Authors: Gabriel Doherty
The opposing camp, in contrast, repudiated such a connection, and employed a variety of arguments to reinforce their case. Martin Mansergh contrasted the failure of the Provisional movement, during its armed campaign, to gain anything close to majority support even within the nationalist community of Northern Ireland, let alone south of the border, with the ‘legitimate national revolution’ of 1916–21, which ‘quite rapidly won and retained the democratic support of the people’.
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Likewise Willie O’Dea was emphatic in his repeated insistence that the only legitimate armed group within the state was the Irish army, which alone had the right to style itself Óglaigh na hÉireann,
72
and Michael McDowell counterpointed the ethical and conventional (and thus, of course, doomed) military tactics of the 1916 insurgents with the terroristic methods of the Provisional IRA.
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One of the more interesting contributors in this regard was Professor John A. Murphy, who, in the course of two articles written in the build-up to the parade, highlighted the uncertainties felt by many on this specific question. In the first he stated that he had never subscribed to the view that 1916 was the wellspring for the Provisional IRA’s armed campaign, but rather insisted that ‘the Rising was such a powerful dynamic that the state should not let the initiative in celebrating it pass into Provo hands’.
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In the second, however, in the course of a detailed critique of the language used in, and the underlying ideas of, the 1916 Proclamation, he suggested that its most disturbing phrase was ‘through us’ – i.e. that war would be waged by ‘a self-appointed apostolic elite, a “prophetic shock minority”, who regarded their idealistic convictions as sufficient justification for their
insurrectionary violence in the name of “the people”. Essentially, this has always been the position of the IRA.’
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One aspect of Provisional Sinn Féin’s attitude towards the commemoration must be briefly mentioned before moving on, and that was the absence of the party’s leader, Gerry Adams, from the reviewing stand of the military parade.
76
During his speech to the party’s árd fheis he had (somewhat ironically in the eyes of some) criticised the militaristic nature of the parade, and expressed a preference for an ‘inclusive, civic and cultural celebration’.
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His absence was defended by his party colleague Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (who was also absent from the ceremony, as was the party’s vice president Martin McGuinness) on the grounds of ‘prior commitments’ – although the Taoiseach somewhat tartly observed that he had given everyone seven months’ notice of the event.
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The range of activities undertaken by local authorities to mark the Rising was, if anything, even more impressive than those organised by the state, when one bears in mind the more limited resources available to them – albeit, inevitably, the response was by no means evenly spread across the country. The local commemorations also tended to be characterised by less manifest party-political differences than their national equivalents. Dublin City Council was, naturally, one of the more active centres. It organised a series of lunchtime lectures by several experts on such topics as the Irish Citizen Army, the role of Éamonn Ceannt, and the contributions of two female participants, Dr Kathleen Lynn and Helena Molony; produced a directory of locations in the city associated with the Rising and contemporaneous events; erected a commemorative plaque to Ceannt on his work-place at municipal buildings in Castle Street; made available through its website a previously unpublished eye-witness account of Easter Week; and held a minute’s silence in commemoration of the Citizen Army garrison in City Hall at noon on Monday 24 April (the precise anniversary of the start of the Rising).
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Most county councils also responded in some manner. Cork County Council, for example, arranged for a formal reading of the Proclamation at its meeting on 27 March, and for a letter to be sent to the Department of Education and Science calling on it to distribute copies of both the Proclamation and the national flag to all national schools in the state. Many such authorities – Donegal, Kerry, Westmeath, and Clare, for example – arranged exhibitions of material relating to the Rising and the independence struggle in county libraries and museums, with a pronounced emphasis upon the involvement of locals in the events. Waterford County
Council, amongst others, increased the provision of literature on the Rising for adults and children through its library service.
Many other local authority bodies were also involved, with noteworthy events organised by Ennis, Athy and Carlow Town Councils, and the Co. Kilkenny Vocational Education Committee, amongst many,
many
others.
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A
CADEMIC ACTIVITIES
One of the lasting achievements of the ninetieth anniversary commemorations of the Easter Rising will surely be its historiographical legacy. Both in the build up to 2006, and during the year itself, a plethora of titles – some of lasting value, others of more dubious merit – appeared in bookshops and, by degrees, worked their way into the thinking of the book-buying and reading public. It is no exaggeration to say that in this respect 2006 is second only to 1966 in terms of the quality of the academic studies produced; and by the time the publishing cycle has fully turned, it may be that the year will prove as significant in its impact upon scholarship on the Rising as it has undoubtedly been in terms of public opinion regarding it.
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Two full-length academic monographs about the Rising appeared during the period in question. The first, Michael Foy and Brian Barton’s,
The Easter Rising
,
is an updated version of a text that originally appeared in 1999 and, as such, inevitably does not incorporate the new source material that has come on stream in recent years.
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The second, Charles Townshend’s magisterial
Easter 1916: the Irish rebellion
,
made its appearance in 2005, and suffers from no such handicap.
83
At a more popular level Tim Pat Coogan’s illustrated account of the Rising, originally published in 2001, was re-issued in paperback form and sold well,
84
as did the similarly well-illustrated
Irish Times
book of the 1916 Rising, which was an expanded version of the special supplement produced by the paper mentioned above.
85
The title of Jonathan Githens-Mazer’s
Myths and memories of the Easter Rising
was slightly misleading, in that its focus was as much on the First World War as the Rising, although it did have a useful chapter on the concept of the Rising as a ‘cultural trigger point’.
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James Moran’s
Staging the Easter Rising
took a rather different slant on the events in Dublin in 1916, by examining the evolution of its theatrical and other representations in the decades following independence.
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Rather more grounded in archival material was Annie Ryan’s,
Witness: inside the Easter Rising
,
which utilised excerpts from a large number of Witness Statements from the Bureau of Military History to provide a detailed chronological narrative of the events of the Rising, with a welcome emphasis on the role of female participants.
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Owen McGee’s
The IRB: the Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the Land League to Sinn Féin
likewise made extensive use of original source material.
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A limited number of older titles were reprinted during the year. Garret FitzGerald’s edition of his father’s memoirs,
Desmond’s Rising: memoirs 1913 to Easter 1916
,
which had originally appeared in 1968, was issued in revised form by Liberties press.
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Likewise, L.G. Redmond Howard’s eyewitness account of Easter Week, which had been originally published in the immediate aftermath of the Rising, was re-published by the Aubane Historical Society as part of its on-going, and most welcome, programme of re-issuing neglected texts from the revolutionary period;
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and Seán
Cronin’s
Our own red blood: the story of the 1916 Rising
was re-issued after a thirty year gap.
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Two studies which took the General Post Office (GPO) as their focus also appeared during the year. The first,
GPO staff in 1916
,
was published by An Post and examined the impact of the Rising on the workings of the postal system in Ireland, and its staff at all levels. Keith Jeffery’s
The GPO and the Easter Rising
traversed similar ground in rather more detail.
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Six works examined different aspects of the rebellion from local perspectives. Two, published by Oxford University Press in 2005, supplied invaluable information on the evolution of nationalist politics in provincial Ireland (notably Connacht) in the decades leading up to the Rising, and, in one case, a few years after.
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The third, Marie Coleman’s
County Longford and the Irish revolution 1910–1923
,
adopted a similar approach, albeit on this occasion taking a single county as the focus of study.
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Two more focused primarily on the activities of the Irish Volunteers, in one case in Cork in the years prior to the Rising,
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and in the other in Roscommon in the years following.
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The final work, Lyn Ebenezer’s
Frongoch and the birth of the IRA
,
was slightly different in that it examined the role of the famed prison camp in creating a disciplined revolutionary cadre, but with a primary focus on its Welsh aspects.
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The anniversary also produced a rich crop of biographical studies. The most significant was Donal Nevin’s
James Connolly: ‘a full life’
,
the first full-length study of the man in several decades.
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The biggest disappointment was that Ruth Dudley Edwards, in reissuing her commanding biography
of Pearse, failed to update the text in any meaningful way, on the basis of the rather puzzling observation: ‘Little new material has appeared since 1977 [the date of original publication] and subsequent books and articles on Pearse have been tangential.’
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Two of the executed leaders of the Rising (Ceannt and MacDermott) were the focus of middling length studies,
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a third (Casement) the object of an excellent edited volume of essays,
102
while a fourth (Joseph Plunkett) featured prominently in his sister’s memoir of the period.
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There was also a welcome re-appearance of Jack White’s autobiography.
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One cannot finish this section without reference to the success of
Recollections of 1916 and its Aftermath
,
a hybrid publication which incorporated excerpts from dozens of interviews with survivors of the Rising, undertaken over many years, together with the interviews themselves, supplied on compact disc.
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The full version of the publication (which runs to thirty such compact discs) is a historical source of undoubted value.
Historical, political and religious journals also provided a range of material for the reading public. Pride of place in this respect must go to
History Ireland
,
whose March–April 2006 issue was entirely given over to various aspects of the Rising, with articles on Seán McLoughlin, the Citizen Army, the Rising in Galway, the 1966 commemorations and an acerbic critique of the 2006 official commemorations by Professor Paul Bew. Not surprisingly the defence forces’ journal
An Cosantóir
also produced a memorial number, a double-sized issue in April–May, which explored various aspects of Easter Week from a military perspective. Both the
BBC History Magazine
and
History Today
also included articles on the Rising in their April numbers, with journals as diverse as
The Word
,
Village
,
The Phoenix
,
Irish Political Review
and
INC News
offering information and opinion on both the Rising and the commemoration from a range of perspectives.
In addition to this remarkable level of written output there were, of course, other academic activities organised to mark the event. The university sector, for example, organised a number of conferences, of varying size and scope (in addition, of course, to the event held in University College Cork which was the wellspring for this volume). Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin), in fact, organised two such events: the first, ’1916: then and now’, was a joint enterprise between the Ireland Institute and the university’s Historical Society and ran over two days; while the second, ‘The 1916 Rising: new perspectives and arguments’, was held a week later. University College Dublin adopted a more interdisciplinary approach, the topic of its venture being ‘The life and after-life of P.H. Pearse’, a two day
bi-lingual event split between UCD and the Pearse Museum in Rathfarnham. The Centre for Human Settlement and Historical Change in the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) adopted a markedly different approach, with its seminar ’1916: local dimensions’ in May offering a welcome focus on events during Easter Week outside Dublin, while NUI Maynooth also organised an open debate in which both staff and students participated.
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