PADRAIC PEARSE was an Irish hero. That's all I really wanted to say this April morning, on the day before the 80th anniversary of the Easter Rising. But it's a long way to the bottom of the page, and I doubt if there are enough Corrections and Clarifications to fill the space.
In a way, I suppose, this is a sort of Correction and Clarification. It is just by way of acknowledging that, in the opinion of this Irishman at least, and contrary to the past 30 years of disinformation and mean mindedness, the Irish revolution, begun by Pearse and his comrades on Easter Monday 1916 resulted in the free Republic in which we live today. Nothing, not a further 25 years of IRA violence nor a million revisionist books, articles or radio and TV programmes, can alter that for me.
I would like to say that I do not believe the appropriation of the Rising by any faction detracts one iota from its symbolism of heroism. I am able to separate what happened in the GPO from what happened in Warrington and Enniskillen. Pearse did not plant bombs in either place. This should be axiomatic. In feeling the need to say it, I am, of course, reacting to attempts to suggest that we have been misled, that Pearse and his comrades of Easter 1916 were not heroes, that Pearse was a vainglorious fool and the Rising a botched gesture turned into myth.
Actually, it doesn't bother me as much as it used to when people denigrate Pearse as a bloodthirsty bigot because, as well as knowing different, I now know why they are compelled to do it. Luckily I am able to see these continual attempts to denigrate the heroic sacrifices of 1916 as evidence of the continued enslavement of large parts of the Irish public mind. One reason I can recognise it is that Padraic Pearse predicted it.
This is the one sense in which I would agree - that the Rising may have failed it did not liberate us entirely from intellectual slavery, mainly because Pearse, who understood the colonial mindset so absolutely, did not survive to guide us through the minefield of post colonialism.
Listening to political discourse in this Republic, one could get tile impression that the point of history was to provide a battering ram for the various factions to beat one another to pulp. Divisions which appear to be about the past are really about the present, as each faction shifts the emphasis of history to try to bring about the kind of present it would prefer. This goes some way towards explaining the state of this Republic.
The argument goes that the more recent untruths were reactions to past ones. Certainly there was, in previous tellings of Irish history, a measure of myth making and over simplification. One characteristic of the post colonial condition is the creation, in the years immediately following independence, of an excessively insular version of the nation. This occurred in Ireland between the 20s and 50s, and one of its legacies was a historiography which sought to feed national self confidence. This provided those infected with other variations of post colonial syndrome with an army of straw men.
But just as dangerous as myth making, surely, is a rewriting of history on the basis of a belief that such pitfalls can be avoided by detachment, objectivity, balance and empiricism. These are words I believe we should suspect, because they can conceal a more subtle form of bias or agenda.
In the past generation, much of the history we have been offered has been infected with a bias justified as a legitimate effort to counterbalance the previous generation's version. Unable to perceive their own neo colonial mindset, certain Irish writers, commentators and alleged historians frantically sought to demonstrate to our English neighbours that they are not really savages after all. There was, as Dr Brendan Bradshaw put it, an attempt to replace myth with anti myth, mainly because of the desire of a modernising elite in the Republic to dispense with the baggage of its traumatised past, an anxiety which increased with the start of the Northern conflict at the end of the 1960s. A generation mostly unfit to button up Pearse's epaulettes proceeded to drag his name in the mud.
I don't want to pick a fight with anybody. It doesn't matter to me what other people want to believe. They are entitled to their opinions and beliefs. But when they have finished speaking, I will say again what I believe that Padraic Pearse was a brave and brilliant man and that I wish to salute his courage and sacrifice. I don't mean merely that Pearse is a hero of mine. He is a hero, too, for the vast majority of Irish people. In their hearts they know it, but they are afraid of being called names, of being held responsible for all sorts of things.
IN THE Ireland of today, the things we say in public are very often not what we mean, but what we imagine we are expected to say. Underneath the ritualistic condemnations of IRA violence is a different set of aspirations, not expressed in the public conversation, to do with a deep longing to honour our nationhood and those who died to vindicate it.
Opposing the modern version of Irish armed republicanism may be necessary and worthwhile, but to do so on the basis of untruth is courting disaster. It is time all of us said again what we know to be true: that the men of 1916 are Irish heroes, to whom we owe an immense debt of gratitude.
The main reason I want to say this today is because we are upon the 80th anniversary of the Rising, and things like this don't get said much in public anymore. It does nothing to change my mind when I am told that young Irish people couldn't care less about Padraic Pearse. Someone sent me a copy of an article that appeared in the Sunday Tribune on Easter Sunday, which purported to show that young Irish people could not name the signatories of the Proclamation, or answer several other questions about the Easter Rising. The article was written on the basis of a straw poll held outside the GPO.
It doesn't worry me much whether young people know the names of the Proclamation signatories. History is not a game of Trivial Pursuit; it is about the assimilation of meaning. What struck me most immediately on reading this article was not that Irish youth would prefer not to think about the past, but how colossal the failure of their parents' generation in not bequeathing their children a truthful version of it. It would be a miracle if, having been raised in the past quarter century of disinformation, denial, anti nationalism and neurosis, the younger generation had emerged any differently.
For this is an Ireland in which it is not possible to buy the works of Padraic Pearse in an ordinary bookshop. This is the Ireland in which we have called the ugliest street in the capital after Padraic Pearse, and the most appalling monstrosity of our alleged "modernisation" - Ballymun flats after the seven signatories to the Proclamation. I can see why this generation does not want its children to know their history. If the truth were known, we should die of shame.