Denigrating the People of 1916 by Gerry Adams

Posted by Jim on August 9, 2014

 

Former taoiseach John Bruton is on a crusade to revive Redmondism in
Irish politics and to denigrate the men and women who gave us the
Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the 1916 Rising.

Last month Mr Bruton said in London that the Rising damaged the Irish
psyche. The other day he said it was “completely unnecessary” and that
any State commemorations of the Rising should not “retrospectively
justify violence”.

The basis for Mr Bruton’s argument is his claim that the placing of Home
Rule “on the statute book” by the British government in September 1914
was enough to make the Rising and the struggle for Irish independence
superfluous.

If only our ancestors had the wisdom and insight of Mr Bruton; if only
he had been there to tell them the error of their ways. Mar eadh.

Mr Bruton thinks Home Rule “on the statute book” was so great an event
that the Irish Government should commemorate it next month. So let us
examine exactly what happened in Westminster in September 1914.

The Home Rule Bill, providing for an extremely limited form of
devolution for Ireland, within the UK and British Empire, was at its
final stage.

Against this bill, the British opposition Conservative and Unionist
Party waged an unrelenting campaign.

The Tories had seized on the issue of Home Rule as the most effective
weapon to use against the Liberals.

Leading members of the British landed aristocracy and senior military
figures avidly supported threats of civil war if Home Rule was
implemented. This culminated in the arming of the Ulster Volunteer Force
and the anti-Home Rule mutiny by British army officers at the Curragh.

Under that pressure, the Liberal government and John Redmond agreed in
principle that Ireland should be partitioned rather than have North-East
Ulster included under Home Rule.

In September 1914, with the war just weeks old, the Liberal government
pulled one of the greatest strokes ever attempted by a British
government. It enacted the Home Rule Bill but suspended it until the end
of the war when an amending bill would be passed to provide for
partition.

In return for this, John Redmond pledged the lives of tens of thousands
of young Irishmen to the British war effort and embarked on a recruiting
campaign for the army.

Roger Casement described Home Rule “on the statute book” as “a
promissory note payable only after death”.

James Connolly called it “a carefully staged pantomime to fool
nationalist Ireland” and said that, in return, Redmond’s party would
“send forth more thousands of Irish men and boys to manure with their
corpses the soil of a foreign country”.

And in a phrase that still echoes today, Connolly declared: “Yes, ruling
by fooling is a great British art — with great Irish fools to practice
on.”

Connolly and Casement were correct in their prediction. It is estimated
that well over 30,000 Irishmen died in the First World War. The exact
number will never be known. A great number of them were induced to join
up by Redmond’s promise of Home Rule for Ireland and by Edward Carson’s
promise of no Home Rule for Ulster.

Isn’t it strange then that Mr Bruton is so worried that honouring the
men and women of Easter 1916 would retrospectively justify violence when
he has nothing to say about the role of Redmond and his party in sending
tens of thousands of Irishmen to fight Germans and Austrians and Turks
with whom Ireland had no quarrel? Was John Redmond not a man of
violence? It is hugely important that we remember these events as a
nation on our own terms.

It is right that those Irish people who died in the First World War and
those who survived it should be remembered. Their families have every
right to honour their courage.

But this does not mean ignoring the fact that Ireland, as a submerged
nation within the UK, was carried into the war without any say in the
matter.

We should look at the war from an Irish point of view. It was a war of
empires ruled by privileged elites who cared little for the lives of the
millions they threw into battle.

The Irish experience of the war up to 1916 was one of the factors that
led to the Easter Rising. And after the Rising and the executions and
repression that followed, many Irishmen who had fought in the British
army rejected that army for good. Some of them joined the IRA.

The notion that Britain had fought “for the freedom of small nations”
was exposed as hypocrisy when Britain refused to recognise the First
Dail Eireann.

Mr Bruton does no service to the memory of the Irish dead of World War
One by denigrating the men and women of Easter 1916.

I suspect that behind Mr Bruton’s Redmondite crusade is a fear, not of
violence, but of the Proclamation.

You see, the Proclamation enshrines principles and commitments to
equality and Irish sovereignty that still challenge the privileged in
our society. It is a commitment to a rights-based society in Ireland
with equality for all our citizens.

That is why the Proclamation should be at the centre of all our
celebrations and commemorations of the great national and international
event that was the 1916 Easter Rising.