Reading 1916 politics via official acts of memory

WorldView: Who won in 1916? This is hard to answer, but it is a vital aspect of the politics of commemoration. History is written from the perspective of the victors and ought to be written from that of the vanquished, wrote Walter Benjamin. "All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers." He preferred "to brush history against the grain".

Applying Benjamin's insights to 1916 is salutary, but difficult and ambiguous, because the rebels deliberately set out to burst "the limits of what can be imagined". The phrase is Charles Townshend's, in his recent fine study of 1916. This was the point of their symbolic action.

Another historian, Eric Hobsbawm, compares this "Easter Rising principle" with the Paris Commune and Lenin's storming of the Winter Palace - revolutionary acts intended to provide inspiration for the future. It follows that post-revolutionary history can be understood through the history of its acts of commemoration. The politics of memory have become much more active in recent European history, as Ireland shows.

The Rising was put down summarily and its 15 leaders executed over a nine-day period in which more and more voices were raised against such exemplary punishments. That began the swing in public opinion away from the Home Rule leadership and towards more radical nationalists. The trend was to be immensely reinforced by the conscription crisis of 1917-18, the ascendancy of hardline unionists in Lloyd George's government, the extension of the franchise for the 1918 elections and the ensuing war against British occupation.

In the epilogue to his book, Townshend argues that this second fight, which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the establishment of the Irish Free State, "had the effect of stifling re-evaluation of 1916 for many years". Pro- and anti-treaty parties incorporated it in their genealogies, gradually creating a tradition of uncritical nostalgic commemoration of the Rising as the foundational myth of the state and the people - as is typical of post-revolutionary regimes the world over.

But the politics of republicanism continually intervened. In his study Staging the Rising: 1916 as Theatre, James Moran recalls how shocking to the new conventional wisdom was Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, first staged in 1926. When the GPO was finally completely restored in 1929, the Cumann na nGaedheal government held a low-key ceremony at which W T Cosgrave only mentioned the Rising at the end of his speech.

The first large-scale public ceremony held there was in 1935, when Eamon de Valera set out to claim the inheritance from the IRA and transform it into a Catholic nationalist and patriarchal pageant for Fianna Fáil. An open-air Mass was held at the GPO with 1916 veterans acting as altar boys. Some 7,000 troops marched past and de Valera unveiled the statue of Cuchulainn in the name of the men of Easter week, antagonising many women who had participated. The political timing was related to his campaign against the IRA.

It was to be another 30 years before what Townshend calls the "stifling pieties" about 1916 began to be unravelled by historians and commentators. The 1966 commemoration of its 50th anniversary was a large State occasion. But it saw the emergence of a new self-reflection that was to flow into the later debate on historical revisionism.

And although the 1916 leaders had shown little concern about the risk of alienating northern unionist opinion, it was the eruption of The Troubles there from the late 1960s which stimulated further re-evaluation of the Rising. (So much so that a joint research exercise between historians from Queens and UCD is exploring what effects the 1966 commemorations had in stoking or provoking the conflict in Northern Ireland.)

One of the most interesting essays published in the 1960s was The Embers of Easter by Conor Cruise O'Brien. He took his departure from Lenin, who defended 1916 against other Marxist critics' dismissal of the Rising as a nationalist putsch. Only those who did not understand social revolution as a living phenomenon would describe it so, Lenin argued. "The misfortune of the Irish is that they rose prematurely, when the European revolt of the proletariat had not yet matured."

O'Brien built on Lenin's case to argue that had the Rising come later - during the conscription crisis of 1917-18 - Ireland could have triggered a European revolution that never was. Irish troops in the British army would have mutinied, and the mutiny would have spread to the French and perhaps the German army too.

This is one of the counterfactual scenarios the Rising has stimulated. The more usual one was that Ireland could have attained a Home Rule settlement in a united Ireland without it. That this remains deeply contested is illustrated by its firm rebuttal in a piece about 1916 on the Taoiseach's Office website this week.

The 75th anniversary in 1991 was a muted affair, overshadowed by continuing violence in the North as the Provisional movement claimed its legitimacy from 1916 and 1918. The determination not to let Sinn Féin claim it this year, or in 2016, best explains the Government's decision to revive the State ceremony.

A more inclusive form of commemoration can be seen in the concluding sentence of the article on the Taoiseach's website: "The Rising resulted in the loss of many lives, be they combatants or innocent civilians. We commemorate these events on this their ninetieth anniversary and mourn the loss of all those who died."