O’Connell Street’s remain following the bombing and violence of the 1916 Easter Rising.

by Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd

On August 20, 1916 Joyce Kilmer, the poet and journalist, interviewed Moira Regan, whom he described as a “slight gray-eyed girl with a charming flavor of County Wexford in her manner and in her voice,” for The New York Times magazine.

Moira Regan was a member of Cumann na mBan and had fought alongside her male comrades in the GPO as well as carrying urgent messages from one Republican outpost to another.

When the fight was over she stood outside the GPO and took one look back at the tricolor still flying over the building.

Her words capture eloquently what it means to see the birth of a nation.

“You cannot understand the joy of this feeling unless you have lived in a nation whose spirit has been crushed and then suddenly revived. I felt that evening when I saw the Irish flag floating over the Post Office in O’Connell Street that this was a thing worth living and dying for. I was absolutely intoxicated and carried away with joy and pride in knowing I had a nation.”

The GPO in the wake of the Rising

We still exult in that reality of nationhood every time we stand at Croke Park or the Aviva Stadium for the national anthem or travel abroad to international soccer tournaments, as the boys and girls in green will do this summer at Euro 2016.

Expression of identity is critical. In the North the Troubles only ended with the vital step of parity of esteem for both sides’ revered symbols. When The New York Times slammed the Irish rebels as subjects taking on their king they missed the point completely. What vote was ever held to sanction that?

The revisionists who argue that economic and political relations with Britain were improving before the Rising forget that in 1916 an alien flag flew and a foreign army reigned. “History proves that people will always resist occupation,” wrote current UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in The New York Times recently.

Given Ireland’s history of refusing to bend the knee and the many broken promises on Home Rule, a new uprising was inevitable.

Unlike John Redmond, the leaders of 1916 grasped the essential fact that Home Rule had failed. Even James Joyce, Ireland’s most famous exile, had lots to say about foolishly depending on Home Rule.

James Joyce

Writing in 1907, Joyce was deeply suspicious of what he satirically called the “Home Rule Comet,” a celestial body he said was sent over the Irish cosmos by the British Parliament every few years when Home Rule fever began to swirl. The comet Joyce wrote was “vague, distant but as punctual as ever,” tantalizing but never delivering.

There were many others, most notably the Rising’s leaders who felt exactly the way that Joyce did on Home Rule, if not even stronger. They saw the Curragh Mutiny by British Army elite in 1914, when 61 officers offered their resignation rather than fight against the Loyalist UVF if Home Rule was imposed.

They knew of the sedition of Bonar Law, the Tory leader and future Prime Minister, when he stated in 1912 at an Anti-Home Rule rally at Blenheim Palace, Churchill’s ancestral home, that he could “imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them.”

Despite this, John Redmond continued with his delusion, even stating in Parliament at one point that he had convinced Edward Carson, the Unionist politician, of Home Rule for all of Ireland. Carson, with his secret assurances no such home rule would be granted, must have been smirking up his sleeve.

When would Home Rule have come? We might still be waiting for it given the Versailles Treaty, the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic, the Second Word War, the Cold War – so many crises, so many reasons to abstain from acting. Britain was busy drawing arbitrary borders on maps all over the Middle East which haunt us to this day.

John Redmond

Yet Redmond took the terrible gamble of recommending tens of thousands of young Irishmen fight in World War I, where 30,000 or more Irish lost their lives in order to prove his thesis of the Home Rule paradox that fighting for Britain was the best way to achieve freedom from it.

In the days following Easter 1916, he utterly misread the impact of the Rising, praising the British: “It has been dealt with with firmness, which was not only right, but it was the duty of the Government to so deal with it.”

Even Edward Carson had warned the British government to be careful who they punished.

In contrast to Redmond, most of Irish America quickly saw the Home Rule Bill as the latest illusionary comet sent by British leadership. Most of the Irish in America traced their roots back to the Famine, so it’s hardly surprising that theirs was a rebel tradition much more in tune with the men and women of 1916 than with John Redmond’s paradoxical call to fight for the British in order to free the Irish.

The historical inflexion point for the Irish Americans was not Home Rule but the American Revolution, which began in 1775 when farmers and peasants took up arms against a far superior army and somehow defeated them.

As is often noted, most Americans started off the war as Loyalists but ended as Republicans or Patriots. Ironically it was an Englishman, Thomas Paine, and his hugely influential “Common Sense” with its rallying cry to fight that convinced many of them.

Empires and monarchies were never to be trusted, Paine hammered home, and the Great War proved him right. A pity Redmond never took note.

For Irish America, once news of the Easter Rising broke, the great mission was first to get President Woodrow Wilson to speak out, but while the patrician president agreed with them heartily in public, he mercilessly mocked them in private as Professor Robert Schmuhl’s excellent new book on the Easter Rising – “Ireland’s Exiled Children” – makes clear.

Short of gaining Wilson’s support, the Irish American leaders wanted to turn back the global tidal wave of condemnation surrounding The Rising.

Significantly, their media sensed the importance of the moment long before far more august publications who dismissed it as mere rabble-rousing mayhem.

Clan Na Gael leader John Devoy, in many ways the forgotten architect of the Easter Rising, along with Philadelphia-based Irish native John Joe McGarrity, wrote in his Gaelic American newspaper that “the serial and ill informed men who write the editorials have been airing their ignorance this week over ‘riots started by a Sinn Fein mob in Dublin.’”

Calling such comments absurd and childish, Devoy instead proclaimed the Rising “the most formidable insurrection that had taken place in Ireland since 1798.”

History would bear that judgement out to be totally correct, as Devoy, the flinty old fenian, understood better than most the power of the dream of nationhood and the larger meaning of 1916.

Roger Casement and John Devoy

The New York Times, on the other hand, approved of the executions, stating, “War is a stern business and the subject who sets himself against his King ….can hardly expect mercy.” Except he wasn’t their king.

All the major Irish papers backed the executions, so it fell to Devoy and a very few others to put forward the defense of the Rising.

For Irish America, Easter 1916 fell into a coherent timeline of defence and physical force, a continuum that began with the Dissenter Irish who fought with Washington for independence and establishing the first democracy.

Then there was the gallant Irish role in the American Civil War: 250,000 or so Irish fought on the Union side to end slavery and partition and were so effective that the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis personally sent an Irish priest and Rebel hero Father John Bannon, to Ireland to try and convince the clergy to stop emigration.

The American Civil War neatly dovetailed with the Fenian movement, with Fenian membership a badge of honor in the Union ranks. The Fenian bonds that were sold at the time to be redeemed when Ireland was a nation show an Irish Union army soldier rising from his knees, victorious, as an Irish speirbhean or female goddess beckons him to fight one more time for Ireland, which shimmers in the distance.

The Irish Americans always believed a fight for Ireland would come again soon – and it did.

To Devoy and millions of Irish Americans, the men and women of 1916 were freedom’s sons and daughters as surely as the Americans at Lexington and Concord and the Irish Union soldiers at Gettysburg were. They remain the same today. “Gentlemen you have a country” Thomas Davis said to an earlier generation of insurgents.

Not until 1916 did that come true.