Contrasting narratives at republican Rising events

Two significant republican commemorative events outside the GPO over the weekend presented contrasting narratives of the 100 years since 1916, and competing visions of how a 32-county Irish republic could be obtained.

The Republican Sinn Féin (RSF) event on Saturday, its speakers framed by the GPO’s pillars, was a restrained, almost sombre yet good-humoured affair marking the unfinished business of the Irish revolution: the century had shown that the republic cannot easily be achieved, and that further generations of Irish men and women may have to fight and to die in the struggle.

The Sinn Féin commemoration on Sunday, mounted on a glitzy stage in the centre of O’Connell Street more appropriate for a rock concert than a political rally, was a more upbeat if at times slightly comic exercise: a banner which organisers fixed to the GPO’s front wall bore the Liberty Hall slogan “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland”, a claim which sat oddly with the Proclamation’s exaltation of “gallant allies in Europe” and with imperial Germany’s crucial role in the Rising.

The great names of Sinn Féin were in attendance – Gerry Adams raised a cheer when he mounted the stage to take pictures of the assembling crowd – although only Martin McGuinness made a speech.

His message was that, while “the days of second-class citizenship” in Northern Ireland “are over”, this was due to “the sacrifice, the determination and the courage of this generation of Irish republicans”, not “our self-serving political parties”. But, crucially, the time for fighting has passed.

Paramilitary garb

The RSF commemoration included cohorts of youths in Fianna Éireann uniform and men in paramilitary garb, with berets, sunglasses, olive-green scarves across their faces and businesslike black boots, formed in ranks and marching more or less in time.

By contrast the Sinn Féin event was necessarily decommissioned, with not a beret or pair of black gloves to be seen. Instead there were people, the great majority of a certain age, in 1916-era Volunteer, Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan uniforms.

Re-enactors from the Cabra Historical Society fired simulated volleys, yet the rhetorical emphasis was on the political legacy of 1916 and the need peacefully to complete the dream of a 32-county republic. McGuinness finished by urging: “Let us all join the Rising . . . Up the rebels!”, but this is to be an exclusively political enterprise.

Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD read out the Proclamation as Gaeilge, his delivery curiously deadpan for such a historic occasion (perhaps because he was holding two texts, which he appeared to be consulting simultaneously). He was upstaged by a well-built young man in Irish Volunteer uniform who delivered the original English text with Pearsean emphasis and vigour.

The Proclamation’s seven signatories were briefly invoked, their portraits carried by Sinn Féin worthies who lined up behind the rostrum.

Roger Casement was similarly commemorated, as were Countess Markievicz, Margaret Skinnider, and Molly O’Reilly, none of whom died in combat or in jail during the Rising or subsequently, and whose inclusion was presumably to emphasise women’s role in the Rising and by extension in contemporary Sinn Féin.

Willie Pearse and those other seven executed Rising men were not even mentioned. Instead proceedings closed with a brief discourse on Thomas Ashe, who died following forced feeding in 1917, recalled as “the first of the 22 Irish Republicans who died on hunger strike”.

This facilitated a transition to Bobby Sands who, although not the last to die in the 1981 hunger strike, is the icon of choice for republican sacrifice during the Northern Ireland troubles.

Sands was also invoked by RSF speakers, who used his words to argue not for the end but for the continuation of armed struggle.

RSF policy could not be clearer: in the resolute language of RSF president Des Dalton, physical force is the “unbreakable link” between the generations which have sought Irish independence, and the campaign must continue by all appropriate means until the republic is achieved.

Vigorous hint

Another speaker closed RSF proceedings by urging the young to “join the fight”, the paramilitaries on display offering a vigorous hint of what would be involved, whereas the harmless and bedraggled Dad’s (and Ma’s) army of re-enactors seemed to suggest that in Sinn Féin’s view Irish political violence belongs firmly in the past.

How could it be otherwise for a party now a prominent part of the electoral landscape, and embedded in the Northern Ireland government?

RSF speakers drew on a very traditional republican lexicon, using terms such as “Free State”, “26 counties” and “six counties” – but did not waste much powder and shot in direct criticism of Sinn Féin or anyone else as cowards, backsliders or lackeys of imperialism.

Continuity IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, however, have no such inhibitions: their Easter 2016 statement advised “the Provisional revisionists to stop referring to themselves as Sinn Féin. They have taken their permanent position as the lackeys of the crown and enforcers of British rule.”

RSF speakers contented themselves with a general dismissal of both the Stormont assembly and the present-day Oireachtas, as well as those who support them.

Speakers reiterated the purist republican view that the only legitimate Irish parliament was the all-island, first Dáil which first met in January 1919, from which RSF and the Continuity IRA claim descent.

On Saturday outside the GPO, RSF's audience, accompanied by the pipes and drums of the (Scottish) Coatbridge United Irishmen Flute Band, solemnly sang Amhrán na bFiann.

On Sunday, Sinn Féin's listeners had to make do with brief snatches from Thomas Davis's milk-and-water 19th century nationalist ballad A Nation Once Again.

Where were the once-familiar The Boys of the Old Brigade, Take it Down From the Mast, Seán South, or Old Mountbatten Had a Boat, all songs used to rally the republican faithful which I often heard on Dublin streets when the Provos were in their pomp?

If Adams is right, and “they haven’t gone away, you know”, they seem nevertheless to have lost their voices.

Eunan O’Halpin is Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin