Home Rule would have made us dependent; we got out from under British rule just in time, writes Garret FitzGerald.
The first point I would like to make about 1916 is that it was a product of desperation. For, as my father Desmond FitzGerald was to write a quarter of a century later, the Rising was launched by men for whom in the autumn of 1914 the Volunteer movement, "on which all our dreams had centred, seemed merely to have canalised the martial spirit of the Irish people for the defence of England.
"Our dream castles toppled about us with a crash. It was brought home to us that the very fever that had possessed us was due to a subconscious awareness that the final end of the Irish nation was at hand."
Only a rising could rekindle the almost extinguished flame of Irish nationalism, he and his friends believed.
Many of those writing about the events of Easter Week 1916 have concentrated on challenging the morality of that Rising - by anachronistically seeking to apply values of the late 20th century to a Europe where in many states issues of peace were still being decided by emperors and kings - and where only two states, France and newly-independent Norway - had democratic governments elected by universal suffrage.
That does not mean that those who launched the 1916 Rising were unaware that their decision had moral implications. Not alone was this the case with those like my father, The O'Rahilly and of course Eoin Mac Neill and Bulmer Hobson, respectively president and secretary of the Irish Volunteers - all of whom believed that it was a mistake to proceed with this venture after the loss of the arms on the Aud had made military success impossible. It was also true of some of the leaders themselves.
For, when later my father came to write his memories of the period, he recorded that in the many discussions he had with Pearse and Plunkett in the GPO during that extraordinary week "time and again we came back to one favourite topic which could not be avoided. And that was the moral rectitude of what we had undertaken . . . We brought forward every theological argument and quotation that justified that Rising" (Desmond's Rising, page 142).
Ninety years later it seems to me absurd that people should be concerned to sit in judgment on men who, in circumstances unimaginably different from the world of today, in my father's words "with calm deliberation decided on a course with the full knowledge that the decision they had made meant their own inevitable death - and made that decision when their people were far from expecting it of them; when the very people they sought to serve were more likely than not to blame them for their act.
"I doubt if what may be called the loneliness of that act will be realised. It is one thing to go forward into danger leading a warlike people; it is a very different matter when the thought of such a thing has not entered people's minds; when if they did consider the matter they would only exclaim at its foolishness."
Clearly, there is much hindsight involved in what passes for today's conventional wisdom that condemns 1916 as "undemocratic". Many who now hold that view have been hugely influenced by a belief that the roots of the IRA violence in Northern Ireland are to be found in 1916.
It is true that the IRA and Sinn Féin have sought to use 1916 as an excuse or cover for their violence against the unionist community in Northern Ireland, and far too many people have allowed them to get away with that tactic. But the truth is that neither the often sectarian motivation of the IRA in Northern Ireland nor the ruthlessness of their campaign against its unionist community find any parallel whatever in the 1916 Rising. It is not difficult to imagine the horror with which the 1916 leaders would have greeted today's attempts by the IRA to justify their past actions by reference to what happened in Dublin 90 years ago.
Another case often made against the Rising is that it was unnecessary. We are told that Home Rule would have been conceded after the first World War. That may well be true, but it does not follow that Home Rule would then have led peacefully onwards to Irish independence. That is frankly most unlikely. Indeed, I would describe this thesis as alternative history gone mad.
Firstly, there is little reason to believe that Britain would have permitted Ireland to secure independence peacefully at least until many decades after the second World War. Secondly, long before that point could have been reached, the growth of the welfare state within a United Kingdom of which Ireland remained a part would have involved a scale of financial transfers from Britain to Ireland that would have made the whole of our island even more financially dependent upon Britain than Northern Ireland is today.
By the time that Britain might finally have been prepared peacefully to concede independence to our part of Ireland, the financial cost of such a separation would have been so great for our people - probably entailing a drop of 25 per cent or more in living standards - that it is highly unlikely that the Irish people would have been prepared to accept such a sudden and huge drop in their standard of living.
The truth is that we got out from under British rule just in time - at a moment when the cost of the break was still bearable, involving as it did only a small reduction in public service salaries and in the very limited social welfare provisions of that period. And, of course, without the independence thus secured in the aftermath of the Rising we could never have become a prosperous and respected state and member of the EU. For it is only because we became politically independent that we have enjoyed the power - which Northern Ireland lacks today - to adopt policies enabling us, somewhat belatedly, to catch up with the rest of Europe, including Britain, in terms of national output and living standards, and to join that Union in our own right, rather than as a subordinate region of the eurosceptic UK.
Without the impetus to early Irish independence provided by the Rising, it seems to me impossible to make a credible case for the emergence of a successful Irish State by the end of the 20th century. Indeed, I have never heard anyone even attempt to make a case for a successful Irish economy being achieved on the basis of a move to Home Rule rather than independence in the early 1920s.
It is only by ignoring completely this fundamental economic equation that those who seek to advocate retrospectively the delayed Home Rule route to independence have been able to give a spurious credibility to their case.
Of course, the men who launched the Rising were as unaware of what was to become in time the compelling economic case for early Irish independence, as they were unaware of the retrospective criticism they would face in the late 20th century because of the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland half-a-century after their initiative had culminated in the emergence of an independent Irish State. But we know - as they may have hoped, but could not have known - that within less than eight years their action would have brought into being an internationally-recognised independent State.
Desmond's Rising - an Autobiography by Desmond FitzGerald is republished today by Liberties Press.
Tomorrow: Eoin Ryan MEP on how his grandparents saw the Rising as just one step in a lifelong campaign