Review: Was it for this? Reflections on the Easter Rising and what it means to us now

Was it for this? Reflections on the Easter Rising and what it means to us now

Author: Edited by Ronan McGreevy

ISBN-13: 9780907011521

Publisher: Irish Times Books

Guideline Price: €14.99

The number of books being published about 1916 threatens to outstrip the number of Irish Volunteers who, in the days before adequate historical evidence was widely available, claimed to have been in the GPO in Easter Week. Although life and limb are not equally at stake, some sort of courage is plainly required.

Like all good anthologies, Ronan McGreevy’s wide-ranging compilation eschews an index: to find out if you’re mentioned in it you have to read it. But it does have a list of contributors, and a table of contents, which is of structural interest in itself in that not all of the 10 sections are directly related to the 10 decades since 1916.

There are no entries for 1936 or 1946 or 1986. A quick look through The Irish Times's online archive reveals, indeed, that in the first two of these years, at any rate, the ceremonies were perfunctory, to put it mildly. In the 1930s and 1940s, of course, militant republicanism would have been at the forefront of many people's minds, particularly Éamon de Valera's. But there are substantial sections dealing with the 65th and 75th anniversaries, in 1981 and 1991, indicating that our appetite for commemoration has been progressively growing towards its present, apparently insatiable level.

Unexpected pleasures More than a quarter of the book is devoted to the decade beginning in 1916. This seems overgenerous, given that many aspects of the 1916 coverage have been adequately rereported comparatively recently, but even here there are unexpected pleasures, such as Lenin’s commentary on 1916.

Explanatory notes, which might have been useful, are few and far between. Readers may not be convinced, given The Irish Times's then visceral dislike of the Irish Parliamentary Party, by the editor's suggested reason for the omission of the most poignant excerpts from the post-Rising House of Commons debate, at which John Redmond praised the "bravery and skill" of the insurgents and described Gen Sir John Maxwell executions of the leaders of the rebellion as "letting loose a river of blood". Could "deadlines pressures" alone have been responsible for such political omissions?

It is also tempting to wonder whether the signatory of one unannotated letter to the newspaper, from AM Sullivan of “Altona, Dublin”, might, surprisingly, have been the barrister and staunch advocate of the Irish Parliamentary Party Sgt AM Sullivan, who, despite his opposition to the Rising, defended Sir Roger Casement later that year, at his treason trial the Old Bailey.

Another sixth of the book is devoted to important, thoughtful writing published by the newspaper – and soon afterwards in book form – to mark the 50th anniversary, in 1966. Although it is unfair for anthologists to criticise the work of other anthologists – nobody can have read everything, and every choice is in the end personal – I would have welcomed in this section, in particular, the republication of Terence McCaughey’s heartfelt critique of the quietism of the minority Protestant tradition in the 50 years after 1916.

Robin Dudley Edwards’s 1966 essay, which, virtually uniquely in this anthology, interrogates social class aspects of the Rising, and the role of the public service, is one of the pieces that wear particularly well. He raises, without quite answering, the vexed question of whether the 1916-21 period resulted in a bourgeois revolution, inasmuch as “there was no real method of excluding” from subsequent Irish administrative systems “those who supported the Redmondite party before 1916”.

The jury – and the electorate – is still out on that one. And, although it is not the anthologist’s fault, there is little about social class elsewhere in this collection, no doubt because class issues have featured only marginally in mainstream journalism over the past century.

The later sections of the book, amounting to about half of the total, not only show revisionism red in tooth and claw (and with luck rescue the term itself from the lexicon of abuse) but also demonstrate the real value of continuing public debate about the past and what it means for the present and the future.

Paul Bew’s assertion, in a 2006 riposte to Mary McAleese, is a case in point. His view that “the Irish State has returned today to where Redmond was in 1916; a belief in the principle of consent and a desire for Anglo-Irish harmony” is in some respects debatable, but, in the light of more recent controversies and commemorations, hardly irrelevant. Redmond’s rescue from the trash can of history is certainly overdue, but recycling is more appropriate than canonisation.

Here one can also find wonderful, shining slivers of thought and language that have been obscured for too long by the inevitably ephemeral nature of the medium in which they first appeared. John McGahern’s “From a Glorious Dream to Wink and Nod”, from 1991, is a powerful act of meditation and reclamation, based on experience, and presented in that writer’s deceptively effortless style, at once intimate and profound. It also illuminates the important truth that where journalism incorporates reportage as well as rhetoric, its usefulness and relevance for future generations are greatly enhanced.

Eamonn McCann’s factually muscular, acerbic exposition of the role of the Catholic Church in 1916-21, from 2015, is another 24-carat example of this. It is beyond argument that the Rising contravened every tenet of the “just war” theory propounded by Catholic thinkers for aeons, and certainly in 1916. But it is also incontrovertible that such religious theorists were generally to be found, in their serried ranks, finding theological reasons to defend the status quo of any and every political and social power structure of which they were part, or – sniffing the way the wind was blowing – which they aspired to join or control.

It was not until the 1960s, indeed, that the unholy Constantinian alliance between Catholicism and Irish politics, forged in 1918, began to weaken.

This anthology is in effect (and for obvious reasons) quite like The Irish Times itself: excellently written, usefully provocative, frequently illuminating, occasionally self-important and orotund but also, even in this digital age, a vital part of our cultural furniture.

Above all it underlines one of the most vital, and most frequently forgotten, functions of any self-respecting modern medium of communication. This is, to quote the late Tony Judt, to disturb “the easy peace of received opinion”.

John Horgan is emeritus professor of journalism at Dublin City University and a former Irish Times journalist

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