A 'social platform' was not a major part of the 1916 Rising, and it is a mistake to project the standards or agendas of today into the past, writes Eoin Neeson.
Pointing an improbable magisterial finger at "analysts" who, he claims, will write about 1916 in this, the 90th anniversary year, Pat Rabbitte in his Irish Times article last week also berates a variety of politicians and political parties that, he says, have claimed the Rising for themselves alone. He correctly points out that the Rising belongs to all our people.
He then equates this latter certainty with his own fanciful recipe for a definition of Irishness.
Inevitably, like many who believe they know all the answers, he then hops jovially forward to do the very thing he condemns in others - blithely uses the Rising for disingenuous political special pleading, in his case on behalf of the Labour Party (for which this does little service).
This is a pity, because his article draws attention to the valuable Liberty Project, a Labour Party programme focusing on the role of the labour movement during the Rising.
In spite of the evidence to the contrary, historical pundits in general often proclaim fixed and erroneous views about the Rising. One of these, as Pat Rabbitte indicates, is that there was little or no social content to the Rising.
Of course there was. James Connolly and the Citizen Army alone are proof of that. But, while there was an increased social whiff following the January conclave between the planners and Connolly, Pat Rabbitte would apparently have us believe that a social platform was a major feature of the Rising, which simply isn't true.
The truth lies in between. In order to penetrate it it is necessary to do what many "historiographers" seem to find difficult - that is get a feel for the true climate of the times instead of projecting backwards the standards of our own (often cloaked in some pet theory).
It is partly this that has led to the perpetuation of some of the myths about the Rising and after.
Rabbitte tells us that the Labour Party will "seek to redress the balance" - he doesn't quite say of what, but we may assume that he is referring to the social content of the Rising - through the Liberty Project. If the Liberty Project presents the reality without exaggeration and makes the link between 1916, the Great Dublin strike of 1913 and the pan-European (including England) social revolution of the previous 10 years inspired by Rosa Luxembourg and others, then it will provide a welcome and signal service, and he is to be commended for drawing it to our attention.
But what, for instance, are we to make of this: "Getting the right take on 1916 is important, but so too is putting 1916 into perspective".
I thought that "getting the right take on" and "into perspective" amounted to much the same thing and, if it weren't for the "but" that it might be just a bit of rabbittical tautology. But there the "but" is. Like much that seems at first glance straightforward, it must, in fact, mean something else - even if we're not too sure what that might be.
Moreover, when in his enthusiasm to "redress" whatever "balance" it is he has in mind, Rabbitte goes on to determine what being Irish means (a daunting prospect even when, as he prefers, it is done in simplistic universal terms), we are suddenly in murky waters.
He asks: "In modern cosmopolitan Ireland, can we really hang our sense of national identity on events which took place 90 years ago?"
We do that? And there was I thinking that the Rising of 1916 synthesised the idea of Irish identity since way before the Union and that when all is said and done "people are people", as an old Polish friend of mine who survived Siberia in the second World War used to say.
As even a cursory consideration of the Irish social/political scene before and after it makes clear, the Rising is unmistakably the pivotal event in the modern development of the nation and the foundation of the State. It belongs - inasmuch as it "belongs" at all - to everyone who is Irish.
The real tragedy is the falsehoods and myths that have distorted our appreciation of the reality. The most blatant of these, still strong and current, is that the Rising was a romantic "blood sacrifice" of no military or strategic merit.
It is a pity that Rabbitte hitched an otherwise informative article about the Liberty Project to the current popular bandwagon linking the Rising with political posturing.
There is much more to Ireland and Irishness than what he rather self-servingly calls "Sinn Féin's tribalism or Fianna Fáil's narrow conservatism" - or, for that matter, what an equally unwarranted response might call Labour's dog-eared socialism.
It is to be hoped that the Labour Party in its Liberty Project will not contribute to the distortion of the Rising by placing undue emphasis on aspects of it that were by no means central.
Rabbitte's article does not inspire much confidence in this regard. It fails to note some factors of equal or greater importance to the Rising and the climate of its times - a religious ethic, for instance.
This, no less than any social more, occupied a notable, central and taken-for-granted place in the events and, like it or not, remains a substantial part of what being Irish does mean.