Doing Justice to our 1916 Patriots

David Quinn, the prominent Catholic commentator, in his column in the Irish Independent (18 March) suggests that the 1916 rising was immoral and not necessary for our freedom to be achieved. Patsy McGarry, religious correspondent for the Irish Times is also promoting the same theme. They are following in the footsteps of many commentators who follow Fr. Shaw S.J. (Studies 1972) who began the trend of denigrating the ideals and motives of the 1916 patriots. All of this reminds me  of  Doctor Samuel Johnson who said ‘The Irish are a very fair people, they never speak well of one another’. A few years ago a poll was held in the UK to find out who they would chose as the greatest Englishman of all time. Protestant UK chose a canonised Catholic saint for that distinctive honour despite his alleged over-zealous pursuit of Protestant heretics. The British people obviously respected St Thomas More for his idealism, integrity and sacrifice. Any other nation would cherish patriots of the moral integrity, idealism, culture, education, political and artistic gifts that Patrick Pearse and James Connolly possessed and gave totally to their country, not denigrate them. James Mary Plunkett wrote perhaps one of the most beautiful religious poem of the twentieth century ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’. All of the 1916 leaders were described by our greatest poet William Butler Yeats, their contemporary, as ‘the ablest and most fine natured of our young men’.

Michael Kirke in the first of two Position Paper articles on the 1916 Rising states there was ‘a strong undercurrent of rebellion against the Catholic ethos of Ireland’ amongst the leaders of the rebellion and he quotes from Roy Foster’s book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation 1890-1923 to support this without mentioning that Roy Foster is noted as the foremost revisionist Irish historian. In a forward to a book on the writings of Patrick Pearse by Seamus O’Buachalla, Ireland’s most distinguished modern historian F. S. Lyons (TCD based) refutes any notion that Pearse was obsessed by a blood lust or an unseemly attraction to violence. He called an end to the Rising out of his concern for the of loss innocent civilian lives. I was privileged, to know the late Capuchin priest Fr Leonard Coughlan a great pro-life and pro-family defender whose community ministered to the executed leaders and indeed to many of the dead and wounded combatants and civilians during the Rising. It was he who first informed me of how fervently Catholic all of the executed leaders were and he took great care and effort in putting into print the memoirs of his community and on to tape and later on cds their invaluable contributions to the history of the Rising and the last days of the executed leaders.

To those who wish to know and appreciate the calibre of these men and the depth of their faith, I also suggest a marvellous book by Piaras F. MacLochlainn Last Words, letters and statements of the executed after the Rising at Easter 1916. Another historian who has done great work to restore the reputation of the 1916 leaders is Dr. Brian P. Murphy in his brilliant book Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal. Dr Murphy, who is a member of the Benedictine community of Glenstal Abbey, has restored an old garden in the monastery and planted in it sixteen trees to commemorate all of the 1916 executed leaders and has a very informative article: Limerick’s Rebel Prelate in History Ireland’s 1916 edition of their magazine. He also has challenged John Bruton’s often repeated contention that the 1916 Rising was not necessary and destroyed the work and career of his great hero John Redmond (Irish Times, March 30, 2016). I hope to visit Dr Murphy who I know and view these memorial trees in this centenary year.

It is believed that Pope Benedict XV blessed the Irish Volunteers before the Rising: he certainly was aware that it was to take place, and did not condemn it beforehand. His Secretary of State, Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, unaware of that, issued a condemnation of the Rising after it. Gasparri had to tone down his attitude in a second telegram. Seven of the Catholic bishops of Ireland condemned the Rising in its aftermath, most of the Catholic bishops kept their counsel, and three more or less supported it: Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick, Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and most significantly Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin.

There was the threat of conscription by the British from the start of the war in 1914. Most of the Catholic bishops of Ireland urged the men of Ireland to enlist in the British Army. I find it extraordinary that many of those who question the morality of the 1916 Rising never question the morality of the First World War and those leaders and their generals who could allow and tolerate that in the first two days of the opening offensive in the Somme The Ulster Volunteer Force (36^th Ulster Brigade) lost 5,000 men. The National Volunteers, who fought in the 10^th division lost 9,000 men and the 16^th Irish Division was practically wiped out. An estimated 35,000 Irishmen were killed in the First World War; 20,000 of them Catholics and approximately 200,000 Irishmen were injured or maimed in body or mind. Actually some hold that over 60,000 were killed. Pope Benedict XV in 1917 described the war as a ‘useless slaughter’, and a war fought for economic reasons.

When you consider the appalling slaughter of the First World War the 450 deaths (excluding the sixteen leaders executed) during the insurrection seems very small. The majority of these deaths were caused by the British themselves in their ruthless crushing of the rebels; a fact admitted by Michael Portillo a former British Cabinet Minister in a recent BBC documentary on the Rising from a British perspective. Of the dead, 230 were civilians, 64 were volunteers out of a total rebel army of 1,558 and 2,614 volunteers were wounded. 116 British soldiers were killed, 368 wounded and 9 missing. 16 policemen were killed and 29 were wounded. Unlike the British Generals in the First World War and in the 1916 Rising, Pearse sought to seek the minimum loss of life of his men and that of innocent civilians. The First World War was not a just war. By 1918, 27 of the 31 Catholic Bishops of Ireland considered force justified in opposing the imposition of conscription by the British. Perhaps they felt responsible, for having sent so many young Irishmen to their death in the British Army.

The 1916 Leaders believed their Rising would lead to victory eventually. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher-theologian, was a friend of the late Garret FitzGerald’s father, Desmond, a 1916 veteran. Maritain considered the 1916 Leaders to have been ‘a prophetic shock minority’, and their cause just. He was happy that they were willing to submit their decision to the popular vote when the opportunity would arise and did so a couple years after the Rising. We must not forget that when the 1916 Rising occurred Britain held one fifth of the world in its empire and they held their subject peoples under control by force of arms and the largest naval force on earth. In the BBC documentary mentioned above Michael Portillo asked the internationally respected war correspondent Robert Fisk whether Ireland would have achieved its freedom from the British Empire without recourse to arms, his answer was an emphatic NO.

Michael Kirke and David Quinn and other historians and commentators who blame the 1916 leaders for the thirty years of violence in North are wrong. The real cause of the decades of Northern violence is not reliance on 1916 thinking, but rather the grossly unjust drawing of the Border in 1925 and decades of state tolerated anti-Catholic discrimination and bigotry. Whatever about their followers, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins all accepted that a special arrangement would be needed for the North-East, and would have supported a just deal on the Border. The French are not ashamed of their revolution a few centuries ago and they have reason to be in that their revolutionaries massacred over 700,000 of their people in Brittany and West France in order to impose their Liberty, Equality and Fraternity ideals and make France Une et Indivisible. Our patriots died for us and we should be proud of them and preserve the places where they lived, where they fought and where they died. I am overjoyed, therefore that the relatives of the 1916 leaders recently won a landmark court battle to have the buildings and surrounding areas of Moore Street declared a historic battle site and be protected from destruction and being turned into another needless shopping centre and that the laneway where The O’Rahilly died and places where Pearse and the other 1916 leaders surrendered will not be destroyed by the developer’s wrecking ball and crane. It now has the potential to be turned into a very successful cultural and museum area with perhaps an Irish army base where the changing of the guard can be by viewed by millions of visitors from home and overseas. Kilmainam Jail was saved from destruction by patriotic volunteers and now is one of the State’s most successful tourist attractions and is visited by about 1,300 people a day. Thanks to the 1916 relatives long campaign, Moore street will become a must see visitor destination.

Let us not be ashamed of our 1916 patriots and to be fair the majority of our citizens are justly proud of them as demonstrated by the massive turnout for the State’s centenary commemoration of the men and women of 1916 on Easter Sunday and the massive numbers of people who attended 1916 events on Easter Monday. It is some of our commentators and historians who seem to have a problem. Perhaps they should study President Higgin’s excellent speech to the relatives of 1916 on Easter Saturday at the RDS when he stated that the negative aspects of the 1916 Rising have been constantly noted but the negative aspects of British Imperialism ignored or not highlighted by some commentators. The  President said: ‘the assumptions of the imperialist mind: that those dominated in any colony were lesser in human terms, in language, culture and politics. The historical evidence for this view was all around, in housing, hunger, emigration, exclusion and language loss. The cultural freedom allowed was a freedom to imitate and ingratiate.’ Despite our freedom some seem to wish to continue to act in that way, the result of what the late Sean McBride, a one time neighbour of mine, described to me in a conversation, as the servile mind or slave mentality formed by centuries of colonial rule