1916 and Me: The citizens’ accounts

I hear the anguish of those who are so easy to ignore

I feel free but not blessed. To feel blessed would imply that fate has guided me here. I have not been guided. I have been placed. Propelled into an already established State, I have bypassed the fracas that my elders endured. In this time, I know only of the tears that I cry for myself and not my whole nation.

I am conscious of those who are not sheltered, and I hear the anguish of those who are so easy to ignore, but I am not there. I am here. I am privileged. I am preserved.

Not one scuff on my shoe holds a story. Not one frayed thread on my trousers is from true hardship. My morning coat is worn to greet people who no longer wish to be greeted.

The people in this time need only fight for themselves – and, sadly, they do just that. We stroll nonchalantly past those in need. We place ourselves in positions that best lend themselves to our self-preservation.

In this time we have the ability to fight for others without ever having to put ourselves at risk and without ever having to seek out ammunition. To protect our nation we no longer need to go to war.

Why, then, as the darkness leaches the warmth from the window I stand by, do I worry only about what is inside rather than what is not?

With constant encouragement, small breakthroughs have been made. Days of national pride have existed. But once these days have passed we go back to thinking of only ourselves. The Ireland of 1916 was not a perfect one, but nor is the Ireland that exists almost 100 years later.

As we watch our young leave, and our elders pass on in conditions that no human deserves, why do we watch from the sidelines? In an age when gunpowder is no longer needed to fight back, why do we remain so silent?
Christina Prendergast
Finland

Please, no more bloodshed

My father was born on April 3rd, 1916, and I was born, within sight of Kilmainham Gaol, on May 4th, 1949. What happened between those dates was always something of an unspoken, mysterious, uneasy subject in our family. “ Don’t look back” was a favourite saying of my mother when the question of Irish history was raised.

I delivered daily papers around Kilmainham and Inchicore as a schoolboy. I remember the large black doors of Kilmainham Gaol, where the brave leaders of the 1916 rebellion were brutally shot in the Stonebreakers’ Yard.

Reflecting today, and having four grown-up children and two grandchildren, I marvel at the courage of the Irish Volunteers, the hopelessness of their military situation and the foolishness of the British government in adding murder to mayhem by executing the leaders of the Rising.

As a free Irish citizen today I appreciate the huge sacrifice made by the Irish Volunteers in 1916 to strike out for Irish freedom.

However, I have some grave misgivings about the unintended consequences of a group of unelected idealists taking up arms in pursuit of their objectives. What freedom was achieved for the 254 civilians slain in Easter Week? In all, 485 people were killed in the Easter Rising. Was their sacrifice worth it? I don’t feel it was.

I suggest that if our great heroes, such as Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Mac Diarmada, Plunkett, Ceannt, MacDonagh and de Valera had used their obvious talent and intellectual abilities, a free united Ireland could have been achieved, avoiding the bloodshed of the Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed.

At the age of 17 I stood on O’Connell Street in Dublin on Easter Sunday 1966 and watched in awe as the military parade passed the GPO for the 50th-anniversary commemorations, so proud to be a free Irishman and blissfully unaware that many of my fellow Irish citizens were anything but free. No freedom for the girls in the Magdalene laundries or the boys in the industrial schools or our gay and lesbian neighbours. No real freedom for the poor, the homeless or the marginalised

I was working in 34 Talbot Street on Friday May 17th, 1974, when a series of car bombs exploded in Dublin and Monaghan. The attack killed 35 civilians and injured almost 300.

After the explosion I walked towards the front of Guineys drapery store on Talbot Street and witnessed the carnage and misery caused by the cowardly attack.

So when I reflect on the events of 1916 I cannot help but think it set off a chain that shackled us to the present day, where, even now, Irish men and woman are being lured into dissident republican organisations, unelected, to take up arms against their fellow Irish citizens.

Please, no more bloodshed, not in my name. It is far better to live in peace than to rest in peace.
Brendan Wright
Lucan, Co Dublin

Would it not have been better to buy stamps?

Commemorations are all about those doing the remembering rather than about the event being remembered. I was eight years old in 1966, when the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising was commemorated. I clearly remember the big military parade on O’Connell Street and the ox-blood boots of the Army officers.

I also remember the great stories our teacher told of our majestic heroes who fought bravely against the Saxon foe. It was so much simpler when it was “us versus them”. We had re-enactments in the school yard at playtime.

Then, in August 1969, the Apprentice Boys marched in Derry, and our parents were afraid the Troubles would come down here. They were even more afraid that we might be drawn into the armed struggle by being attracted by another round of “them versus us”.

This time it wasn’t history; it was very present, up there, and defenceless Catholics standing alone in the vicious face of perfidious Albion. In 1976, the year I did my Leaving Certificate, there was not one mention of 1916. No parades, no salutes at the GPO.

I qualified as a history teacher in 1982 and remember teaching the 1916 Rising. I was so determined to teach my young charges to be objective, to interrogate the sources, to rely on impartiality rather than emotion. I was met with indifference.

I now find myself as principal of Coláiste Éanna in Rathfarnham, a school very close to, and named after, the school that Patrick Pearse set up in 1908.

We welcome 37 students who are citizens of the Republic but whose families come from many different parts of the world. Our ethos embraces the aspirations of the 1916 Rising: we cherish all our students and their families equally and with respect and tolerance. Our boys are very proud of, and comfortable with, their Irishness. They do not feel the sense of inferiority that previous generations felt.

So what does 1916 mean to me? I am very proud to be Irish and proud of the Easter martyrs and the triumph of their failure.

I do wonder, though, what they died for. Six of the northern counties of our country do not belong; the national language is dying from indifference and Anglophilia; the M50, Luas, HSE and Shannon floods suggest that, as a nation, we cannot plan to save our lives. Would it not have been better for them to buy stamps and to let nationalism take its course?
Brendan McCauley
Terenure, Dublin

Something had lain dormant inside us

Every revolution or liberation has its defining moment, when all changes, changes utterly. No matter how many warning tremors, or later years of prolonged revolutionary change, there is a defining, Bastille moment of revolution. (Never mind that the citizens of Paris liberated only seven prisoners that day, one of them Irish. It was the defining moment when a people found their sovereign minds.)

So it was when, on April 24th, 1916, our sovereign republic was proclaimed, on the main street of our capital, then under Nelson’s nose, today under our Sword of Light. The Irish Republic became a reality, a “thing”.

Irish law calculates State public service from the first meeting of our sovereign government the previous day, crediting service to the Republic on April 23rd, 1916, for pension contributions. It is a symbolic statement. Each of us became a sovereign citizen of a new republic that day, each the equal of a monarch, subjects no more.

I cannot recall ever thinking other than as a sovereign republican citizen, even as a child. I read about 1916 at the age of seven. It made a deep impression on me. Pearse proclaimed our august destiny, written on a timeless page.

Something had lain dormant inside us and needed to be awoken. It had woken up a long time ago in the heart of Tom Clarke, truly our first president; of Pearse, our first taoiseach; and Connolly, a very equal tánaiste in our first government – a coalition of republican Gaels and socialist citizens. They, and their comrades, woke us up as a nation.

Or, rather, that became our birthright. The truth is that not all of us have yet fully recovered our sovereign minds. Some of our fellow citizens unfortunately remain in their slumber.

Sovereignty and republicanism are a mindset. They are real power in your hands, if only you exercise it. They are a mark on a ballot paper, or a question asked, a proposal made, a whistle blown, a service rendered, a request for a vote, or simply speaking up. Nothing more is necessary. Never doubt just how much you can achieve if you think you can.

We had nearly lost our sovereign minds. A couple of thousand men and women helped us to find ourselves again in 1916 and showed us what we could be, the republic as proclaimed in 1916. A nation once again, not Redmond’s mere province of an empire, and with an inspiring one-paragraph social programme.

For all the imperfections of our country – and what country does not have them? – we can always strive to attain that ideal of the Proclamation. We can, if we think we can.
Pat Kelly
Malahide, Co Dublin

I prefer a republic to a monarchy 

Ten years ago I stood under a fluttering Tricolour in the stark Stonebreakers’ Yard of Kilmainham Gaol listening, with my visitors, as the guide told the story of the execution of the rebels. A shiver ran up my spine as I realised that it was time for me to apply for citizenship, after 30 years living here.

Born and bred in England, I had gradually come to feel, on my trips back, that I had very little in common with daily life there and that I had well and truly gone native.

I preferred the concept of an independent democratic republic to a country with a monarchy. I was married to a northerner (with an Irish passport) and all my children had been born and raised here, so what was I waiting for?

So in one sense the rebels of 1916 have had a influence on me, if somewhat indirect: I had found the place where I felt comfortable and, following that day, set in train the official application to become an Irish citizen.

Ten years on, I have no regrets about making that decision.
Dee Neeson
Killiney, Co Dublin

If Ireland were a 100-year-old person

I travelled two and a half hours to and from rural Co Clare today to visit my paternal grandparents, who are both in their 80s. Although they are sound of mind and in good physical health they both spend most of their time at home. I am glad their world is mainly confined to the cosy kitchen at the heart of their home.

As I made my way home, stopping in Clarecastle to get petrol, I saw Garda lights flashing.

I had a brief chat with the shopkeeper while I was paying; then, as I was leaving, I noticed three men and two women, all younger than me, outside. I heard shouting and, looking out of my car, saw one of the women kick one of the men. Concerned for the man working in the shop by himself, I left the station and told a garda that it might be worthwhile to intervene down the road. He assured me that he’d investigate.

I returned to the petrol station, remaining in my car, nervous for the man working in the shop. Moments later the garda arrived. Two of the men and both of the women ran from the petrol station. As I left, the garda was speaking to the remaining man.

As I drove on towards Cork I heard an advertisement for a book remembering 1916, which led me to wonder why we are so focused on celebrating our state. A state that provides dismal care for its ill and elderly. A state that is full of antisocial behaviour and needless violence. A state with a drinking problem.

If Ireland were a 100-year-old person who ignored those most in need, in favour of personal gain, how many people would be at that birthday party?

I am not cynical, but I am a 27-year-old wondering if, instead of celebrating, it might be time to reflect, take action and then work towards an Ireland to be proud of in 2116.
Margaret Murphy
Cork