The fantasy history of the 1916 Easter Rising

Posted by Jim on January 23, 2016

By An Sionnach Fionn

Liam Kennedy is a professor of economic and social history at Queen’s
University Belfast, which is somewhat shocking given that he seems to
have, at best, a passing familiarity with the latter half of his chosen
speciality. Here he is in the Irish Independent, salami-slicing Irish
history to suit his particular tastes. A little bit of this, a little
bit of that, and you end up with a dog’s dinner of a historical
analysis:

“A small, unrepresentative bunch of fanatical nationalists, none of whom
had been elected, presumed to speak on behalf of the Irish people and
plunge them, without so much as a by-your-leave, into the most terrible
of all states, that of war and its associated terrors.”

Nope, he’s not referring to John Redmond, the head of the Irish
Parliamentary Party and the self-proclaimed “leader of nationalist
Ireland” in 1916, who cajoled, heckled and bullied tens of thousands of
Irish men into the service of the fanatically nationalistic British
Empire, knowing that many of them would be doomed to lie torn and
dismembered beneath the battlefields of Europe, Asia and Africa.

“It was the plain people of inner-city Dublin who died in their hundreds
to satisfy the blood-drenched fantasies of less-than-impressive poets
and marginal figures on the Irish political scene.”

Those “marginal figures” of Irish politics were responsible for the
deaths of less than 500 “plain people” in 1916. In contrast, the
mainstream figures of Irish politics were responsible for the deaths of
at least 15,000 “plain people” in 1916. The supposed nationalist,
Redmond, and his ideological rival, the unionist demagogue Edward
Carson, contrived between them to bring about the deaths – the
industrial-scale murder – of some 35,000 khaki-clad men and boys from
Ireland. Both did so while proclaiming their loyalty to a
“blood-drenched” imperium ruled from London, Redmond condemning those
who declined to fight as, “…running away in the hour of their Empire’s
need.”

“Easter 1916 was a pivotal moment in Irish history. It copper-fastened
Partition and deformed Irish politics. How could fellow Irish people of
a unionist persuasion, who made up a quarter of the population, even
think of an all-Ireland state after an insurrection that proudly
proclaimed its alliance with the armies of the German Kaiser?”

The partition of Ireland was copper-fastened when the British separatist
minority in the country, the unionists in the north-east under the
malign tutelage of Carson, took up arms in 1912 against UK legislation
to enact limited “home rule”. When they adopted terrorism and the threat
of terrorism in pursuit of their rebellion, Ireland’s deformation was
complete. And who armed the would-be insurrectionists? The German
Kaiser. And who declared that the rule of “…Germany and the German
Emperor would be preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and
the Molly Maguires”? None other than Edward Carson, leader and founder
of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Kennedy’s counter-factual fantasies are echoed in those of conservative
politician-turned-presenter, Ivan Yates, also writing for the British
apologist rag that is the Irish Independent:

“Constitutional nationalism is discommoded by self-appointed violent
Republicans, who sought no electoral mandate from voters. Redmondites
and pacifist traditions still maintain we’d have won freedom from
British imperialism without taking up arms.”

From at least 1902 the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the
“Redmondites”, had an acknowledged army of street and parish thugs,
which it used to beat its opponents into the ground. This was the
Ancient Order of Hibernians, or AOH, an extremist force grown so
ferocious that the two general elections held in 1910 were widely
regarded as the bloodiest in living memory. AOH men openly displayed
firearms at hustings and rallies, appeared with cudgels and batons
during parades and demonstrations, raided or broke up rival meetings,
including those of the All-for-Ireland League and the politically
incipient Sinn Fein. By 1914 John Redmond had added an actual army, the
Irish National Volunteers (INV), to his “baton men”. The IPP now had a
military wing, the INV, with Redmond as the supreme leader of both,
while his cohorts worked as gun-smugglers to arm the new Redmondite
legion.

So who is more reprehensible on the scales of historical judgement?
Patrick Pearse, a progressive militant who sought a modern democratic
republic, a sovereign and independent Ireland where all of the children
of the nation would be cherished equally, or John Redmond, a
conservative militant who was ready to accept a devolved, partitioned
Ireland within the United Kingdom, a province committed to the onward
march of the UK’s imperial hegemony over the peoples of the Earth?