

A good article on Irish historical revisionism can be found here:

https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/the-fight-for-irish-history/

Eyes burning.

In fact the establishment discomfort at commemorating the 1916 rising has elicited a great deal of public ridicule

engels@55

If you believe you know what any historical Jesus (if there was one at all,) wanted for his buck, you haven’t been thinking at all. Perhaps you’re thinking of some abstract actor “Christianity” instead of Christ, but I hope not, that would be worse than uninformed, but metaphysical, in the most pejorative sense of the word.

I can understand the desire of a CTer (at heart, if not formally,) to try to salvage the OP. But I don’t think it can be done. Not wise, not good (except as sentimental rhetoric.)

Footnote to engels @53: sometimes principled nonviolence can be a radical strategy

More often than not, actually. See Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action and How Nonviolent Struggle Works (http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/How-Nonviolent-Struggle-Works.pdf).

Wonderful post, Maria.

My personal anecdote from those times: my great-grandfather was beaten to death by General Percival’s men in front of his family on Christmas Eve in 1921. Not because he was a part of any grand political movement, but because he was removing a mouse from a trap outside his gate past curfew. Or at least that’s the story I’ve been told.

That’s not to say that the uprising was worth it or not. Perhaps the uprising created the climate of tensions that led to his death. Maybe a movement of civil disobedience would have been more effective. Either way, things were not easy or pleasant then.

The only argument that I would would wish to make is that we are in no position to judge the feelings and actions of those who lived through those times. And that we should be thankful we’re alive today instead.

Some people allege that home rule was unlikely, however the relationship of Britain with the dominions does tend to indicate that it is unlikely that power transfers would be reversed.

The Act had actually passed and attempting to either not bring it into force or attempting to abolish the Irish Parliament without its consent would run into the issue of that would provide a strong moral case for militant resistance.

The position I hold is that until the democratic and constitutional process had actually failed then the resort to violence was immoral.

This type of article has become a normal meme of neoliberal historical analysis. Direct violence by revolutionaries kills innocent people – bad, bad & evil. If only they would wait, good things will trickle down. Eventually. Maybe. That many lives, especially children’s, were lost through poverty and attendant illness is just the norm of life while people waited for rights to trickle down from above. That tens of thousands of Irish died (and many European children) in an utterly futile war so that the “good” could play global chess with countries and economies for personal benefit is a footnote. That returning soldiers knew first hand the futility of that “great” war and began to see things in a different way from those who would grant certain limited rights also played an important role in the 1916 rising is entirely written out of all histories.

However, some comments are also revealing. If only the Irish would have waited for some foreign power to grant them some rights, things would have been honkey dory. Oh, ta very much, we would have been so grateful.

This “trickle-down” meme still plays today in the Tory-run UK and is a major theme used by the major modern Irish political parties. We are told that we individuals must assume personal responsibility for whatever happens to us. If we not motivated to amass wealth, or worse, if we should fall into poverty, we will suffer defined social and economic consequences.

There is an assumption by the Good (economic winners via bank balances) that somehow the non-rich individuals haven’t already taken responsibility for their actions. No, we have to be told to do so, but the Good get to set the terms and conditions upon this responsibility is evaluated and measured. And we had better measure up because if we don’t then we can expect the terms and conditions to change for the worse.

It is at this level that the revisionist historians wish to rewrite history. The Irish 1916 rising was a definitive statement that some Irish women and men were not going to wait for scraps to fall from the Table of the Good. Whether for good or ill, they did not ask for permission. They did not wait to be told to take personal responsibility, they took it. They altered the course of Irish history. They were not asking for rights, they we taking back the rights of self determination.

But they, of course, did not change crooked timber of human nature. Whilst, the Great and Good could not stop the post 1916 idea that Irish people did not need to ask permission to govern themselves, they could at least try and maintain the common meme that our economic lives must be granted by others or by the mythos of markets.

The rebellion in 1916 may have achieved a modicum of self determination, but it was only a rebellion. The idea that democratic peoples need to accept or have right granted to them in any sphere of life is still thwarted. The legacy of 1916 Uprising is that it only achieved very limited results. The uprising is still on-going and will ever be so. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin understood this dynamic when setting the foundation of their particular politic. They were rebellious Republicans also. I wonder if we’ll be treated to how their actions lead to tens of thousands of deaths. How the US rebellion was one big mistake. Could they have not waited for future to fix all things?

Personally, I prefer voting and politics. Democracy. However, when we lose sight of the very reasons why people fight for rights, we allow those who would call themselves our betters to promote some very unsavoury and very undemocratic ideas and often use war as a useful took for their own selfish ends.

One more thing: on the executions after the Rising, which with hindsight were a complete mistake. But in the words of Patrick Pearse, “We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people, but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing.” His words, not General Maxwell’s.

I’ve read your piece today, Maria, with deep appreciation and edification. It so happened that 3 Quarks Daily (re)published, right beside a piece about the Rising, a review of Christopher Logue’s War Music, that great recreation of The Iliad for us now. The review ended with a quotation from the poem, an address appended to the image of a single spear planted in the sand during a moment of peace before Troy:

Moments like these absolve the needs dividing men.
Whatever caught and brought and kept them here
Is lost: and for a while they join a terrible equality,
Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:
And so insidious is this liberty
That those surviving it will bear
An even greater servitude to its root:
Believing they were whole, while they were brave;
That they were rich, because their loot was great;
That war was meaningful, because they lost their friends.

Thank you so much, Maria.

Peter T @43. Despite your smug and condescending tone, I’ve never learned an interesting or important fact from you or found anything of value in your arguments. It’s clear that the converse is true for you. So I’d prefer not to interact with you in future.

“You are reciting the myth that the bomb ended the war.”

I’m not competent to discuss the Easter Rising, though I appreciate Maria’s post.

The end of the Pacific war is however something I’ve read up on, and calling that a “myth” is a bit much. Whether Hirohito was genuinely shocked by the attacks, used them as an excuse to override the militarists in the cabinet, or a little of both, the A-bombings (which were blatant war crimes if there is any such thing as a war crime) certainly precipitated the Japanese surrender. One can speculate that Japan would have folded as quickly after the Soviets attacked, but that is indeed speculation.

John @ 73

It’s a side issue to Maria’s lovely post. But my response was not condescending but written in irritation at a facile remark. Which 19th century wars did you have in mind? The Franco-Prussian, where Paris was starved and villagers shot to deter franc-tireur activity? Any of the Balkan wars, where atrocity coupled with ethnic cleansing was commonplace? The Ashanti War with the destruction of Kumasi or the Boxer rebellion with the burning of the Summer Palace? Any of the innumerable wars of imperial policing or expansion? The Boer War with its concentration camps? And this without considering the very elastic nature of the laws of war. 19th century European wars were, on the whole, smaller but not therefore less vicious or easier on civilians.

The comparison isn’t exact. The dominions for example didn’t have direct representation at Westminster, while Ireland would have retained a reduced representation. The differences generally put Ireland in a stronger position.

At the time the Act seemed to be a more or less workable compromise and in the situation in 1916 I don’t think resorting to violence was justified. It heightened and legitimized unionist fears about nationalist intentions.

@80

“Victorious violent insurgencies often feel compelled to reestablish the monopoly on the use of force and therefore seek to purge any remaining elements of the state… ”

If they didn’t manage to establish a monopoly on the use of force then they wouldn’t have created a state.

We might all say that we’d prefer political movements to be non-violent and political regimes to be non-repressive. The research above, however, is devoid of context. In some situations it was practically inconceivable that non-violence would be successful and foreign intervention before or after regime change often made the establishment of a ‘peaceful’ government impossible.

In some situations the success of a non-violent movement was dependent on the use of violence or the threat of force on the previous regime. Many peaceful ‘revolutions’ and changes of regime have come about after defeat in war, while the collapse of the Soviet Bloc took place against a background of loss of confidence caused by the Soviet Union’s refusal to commit vast resources to the pursuit of the Cold War and the defence of its sphere of influence.

Ronan@78: I know a man from Ballycastle who told me (I have no more scholarly source to quote) that the Glens of Antrim are unusual in that a fair proportion of the people are indeed Catholics, but Scottish Catholics who came over in the 16th century or thereabouts and have little sympathy for Irish nationalism.
Further: that Ballycastle is one of the few towns in NI that have a Protestant majority but pre-recent Troubles elected a Catholic mayor; that early 19th-century sources describe the people of Ballycastle as speaking a mixture of English, Irish and Scots Gaelic, with remarkably bad grammar in all three; and that most of the local representatives of the Glens are independents, elected on the basis of promises to do their best locally and to ignore both Unionist and Nationalist parties, who care very little for the Glens.

@Peter T I irritate you, you irritate me, and our discussions have been unproductive. So, let’s leave it there.

There’s hundred things here to respond to, so here’s a question. Quite a lot of contributors to this discussion seem to be working on the assumption that Ireland should be a single independent state. Why do they think this?

Partition would buy off most of the Irish protestant opposition to home rule by excluding the six protestant majority counties from the area affected. While not in the act partition had been proposed in an amending act by the Asquith government.

The 1916 rising tended to stoke the anxieties of the protestants, making them less likely to agree to a home rule parliament that included them.

The thing is while dominions were far short of independence the transfer of powers to the local elected authorities tended not to get reversed. Similarly the Crown Dependencies were basically left to run themselves. Once home rule was actually in place it would be likely to be left to itself.

Stephen , thanks for the insight . Interesting

Ronan @90 I agree, but as you recognise it’s the assumption of unity I’m querying, that the island necessarily constitutes the legitimate democratic unit. Stephen @92 for sure, though Scottish divisions also suggest that historic territory shouldn’t be thought immutable either. The North Atlantic Archipelago is a complicated beast…

Matt Kelly@87

Given that 400 years of effort at Anglicization failed (Ulster plantation aside), the shared and distinct language and culture, the regular attempts at gaining independence (would you say on average every fifty years?) and the fact that once the rising occurred the vast majority of the population turned out not to identify with the UK at all I think that’s a rather odd question.

Bruce @94 I agree, we’re all entitled to have and defend positions. On this thread, there is a notable absence of openness to thinking about Ulster Unionism as a legitimate political identity whose adherents, particularly when territorially concentrated, might also have a right to self-determination. Are you saying I’m drawing on ‘bespoke facts’, which sounds a bit like you’re suggesting I’m making things up? I’m not sure what you’re getting at in your last paragraph. @95 Michael, it’s an entirely sincere question. I guess our differences probably have quite a lot to do with how we think about unionism rather than British rule, for which I am no apologist.

But why should there be a meaningful acknowledgement of the unionist position ? The unionist position is pretty much implicitly recognised in most discussions on the revolutionary period these days. The main post was explicitly laying out (afaict ) a moral case against political violence from seperatists, there were a number of posts questioning the economic performance of the new state without contextualising the alternatives , and then an implication above thst unionist grievance was somehow tied in to nationalist use of force (although causally , in this case, that’s backwards , and normatively unionists have commitments and obligations beyond how seperatists behaved)
I think the analytical problem is the other way around. That most discussions of Ireland ignore the rest of the union. That irish political violence is either assumed as pathological , irrational or illegitimate and that’s all there is to it .

There really is no point trying to re- litigate historical events like Easter 1916 or American Independence re 1776. It may be fun to run history backwards and say “what if” or try to find a grand theory about how people ought to act but it is mere day dreaming.

Mistrust and misunderstanding characterise real political actors everywhere. The future is unknown to the people acting in the historical situation. The actions of 1916 changed the future so assumptions made before it cannot be judged in hindsight. You could easily say American Independence was premature. If only those impatient Yankees had waited a few generations they would have avoided being run by Nixon or face a President trump to come. Slavery could have been abolished, civil war avoided, by a enlightened Imperial Parliament freeing the Slaves. Now the US would have a Parliamentary system, free health care and a PM like Justin Trudeau keen to advance feminism. Silly Americans.

The English Tory Party has got a surprising free ride on this thread! They are the ones who opposed Gladstone and resisted Home Rule for Ireland when it could have been speedily applied by all party agreement. They encouraged Unionist and English nationalism as an electoral ploy to hold power. They delayed so it was perfectly reasonable to conclude Home Rule would never be granted so an uprising was the only hope in a realistic time frame. It is not surprising that certain Irish activists had enough by 1916 of delay on delay and political game playing by English politicians only interested in office and Imperial spoils.

And off course from the socialist point of view you could find lots of bow legged urchins in London in 1900 or 1914 living in poverty in the heart of the British Empire. Which is what Clem Attlee found in Lime house when he got there. No shoes on their feet half starved in the Capital of the greatest Empire ever built by human greed. No use to them was it this Empire? Or to the Scottish slum dwellers in Glasgow. And then as now the Tory Party are not on the side of the victim but the oppressor.

Micheal Lunny: . . . once the rising occurred the vast majority of the population turned out not to identify with the UK at all

Just as telling in its way, the British mostly didn’t identify the UK citizens in Ireland as being British in common with themselves. Or, the English didn’t identify them as English. This mutual lack of identification was always a problem for British governance. It became particularly acute when the shooting started, as British troops committed atrocities as a result of being unwilling to distinguish or trust.

I think it was a bit of a rude shock when Westminster handed Ulster a Home Rule it never wanted, confirming in effect that they were as much an alien nation as their brethren to the south. Edward Carson their leader thru the travail apologized for the result, and blamed the Tories for leading him astray, . . . and then moved to Kent.

bruce wilder @101. very good points. But I would not call Carson formidable. I would call him a nasty piece of reactionary work helping to bring down Oscar Wilde. For political and Career reasons. Not a nice way to treat a fellow graduate of your Alma mater. They still have his type in Ulster. Gay marriage is I suppose a new reason for Irish Unity, time for the south to bring modernity to the backwarter of the north.

Matt@96

I can understand arguing the democratic legitimacy of a separate state for Northern Unionists in 1921 (aside from the small matter of the UVF making it a necessity) but we have the benefit of hindsight and the fifty years between partition and the closing of Stormont showed that Unionism’s sectarian instincts were too strong for that state to maintain legitimacy.

Northern Ireland is a historical mess we will be a long time cleaning up.

Peter T @107. Well if you are Roman and Emperor you are the beneficiary of the Punic war and genocide. He presumably failed to pull down the statues in Rome to the past Emperors or expunge the republican politicians and generals from Roman history. Erecting a statue to Hannibal does not bring him back or his nation.

History is what does not matter to us now. It is what we are forced to learn in School and bores us like Trigonometry. When it is happening it is real and a different matter completely. When the war is over we can say how bad it was and peace is much better. But until then it is bombs over Coventry or Dresden.

In fact it is, you bomb Coventry, so mate, we are burning Germany down round your ears. To show you how it is done.

Making sure the future is better than the past is the best memorial and apology for history. “Let us face the future” as the Labour Manifesto of 1945 put it so well.

I’m just going to say that I really like this essay and the discussion. Like like it. Shut down the internets, it wins, like it.

I would also say that sometimes, when discussing things like the righteousness of a revolution, or attempt at revolution, it is better to discuss things farther from home. Usually makes for more nuance and less blaming (though it still happens)

Keith

The analogy was more about personal trajectory (member of previous enemy nation makes good). I was never bored with history in school (or since), but I’m more interested in figuring out how these people thought than in judging them. Human collectivities are made from the mis-remembered (or just made up) past. The real past, insofar as we can know it, is a kind of corrective. But the stories in their heads were real too. Even the stories about a better future are bricolages cobbled together from what we imagine were the better bits of the past.

Peter T @113. I am not sure H G Wells would agree about our dreams of the future being mere remnants of the past. Rather Modernism involves a belief in future achievements being better based for example on scientific discovery. We have means to improve human life the Romans or people in the Middle ages did not have. As for understanding historic characters that always involves speculation to some degree as sources are limited and political figures may be deceptive about their true motivations. Projecting our ideas back to earlier times is a mistake and I agree with you. But this kind of event, as Easter 1916, or other events from history always elicit counter-factual speculation and authors taking sides ex post for one group or another. As for the desirability of revolutions or wars or such like Aristotle merely says such things happen and we need to accept that and not gripe about it. In a given situation given people believe say starting a world war is a good idea e.g. 1914. And off we go. I am sceptical History can tell us what to do in a similar situation today. Vietnam and the Somme did not stop Blair supporting the Iraq imbroglio. Indeed he churned out the words of mass deception (WMD) to strt it off with a big dose of deceit and arrogance.

@ Bruce Wilder (110): “I think it was a bit of a rude shock when Westminster handed Ulster a Home Rule it never wanted, confirming in effect that they were as much an alien nation as their brethren to the south.”

Rather, the ease with which the North got their Home Rule spelled out their status as a brotherly nation – a nation of Protestant settlers, naturally entitled to self-government according to the Tory worldview. Carson wanted the Union to be preserved in full, and failed; Craig went for the second-best option, Home Rule for the six counties, and succeeded. The abysmal difference that existed in the Tory mind between the case of majority-Protestant dominions and that of Ireland is evident in this 1913 letter to The Spectator from Alexander Leeper, the principal of Trinity College Melbourne, the son of a Dublin-based Anglican clergyman, and a diehard Unionist.

The 1914 act had passed and absent a deliberate action on the part of Westminster would come into force. I do not believe the mere suspicion that the act would not be brought into force was sufficient grounds to justify that level of violence. Which also seems to have been the view of the populace at the time.

The strength of Unionist opposition to Home Rule had become apparent rather late, so a second act partitioning off the six majority protestant counties was introduced. It had become clear that the unionists were not going to accept a home rule proposal that placed them in a region politically dominated by Catholics. They did use the threat of violence as a political tool, as did the nationalists. However until 1916 neither had resorted to actually using large scale violence.

Brett Dunbar @ 119: The 1914 act had passed and absent a deliberate action on the part of Westminster would come into force.

No. Your insistence on this counterfactual has become tiresome.
Home Rule would require detailed implementation. It wasn’t going to go off like an automatic timer. Home Rule had been suspended precisely because implementation against violent opposition would be difficult, and the government could not spare the attention and necessary force in wartime. It was clear to all contemporaries that there would be deliberate action at Westminster to modify Home Rule as the Liberals had back down in the face of Ulster Unionist intimidation and the Party complexion of Parliament was changing from the peculiar balance that had enabled the Irish Party to win their point. Partition and a large reduction in representation for Ireland in London were already in the works.

The only party to introduce “large-scale violence” during the Easter Rising was the British government. The rebels were a small force engaged largely in theatrics, as the OP points out. It was the British response that scaled-up violence from assault, trespass and murder to war. You can argue that the Easter Rising was intended to provoke such a response, but the responders have moral responsibilities of their own.

“Home Rule had been suspended precisely because implementation against violent opposition would be difficult, and the government could not spare the attention and necessary force in wartime.”

Not to mention that there was considerable political sympathy for that opposition. “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right”, &tc.

Worth bearing in mind fergus Campbell’s latest research on “the Irish establishment” aswell , which shows that the “greening” of the Irish establishment (ie Catholics being integrated into the elite)wasn’t nearly as extensive as has been claimed, and that the top was still disproportionately Protestant , and in some ways colonial (his conclusion being that ethnic discrimination and inequality was much more prevalent in the period and fed justifiable grievances among the upwardly mobile Catholic classes, even as late as 1914 )

Classes under the Christian Brothers in Oatlands, Stillorgan, in the 1960s included first-person stories in history class from Brothers who had been or knew participants in the 1921-23 internecine struggle, aka the Irish civil war. The bombing of the Four Courts by one side or the other was the main topic for one brother. It was great stuff in a way, but very one sided (Fianna Fail when we learned what was what). 1916 was always a little beyond us, Kilmainham and Dev were only hear say.

Living through the later “troubles” and seeing what the consequent militarism – the Bullet not the ballot- really meant, e.g. Omagh, and the death of how many other “innocents”; one I remember vividly is a 19 year old conscript to HM Army snipered to death in Glen of the Downs in the middle of the madness, convinced me of the futility of the 1916 slogans.

As an Irish Citizen, I do not rejoice in the commemoration of the birth of the terrible beauty.

Below is a link to Gene Kerrigan’s Irish Independent Newspaper article about the rising; giving historical depth, reasons for it occurrence and why certain groups and individuals went ahead with it against all odds.

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/gene-kerrigan/the-heroes-hidden-in-the-archives-34575105.html

Kerrigan would have been thought of as a mainstream centrist, slightly liberal/left, journalist pre-Tiger/Ireland Inc. – i.e. about 20 years ago in Ireland.

Which brings to mind 2 convergent thoughts about this entire article. Maria is perfectly entitled to view her ancestor’s role in Irish history in whatever light she so chooses.

However, I wonder how much of the current ideology of neo-liberalism, added with the non-stop terrorist narrative served up almost daily in the MSM, influences current perceptions. Nothing worse then projecting today’s issues onto historical events where the dynamic was necessarily different and mostly forgotten.

Second, a main premise of this article is basically: ‘think of the innocent children’. Somehow Irish people occupying Irish property in an Irish city with small arms is somehow illegitimate – leading to unnecessary death of the innocents. A mixed bag of UK soldiers, hurriedly brought from the “mainland” to address the rebellion and who used a gunboat and artillery which killed far more innocents than the rebels, isn’t much of a consideration. Legitimate versus illegitimate. Who gets to decide? Everyone? No one?

“There’s something atavistic about the culture of the Orange Order, which cannot easily be separated from Ulster Unionism, a more than sneaking desire to dominate and intimidate the Catholics as a despised and less privileged underclass.”

@ 110: Not to mention the whole, well, raving religious bigot aspect. I remember some years ago that there was some fuss when Peter Robinson allowed as how yes, he had entered a Catholic church, but not for a service, no sir, although he had lots of Roman Catholic friends, etc., and some of his ministerial colleagues had never gone so far as to enter such a disreputable establishment, presumably lest they get Papist cooties, or something. Made for very strange reading.

@11: Collins also expressed impatience with the making of fine speeches. He was a disciple of Clarke and especially MacDiarmada, not Pearse.

I think that many a man with a “poet’s soul” has confronted war bravely, and object respectfully to the apparent bit of snark intended, as if Pearse was too soft a creature for the real thing. Sorry if I am misreading that part of the OP.

No, indeed, it’s not strange for mid-century Ireland. It did ring an odd note for me in 2011, I think it was, but it could be me. I have the impression that there’s a peculiar acidity to the Orange brand of bias, but that, too, could be me.

I recall that some Catholic supporters of Parnell in his time of trial defended him by saying that yes, he was an adulterer now wedded to a divorced woman and his partner in sin, but as a Protestant he could hardly be expected to know any better and was thus excused. Always liked that.

133: ‘as a Protestant he could hardly be expected to know any better and was thus excused’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invincible_ignorance_(Catholic_theology)

Yes and Peter Robinson isn’t a member of the Orange Order or any loyal order so your specification is not relevant to this case. Given the historical context of the DUP, his willingness to attend a Catholic service as a mark of respect for Catholic friends was a significant step – nobody is obliged to attend a service they regard as heretical or blasphemous, although obviously for the secularised diaspora outside Ireland this will all seem very quaint. If you can’t give credit to somebody who is genuinely making an effort there is no way out of this maelstrom for any of us.

Interesting and thought provoking essay. Thank you for this. One thing I did not agree with is your view that radicalism is something that pertains to youthful inexperience, and that it usually leads to violence. This is just not true, we have seen much radicalism in ireland over the last few years (the water protests for example) that were by and large very peaceful. On the other hand, we only have to look around the world to see that conservative state sponsored violence is rampant. I acknowledge that there are zealots, but they exist all across the political spectrum

This is true, but I wonder if we read the history backwards too often and see everything through the confessional divisions. Which isn’t to say they weren’t/aren’t Obviously important , but there were a number of cleavages in Irish society, and questions of “identity” were often quite fluid and contested. Even within the diaspora, where at times you had more Irish born and their children and grand children living in major urban areas in America, uk or Australia , why weren’t the cultural institutions and identities developed there as legitimate as those developed on the island itself ? And how did they affect identities and institutions in the island ? That’s my impression anyway. A lot of the talk that goes on these days about the “new Ireland” with its transformed identities and multicultural aspects strikes me as, perhaps, overwrought. That the transformations weren’t as unique as we like to claim. (Having said that I did come of age in the 90s,so that could be a creation of my imagination)

There are two cathedrals in Dublin, Christchurch and St. Patricks. Both are Church of Ireland.

To this day, there is no Catholic cathedral, just a Pro-Cathedral, as the RC church still regards Christchurch as the “real” cathedral.

Maria thank you for sharing your personal perspective on the morally complexities of the Irish War for Independence. Your reflections are an antidote to most Americans’ naïve faith that history is a morality tale in which the good and wise (us!) emerge victorious (and wealthy).
The Irish have learned—perhaps too well—that history is far too often more tragic than redemptive.
The guerrilla war following 1916 resulted in a partial fulfillment of Eoin MacNeill’s dream of an independent Ireland. However he made the prudential judgment that despite the defects in treaty, he would become a Minister in the Provisional Government. In 1922, however, a large number of his fellow citizens rejected the “compromised “Treaty” and a bloody civil war ensued
The divisions of the Civil War continue to echo in Irish life and politics. Many families were bitterly divided including the McNeill family. One of Eoin’s sons followed his father’s lead and joined army of the Free State; a second son, Brian, joined the “anti-treaty” forces and was killed by Free State soldiers in Sligo.
The events of Easter 1916 continue to be interpreted through the lens of 1922. “Only if” –the two most overused words in Irish historical writing—McNeill had succeeded in derailing “the uprising” then the Civil War have been avoided.
But it is not possible to erase the reality of tragedy in history by counter-narratives and hindsight’s wistful wisdom.