Sir, – Prof Ronan Fanning ("Centenary of 1916 is a time for shameless celebration", Opinion & Analysis, March 2nd) presents the 1916 rebel leaders as motivated by "despair" at constitutional nationalism when "the British government yielded to the Ulster Unionists' threat of force and failed to put in place a Home Rule parliament in Dublin before the Great War".
Few followers of constitutional nationalism saw it like that at the time. The Home Rule Bill had passed its final stages in late May 1914, after a three-session passage begun in 1912 according to parliamentary rules agreed in advance by all parties. A Bill passed in May would normally be signed into law by the monarch in early August when parliament was prorogued.
To blame the British government for not enacting the Bill before the start of the first World War is to blame it for not foreseeing the war’s outbreak in early August. Even had the war not intervened, a Home Rule parliament could not have been in operation before spring 1915 at the earliest.
Similarly, most nationalists accepted the reasonableness of suspending the establishment of a new parliament at the start of a huge conflict that absorbed all attention on both islands. The voters who gave victory to Home Rule candidates in all six Irish byelections between September 1914 and March 1916 had not “despaired of constitutional nationalism”, uneasy though they may have felt at the delay in Home Rule implementation and at the appearance of unionists in the British war cabinet in 1915.
Neither will it do to depict Pearse, a sworn-in member of the IRB from 1914 onwards, as a despairing constitutionalist.
Pearse and many of his co-conspirators had long despised everything Home Rule promised by way of future relations between Ireland and Britain.
His words (in Irish) on platform number three at the great Home Rule rally in O’Connell Street on March 31st, 1912, are hardly those of a yet-to-be-disillusioned Home Ruler: “ . . . let the foreigner understand, if we are betrayed again, there will be bloody war all through Ireland”.
His speech at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915 contained not a word about the suspension of Home Rule implementation for the duration of the war. Rather, he mocked the pacification of Ireland brought by Home Rule, dwelt on the imperatives laid by dead men upon the living and presented himself as “speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme”.
It is true that the Home Rule Bill could not have been implemented in the form in which was enacted. According to the agreed rules, the Bill could not be amended after the first (1912) session. In 1912, neither side wanted partition: nationalists and unionists operated on all-Ireland assumptions. Talk of excluding Ulster counties emerged as a realistic option only in the winter of 1913-14 when territorial compromise came to seem the only way to avert a Balkans-style intercommunal war in Ireland.
Since such changes could not be inserted in the original Bill, they had to be embodied in a separate Amending Bill which would limit the territorial remit of the Home Rule parliament. The impasse over the incompatible national aspirations of nationalists and Ulster unionists prevented agreement on the Amending Bill in 1914; it was due to recur whenever the war ended and Home Rule implementation came back on the agenda.
As far as the peaceful resolution of that impasse was concerned, the revolutionaries of Easter 1916 and their political heirs had nothing to contribute. – Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY,
Clontarf,
Dublin3.
Sir, – Ian d'Alton (February 24th) challenges what he terms the "spurious legitimacy" of the 1916 Rising.
Mr d’Alton claims that the proponents of the Easter Rising had no mandate from the general public to take up arms on their behalf and said the Rising was the work of a tiny cabal of completely unmandated and unrepresentative urban intellectuals, who decided, by themselves, to go out and kill people and destroy property.
May I remind Mr d’Alton that it was British terror in Ireland that had no mandate and revolutionaries by definition act first and then seek a retrospective mandate, which is what was given to Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election.
This election was the first democratic plebiscite to pass judgment on the events of 1916; Sinn Féin, which espoused separation from Britain, received a massive electoral endorsement, winning 75 of the 103 seats and brought to an end Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. The armed rebellion of 1916 was formally and massively endorsed. Either way, British rule in Ireland was a product of conquest, not democracy, and therefore devoid of moral authority.
It is risible for Mr d’Alton to suggest that the Irish State faces an embarrassing dilemma on how to reconcile the Easter Rising and the issue of unmandated force with the democratic process. The right to resist foreign occupation does not necessarily stem from the ballot box. There is a long-established and internationally recognised right of people to resist foreign occupation as expressed in United Nations resolutions 3070 and 3103, which acknowledge the status of combatants struggling against colonial domination and the rights of people to self-determination. – Yours, etc,
TOM COOPER,
Templeogue,
Dublin 6W.