Other Easter Rising books are about what happened. Was it for This? is about what it means

The opening sentence of The Irish Times editorial on the day after the Easter Rising is a master of understatement. “This newspaper has never been published in stranger circumstances than those which obtain today. An attempt has been made to overthrow the constitutional government of Ireland.”

The Irish Times was not a disinterested observer in the Rising. Its offices in Lower Abbey Street were in the firing line and were badly damaged during Easter Week. Its chairman Sir John Arnott’s flagship Arnotts store was also perilously close to the GPO.

The editorial counselled: “At this critical moment our language must be moderate, unsensational and free from any tendency to alarm.” The rebellion would have only one end – defeat for the rebels. “The loyal public will await it calmly and confidently”.

A week later the editorial had an altogether less measured tone. The Rising had been a “criminal adventure”, the ruined Liberty Hall “a sinister memory”, Sir Roger Casement was “an Irish renegade”.

Contrary to what has often been suggested since, The Irish Times never explicitly called for the executions of the leaders of the Rising, but neither did it condemn them. In August 1916, the newspaper suggested the hanged Sir Roger Casement deserved his fate.

Was it for this? – Reflections on the Easter Rising begins and ends with Irish Times editorials, the first from Easter Tuesday, 1916, the last from January 1st, 2016, but it is much more than a collection of editorials.

It consists of editorials, letters and columns from those who have written about the Rising in either the newspaper over the last 100 years or in 1916: The Easter Rising. That book, which included an article written in 1916 by Vladimir Lenin about the Rising, arose out of a supplement in The Irish Times to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966.

Among the contributors featured in Was it for this? are two former taoisigh, John Bruton and Garret FitzGerald, three of the greatest writers post-independence Ireland has produced, Séan O’Casey, Seán Ó Faoláin and John McGahern, and some of the best-known Irish commentators and historians of the past 50 years. These include Conor Cruise O’Brien, Declan Kiberd, Michael Laffan, Ronan Fanning, Ruth Dudley Edwards, John A Murphy, Diarmaid Ferriter and John Horne.

It would be difficult to assemble such an array of heavyweight commentary if one were to try and do it from various sources. Indeed, one could argue that such a book would not be possible except through the archives of The Irish Times, which has been a forum for all shades of Irish opinion over the last century.

Ireland 2016, the State commemoration agency, has recognised the significance of this book to the debate about the Rising by being our partners in its publication.

Was it for this? spans the spectrum of opinion, from the nationalist view of the Rising as espoused by Gerry Adams, Tim Pat Coogan and James Connolly Heron to that of those, most notably, Kevin Myers and Ruth Dudley Edwards, who have long held that it brought more harm than good. Dudley Edwards and the Cambridge historian Brendan Bradshaw had a particularly bitter spat in 1991 over the legacy of the Rising. That exchange is reproduced in this book.

Not even the taoisigh featured can agree on the legacy of the Rising. John Bruton has always maintained that the Easter Rising was unnecessary and that independence could have been achieved without resorting to violence. Garret FitzGerald, whose parents Desmond and Mabel were both in the GPO, has a counterargument, which he articulated in 2006 for the 90th anniversary of the Rising.

In what is one of the most challenging articles in the book, FitzGerald confronts head-on the revisionist school of thought led by Bruton, which insists there was an alternative peaceful path to Irish independence.

Such a belief, FitzGerald wrote, was “alternative history gone mad”. He explained: “It does not follow that Home Rule would have led peacefully onwards to Irish independence.”

He advances two reasons for this. Both are worth quoting in full.

“There is little reason to believe that Britain would have permitted Ireland to secure independence peacefully at least until many decades after the second World War.

“Secondly, long before that point could have been reached, the growth of the welfare state within a United Kingdom of which Ireland remained a part would have involved a scale of financial transfers from Britain to Ireland that would have made the whole of our island even more financially dependent upon Britain than Northern Ireland is today.

“By the time that Britain might finally have been prepared peacefully to concede independence to our part of Ireland, the financial cost of such a separation would have been so great for our people – probably entailing a drop of 25 per cent or more in living standards – that it is highly unlikely that the Irish people would have been prepared to accept such a sudden and huge drop in their standard of living.

“The truth is that we got out from under British rule just in time – at a moment when the cost of the break was still bearable, involving as it did only a small reduction in public service salaries and in the very limited social welfare provisions of that period.”

It is clear from a lengthy first-hand account of the Rising by Garret FitzGerald’s father Desmond that the rebels themselves were confused as to what kind of society they envisaged.

FitzGerald’s account was first published in The Irish Times in 1966, almost 20 years after his death. It contains some fascinating vignettes from inside the GPO. He depicts Patrick Pearse as a forlorn figure observing the looting and realising that the responsibility for inevitable defeat would rest primarily with him.

“I could not look on Pearse’s face without being moved. Its natural gravity now conveyed a sense of great tragedy. There was no doubt in my mind that when he looked round at the men and girls there, he was convinced that they must all perish in the Rising to which he had brought them.”

Desmond FitzGerald’s account created a sensation at the time as he alleged that the rebel leaders were thinking of installing a German prince on the throne of an independent Ireland. They even had Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sickly son Joachim in mind.

A German prince, they reasoned, would bind an independent Ireland to Germany and prevent a re-conquest of the country by the British. FitzGerald explained: “Such a ruler would necessarily favour the Irish language for it would be impossible to make the country German-speaking, while it would be against his own wishes to foster English.”

It is clear from the response by Ernest Blythe a few weeks later in The Irish Times that there was a lot of incredulity around at the notion that the rebels planned to replace one monarchy with another.

Blythe did not participate directly in the Rising but was privy to its planning and confirmed that the German prince proposal was indeed all true. He revealed that the true motives of the rebel could be surmised in two words, “Brits Out”.

On April 15th, 1966 he wrote: “It is necessary to remember that for a long time, the term republic had been for most people in this country simply a code word for complete independence and separation from Britain and scarcely excluded the idea of a democratically accepted constitutional monarch.”

In recent decades, debates about the Easter Rising have been as much about the state of contemporary Ireland as they are about the past. The dominant emotion in so many of the articles republished in this book is disappointment.

Whatever society the rebels had envisaged – and one wonders if they even knew themselves – it had not come to pass. The Rising and its legacy has always stood for an idealised Ireland which has never matched the reality.

The joylessness of post-independence Ireland was referenced in an article written for The Irish Times by Seán O’Casey, defending his play, The Plough and the Stars, which was the subject of riots when it opened at the Abbey Theatre in 1926.

“They [protesters] objected to volunteers and men of the Irish Citizen Army visiting a public-house. Do they want us to believe that all these men were sworn teetotallers? Are we to know the fighters of Easter Week as ‘the army of the Unco Guid?’ [The Unco Guid were a strict religious sect].”

That disappointment was also articulated fiercely by one Irish Times letter writer, known only as Needled, in 1956. Needled noted that on Easter Sunday, 1956, while the 40th anniversary of the Rising was commemorated, copies of the Observer newspaper were confiscated at Dublin Port because they contained information about contraceptives – banned in Ireland at the time.

Needled sneered at those who railed against the division of Ireland while making the southern State as inimical as possible to northern Unionists.

“How long will anti-partitionists continue to live in a dream world? Is this what the men of Easter Week died for? I must withhold my name for the usual, obvious reasons. For the present, I must live and work here.”

In 1966 Seán Ó Faoláin, an old republican, was equally dismayed by the State he and others had fought for. “We have set up a society of urbanised peasants whose whole mentality, whose image of life is, like that antiquated society, based on privilege. Instead of empire we invoke the nation.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien enumerated the many ways in which the Irish State of 1966 had fallen short of the ideals of Pearse, most notably the partition of Ireland and the failure of the bilingual programme. The Irish State was “only 75 per cent free and 0.6 per cent Gaelic”. In 1991, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, John McGahern lamented the nexus of church and state which had led to a stifling mediocrity. He concluded: “I think we can best honour 1916 by restoring those rights and freedoms that were whittled away from the nation as a whole in favour of the dominant religion.”

In reality the Easter Rising has always been and always will be seen through the prism of contemporary concerns. In 2006, at the height of the Celtic Tiger when Ireland’s future prosperity seemed unassailable and Irish optimism was at its zenith, the newspaper published this editorial.

“The flourishing state of our economy was one reason why people were happy to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising and to feel grateful towards those seen as having, at a high price to themselves, taken a decisive step towards independence.”

The success of the Celtic Tiger economy was proof, the paper opined, that Irish people were confident that some day independence would be worth it “as has now happened far beyond any previous reasonable expectation”.

Four years later in November 2010, though, the chimera of the Celtic Tiger had disappeared, resulting in the State surrendering the same sovereignty that the leaders of the Easter Rising had given their lives for.

In the immediate aftermath of the bailout, The Irish Times published a headline invoking the WB Yeats poem, September 1913, first published in this newspaper as Romance in Ireland. The book takes its name from the headline: “Was it for this?”

“It may seem strange to some that The Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”

The Easter Rising is the most exhaustively covered event in Irish history. The National Library of Ireland lists 1,022 titles about the Rising, dozens of which have been published in the past year. Quantity has been matched by quality. I reviewed several of them earlier this year. They were all well-written, well-produced books.

In such circumstances, any publisher would be right to ask themselves the simple question: does the world need another book on the Easter Rising?

But Was it for This? differs from all the other titles. They are about what happened. The book I have edited is about what the Rising means. It is clear that it means something different to everyone and every generation sees it differently.

The last article in the book is The Irish Times editorial from New Year’s Day, 2016. It expresses a hope that in the centenary year of the Easter Rising that Ireland, as a nation, would have the maturity to now put the events of Easter Week 1916 in their proper context, take pride in the achievements of nationhood yet resolve itself in the name of the Republic to put right those thing that are wrong.

It is clear from the commemorations that Irish people are proud of their country, the achievements of Irish independence and the men and women who strove to bring it about.

That is the way it should be, but the Easter Rising will be contentious history forever. It would be a lot less interesting as a historical event if it were not so. We hope that this book will facilitate debate and be an entertaining read for all concerned. It has been 100 years in the making.

[ irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks ]

Was it for this? will be reviewed in The Irish Times tomorrow by John Horgan