Tribes are peculiar things. They form around no rationale, obey no logic, revere myths without regard to fact, and command incomprehensible loyalties. And politics is essentially about tribes, with people outside the tribe usually being mystified by the passion which drives the tribe's unifying identity, writes Kevin Myers
Yet even allowing for the barrier which must always rest between a political party and an outsider like myself, Fianna Fáil's decision to reintroduce a military celebration of the Easter Rising seems just bonkers.
Yet who am I to say? For did not the delegates at the Fianna Fáil ardfheis go insane with joy when the Taoiseach, exhibiting almost the same disregard for democracy that the insurgents of 1916 had shown, announced that the State was going to revert to the giddy days of the Easter parade? This clearly suggests an emotional and tribal need to re-establish the Rising as national icon, independent of both historical truth and any political consequence today.
Now if the Rising were commemorated simply as Easter itself is celebrated in a post-Christian country such as England, it perhaps wouldn't matter, for no broader resonances follow. It would be a value-free, consequence-free affair. But this is not the case for all who wish to commemorate the Easter Rising.
Some honour the event in a purely ceremonial way, as if it were some wholly virtuous, victimless episode which existed solely in their imaginations, and one which makes them feel warm for a weekend. But others see it as a template and inspiration for their own deeds. The Provisional IRA, still in existence, still armed, still gathering intelligence, has throughout the Troubles used the 1916 Rising as its moral benchmark. For did the men of 1916 not kill on the dual authorisation of their own consciences and the divine warrant, heard by them alone, from their forefathers in the Fenian Valhalla beyond? Did all the IRAs not use the same heavenly charter to justify their own killings?
What is the difference between members of the Irish Citizens' Army summarily executing penniless carters who were understandably slow to hand over their livelihoods for the insurgents to turn into barricades, and the IRA's 1975 capture and murder of Sammy Llewellyn, a Protestant workman who went to repair bomb damage on the Falls Road? What is the difference between the murder of Det Garda Jerry McCabe and the murders of Constable James O'Brien and Constable Michael Lahiff in 1916? This, actually: Jerry McCabe was armed, but the two constables of 1916 were not.
All three were brutally cut down by terrorists who had never sought the approval of an electorate.
To fetishise the 1916 Rising, yet again, is to relocate the centre of gravity of Irish political conscience within the violent past; yet Fianna Fáil is not alone in this reversion to atavism. Fine Gael intends to revive the inspiration of Michael Collins, constitutionalist (though he was no such thing) and Arthur Griffith, republican (ditto). In which case, maybe we should simply have a re-run of the 1918 election, preceded of course by a conscription scare, and maybe the British would oblige by announcing a German Plot, just to give everyone a proper sense of occasion.
So which 100-year-old set of political values are we going to appeal to for the future governance of Ireland? Pearse's? Griffith's? Collins? But then why only go back a mere century? Fianna Fáil can call upon Wolfe Tone as the inspiration for its next election campaign.
Perhaps Fine Gael should rummage deeper, and come up the Confederation of Kilkenny, and Fianna Fáil might trump that with Finn McCool. Perhaps in turn Labour can invoke the downtrodden, oppressed and dispossessed fir-bolgs as their inspiration.
No healthy national life can result from a morbid party political obsession with the past. That is a landscape for historians to explore, not for electorates to consult as they decide the future of their country. Yet it seems both main parties have agreed that history is where they are going to set their next manifestos, as tribal identity again becomes the defining feature of political life in Ireland.
And this would not matter within a normal European polity. After all, the differences in policy between Fine Gael/Labour/Fianna Fáil/PD are unknown to any but the Dáil's equivalent of chicken-sexers - that is, political correspondents; and, not belonging to that recondite species, I certainly could not name those policy differences without some serious homework beforehand. And this is perfectly usual. Modern political parties in almost every European country have virtually identical policies and retain their identities largely by myth, by style, and by the careful inflections of language.
But ours is not a normal European polity. All our political parties were born out of the barrel of a gun. One party, Sinn Féin, is still armed, and in a couple of months' time will be able to celebrate the first anniversary of the Northern Bank raid. That is how close our politics is to the gun.
That close. A renewed invocation of 1916 can only re-validate and re-glorify the principle of undemocratic violence. It is no coincidence that the Troubles followed hard on the gargantuan and jingoistic celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Rising. That laid the moral seedbed - and more to the point, created the safe houses - for the IRA in the quarter-century of war that followed.
For democratic politicians to cite the Rising as a glorious inspiration for today, while armed paramilitary organisations still exist, is rather like a headmaster distributing luscious pornography to teenage boys, and then urging them to be pure.
