The year is 1998, and RTE has just broadcast its first ever documentary about the Civil War. It has yet to make one about the War of Independence or the 1916 Rising. Meanwhile, we are warming up to the commemorations of 1798, the awful reality of which remains hidden by a thicket of heritage-industry pikes.
Is it surprising that violence has repeatedly achieved a central place in Irish life when informed public discussion of the reality of murder-for-a-cause varies from muted mumbles to stony silence? Is it surprising that justification for violence regularly re-invents itself, when our national television network has proved unable to deal with the actual realities of political violence in this country? Is it surprising that violence endlessly reasserts itself, when democratic politicians yearly pay homage to the man who did most to formalise the culture of political bloodshed, Wolfe Tone?
Incalculable suffering
I know this is simply anathema to most people who have opinions on the subject; yet it seems to me to be perfectly clear and logical and ethically unassailable. Violence has been a wholly unproductive device for securing Irish separation. All of the gains from 1916, two years after Home Rule became law, could have been made peacefully. Instead, the use of violence caused incalculable and unendurable suffering, grievously distorting Irish history, politically, demographically and economically. Not least, violence has unfailingly given weaponry to Ireland's enemies.
So one can certainly try to explain the violence of 1798, which was overwhelmingly of Irish against Irish, but it is impossible to justify it. Never mind the unspeakable awfulness of the events themselves; had the rising been successful, the outcome would not have been some independent republican paradise of liberty, equality and fraternity, but a French satellite. That satellite would have been ruled in the interests of the First Consul by a secret police, probably of the kind which Fouche, the forerunner of the heads of the OGPU, the Gestapo and the KGB this century, was pioneering in France and in the conquered territories. Believe me, the network of spies and informers which answered to Dublin Castle and its minions were bobbies from Toytown in comparison with Fouche's boys. During his brief sojourn in Lyons, he ordered and personally supervised the murders of 1,700 prisoners, followed by, again on his orders, the execution of the executioners.
"All is permitted"
"To those who act according to the spirit of the Republic, all is permitted," said Fouche of his handiwork, words which have been repeated since many times in the cause of Irish freedom. Yet the taking of a single life has not hastened the cause of Irish independence by a second. The trigger events of 1916-1921, the Easter Rising and the ambush at Solohead Beg, were without moral justification at the time, and were widely deplored as such. They were retrospectively justified by the reaction they prompted - but what moral universe were the perpetrators inhabiting if deeds became acceptable not in the circumstances in which they were committed but in the moral fog of their consequences? And what deeds may not be permitted if all that is sought is retroactive vindication?
Is it surprising, then, if an unelected leader who opted for civil war, who turned Irishman against Irishman - which was what Tone (and his colleagues) certainly did 200 years ago - is transformed into an inspirational hero by elected democratic politicians, that elements in Irish life today can justify a return to violence? For Tone, and the men and women who followed him, chose to consult their own passionate feelings on Ireland's future and caused other men to die for those feelings; self and nation became a single entity.
So it has been for the men and women of the IRA for the past 28 years. They have consulted themselves about whether people should or should not die. Now their leaders, apparently sick of the slaughter, want the killing to stop. They want to negotiate their way out of the bloodshed and towards victory.
Absurd contrivance
And to facilitate the magical process of transforming the base metal of Northern Ireland into a field of cloth of gold, talks have had to be convened under ridiculous rules which violated democracy merely so as to accommodate loyalist murderers without a mandate. If you bend the rules to get such people into talks, is it surprising that they then bend a few more? Is it surprising that if killers know that their exclusion from the talks brings the entire peace process to a halt, they will continue to kill anyway?
For they have been given been given power without responsibility and can kill without consequence. This absurd contrivance, the peace process, has been assembled in order to enable those who murder to end their campaign of murder without loss of face - and more, with political advantage accruing; and now from the sanctuary of this peace process, the killing has started again in earnest.
We are forced to relive our lessons time and time again; and while within our political culture we continue to revere the memory of men of violence, we are probably doomed to this endless cycle of murder, repression and grievance, leading to more murder. . . We might start contemplating, on the bicentenary of his death, that the legacy of Wolfe Tone is the great poisoned chalice of Irish nationalism, and that where he is thought to lie is ill-named: it should be Forebodingstown.