THE problem about a strongly held belief is that it is impossible to understand why everyone else does not share that belief. For example: Eoin Neeson's talk tonight at Griffin College on The Military Aspects of the 1916 Rising (barricades, manned at 8 p.m.) moves me to, touch again upon an issue which seems so intellectually unassailable, yet which remains the preserve of a fraction of a per cent of the general population.
I believe the Easter Rising was an unmitigated evil for Ireland. Virtually everything to doe with the Rising was horrible, from the homicidal manipulations of the secret society, the" Irish Republican Brotherhood, through the events themselves, to the hideous aftermath of the "Anglo Irish war", the civil war, bloody partition, and a legacy of violence and murderous, clandestine covens which haunt us to this day.
No doubt I am mad for deploring the carnage and the suffering and the agony of 1916, all of which, it can probably be argued, enriched Irish life enormously, as did Solohead Beg, Kilmichael, Bloody Sunday, the destruction of the Four Courts, the GPO, the Customs House, Bael na mBlath, etc etc.
I do not see this. I genuinely cannot understand what so many think useful and historically justifiable. Where I see nothing but horror and destruction, many, perhaps most of you, see glory, heroism, dedication and the building of a nation.
That was certainly the theme taken by those who organised the celebration of the 1916 Rising five years ago, as if the Irish nation had not existed before 1916, and had not repeatedly and unfailingly democratically registered its desire for self government far more persuasively and more authoritatively than the odd bands of gunmen and unelected idealists, cited and so lauded in the 1916 Proclamation, ever managed.
Surfeit of bravery
There are points I can concede from the beginning. Yes, the volunteers of 1916 were brave, but that was not unusual at that time. European civilisation was being torn apart by a surfeit of bravery. There was barely a nation in Western Europe which did not call upon its men to exhibit bizarre, almost wicked, levels of heroism. That the men and women of 1916 should have been capable of comparable deeds of gallantry merely makes 1916 part of the lunacy of the period. It does not make it more laudable.
Although much of what happened in the early stages of the Rising was virtually without any form of bravery, as the term is normally understood, but full of jittery homicide. Can it really have been the intentions of the planners of the Rising that impoverished carters should have been summarily shot for not handing over the means of earning their livelihood in order that insurgents could use them as barricades?
Did the murder of the unarmed police constable Lahiffe by Countess Markevicz in Stephen's Green constitute a violation of the plan, or was it its quintessence? And do admirers of that bloodthirsty woman applaud her response to this disgusting deed? ("I shot, him I shot him," she cried, jumping up and down for joy). And the unarmed DMP man, shot dead at Dublin Castle in the first few minutes of the Rising - does not his cold blooded killing by the Irish Citizens Army suggest that a precedent was being set, which would be followed, and was and is?
Criticised
The beginning was matched by the end. The last time I wrote about this, I referred to the killings of captured British soldiers - mostly Dublin Fusiliers - at the back of the GPO shortly before the Rising collapsed and I was bitterly criticised. Yet the shootings certainly seem to have taken place, with the details appearing in the first edition of this newspaper after the Rising. That these killings should have been forgotten is not surprising. When people get all weepy about Countess Markevicz, do they remember that she killed a defenceless man in cold blood in a park where now she has a statue and he is unremembered?
This amnesia is, perhaps, not surprising. Amnesia is spread like a blanket over the entire affair. Andrew Barry of the 10th Dublin Fusiliers, which had the melancholy duty of suppressing the Rising, told an interviewer in the 1980s that one of his fellow soldiers later that year had been an insurgent in the Rising, and that he and his fellow volunteers did not know they were participating in a Rising when they joined what they thought were regular weekend exercises that Easter.
And this is an aspect of the Rising which is seldom mentioned when writers tearfully report of the small band of men who that Easter marched out to take on an empire, it is grand, glorious stuff; but what they do not add is that most of these men had no notion that this was what their leaders had planned. The Irish Volunteers had been called into existence, after all, to protect the lawful gains of the Home Rule Bill; few if any of them joined with the intention of starting a war in the centre of Dublin.
Anti democratic
And that is the kernel of my objection to the 1916 Rising - that in all its essentials it was profoundly anti democratic.
The Rising took place within a democracy in which not a single insurgent had bothered to stand for election. The people who were to be insurgents mostly did not know they were to be insurgents until they reported fob manoeuvres (which were tolerated by the authorities of Dublin Castle in a fashion I think would have barely been emulated by the insurgents gallant allies in Belgium).
And, of course, the Rising was a dismal failure. As Eoin Neeson no doubt will tonight admit, none of the aims were met then, or for decades. A partitioned Ireland, in a condition of perpetual hostility for 40 years, came into existence. The Treaty of 1922 gave little more than had been achieved by John Redmond in 1914. And most enduringly of all, the cult of the gun became sanctified within Irish political life.
All this seems so obvious yet I am accounted a traitorous fool for so saying. I am clearly insane and, like all madmen, am quite convinced I am right. (I am, I am, he cries, as he is led away, sticking straws in his hair. I am).