WB Yeats once made an important distinction – between national pride and national vanity. He suggested that immature societies have national vanity. They are so thin-skinned they can’t bear to face their weaknesses and failures and want only to be told how wonderful they are. Mature societies, on the other hand, have a national pride strong enough to acknowledge both the good and the bad things about themselves. The centenary of the 1916 Rising should make 2016 in this sense a year of genuine national pride, a time in which we both mark the progress we have made towards a real republic and map out the road still to be travelled.
We can already take some heart from the context of the centenary commemorations themselves. In the past, attitudes to the Easter Rising have tended to swing between veneration and execration. The men and women who led and took part in it have been either blessed as saints and martyrs or cursed as fools and terrorists. There are encouraging signs that in 2016 both of these tendencies will be marginal. Especially in the last decade, one-dimensional versions of Irish identity have been successfully complicated. History is no longer a weapon in an endless war. Irish society seems quite capable of remembering both the tragedy and the triumph of 1916, of mourning all the dead, of commemorating with equal solemnity the Rising and the Battle of the Somme. Maturity consists in being comfortable with complexity and most Irish people can now engage with 1916 without resorting to crude simplifications.
The national pride that will rightly be expressed this year is bigger and more open than the mere vanity of waving the tricolour with one hand while using the other to pat ourselves on the back. It is celebratory but it is also challenging.
Is it too much to hope that this same maturity should inform the general election campaign that will soon be upon us? We need an adult conversation about what kind of republic we want and how we can move steadily towards it. The new year marks the beginning of a post-austerity period, the transition from a time of necessity to a time of possibility. Since 2008, Irish politics has been about what we have to do – the difficult and mostly unpleasant imperatives of surviving a very deep crisis. The next five years can be, at least to some extent, about what we want to do. Choices are highly constrained but they are nonetheless real. The duty of all parties will be to frame those choices in adult terms. They cannot promise expanded State services while abolishing taxes or promise tax cuts without spelling out the consequences. The hard-won independence we celebrate in 2016 was in essence a statement that we are willing and able to take responsibility for ourselves. Candidates – and voters – have to live up to that responsibility.
Maturity and optimism
We also need a grown-up conversation about our place in the world. The 1916 rising was designed to alter the political architecture of these islands and also to change Ireland’s relationship to Europe: the rebels wanted to escape the Empire in order to be fully European. Both of those questions are very much back on the agenda for 2016. The United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union has the most profound implications for Ireland. What happens may be beyond our control but we cannot pretend it is not happening. With our close relationship to the UK, our vital national interest in not having the EU’s borders running across this island, and our own harsh experiences of the cost of the eurozone crisis, Ireland should have a lot to say about the possibility and the urgency of democratic reform of the EU. Again, we can bring to bear a sense of complexity that recognises that the EU is at once deeply problematic and utterly indispensible.
We do not have to canonise the 1916 rebels to acknowledge that they had courage and imagination. The best way to honour those qualities is to have the courage to recognise the unacceptable aspects of our society and the imagination to change them. Our national pride should not blind us to the things we have no right to be proud of. A republic does not let its systems of democratic accountability fall into such disrepair. It does not sleep easily when so many of its children are hungry and homeless. It is not comfortable with having so many citizens who do not have the means to lead dignified lives. It is not beyond our collective imagination to consign these things to history.
The republic that was imagined in 1916 should be neither worshipped as a sacred ideal nor dismissed as empty rhetoric. It has at its heart a notion of collective dignity, a belief that Ireland can hold its head up as the equal of any other nation because it values equally all of its own citizens. That is not a fantasy. The republic that actually exists in 2016 may not yet match that aspiration. But it has within it the maturity, the optimism, the decency and the creativity to turn aspirations into realities. We want to feel justly proud of ourselves. We have achieved enough to know that national pride is not mere vanity. We have enough left to achieve to know that courage and imagination are not for the dead generations alone.