"But it is not like 1916." "It wasn't like 1916 in 1916."
Bernard MacLaverty - Cal
We can now say with a degree of certainty not previously available to us that Henry Smart was not in the GPO in that fateful week. Nor Miss O'Shea, with whom he had a passionate encounter in the basement as the shells fell around them. Not surprisingly, of course. But Roddy Doyle's fictional anti-hero, debunker of heroism myths, is not listed in the "definitive" list of 508 rebel combatants who passed through the GPO in Easter Week just published by the Military Service Pensions Project.
But nor, many of us will find to our disappointment, are those real friends and relations, now all passed on, who may have at some stage somewhat embellished their part in Ireland’s Fight for Freedom to be part of the Great National Myth, to say “I was there... I remember the wounded Connolly.” Our own Henry Smarts.
The publication of the list of all 2,558 involved in the Rising across the country on the rebel side – from John Adams of Gray Street to Thomas Yourell of Devenish Road, Kimmage, both Dublin – is an important and welcome piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is our still imperfect understanding of Easter Week, and a personal connection for many to history that they will value. That understanding has always blended myth and reality, wishful thinking and blank pages, not least about those who fought in the trenches instead. They too deserve a listing.
As we fill in the detail of the national narrative ahead of next year’s celebrations the picture that emerges this time more than ever is of complexity, ambiguity and contradictions, as Paul Muldoon put it, “ history’s a twisted root”. And nothing better illustrates the point than the sheer variety of those 2,558 men and women of different backgrounds, interests and aspirations whom we will honour – from the slums of Dublin to its student halls, from the worlds of the arts, of the land, of commerce and trade ...