Sir, – I attended the Reform Group seminar on September 18th on the passage of the Government of Ireland Act, 1914.
Some have put forward the proposition that the British government was never serious about granting home rule to Ireland. I think that I can ascertain the necessity for this line of argument – it’s all to do with an uneasiness about the legitimacy of the Easter Rebellion.
John Bruton raised the inconvenient truth that the Rising – led and fought overwhelmingly by people whose morality was set by reference to Roman Catholicism – did not satisfy the conditions necessary for a “just war”. While it may, possibly, have been defined as a “just cause” and of “right intention”, it was certainly not authorised by a “competent authority”, nor was it a “last resort”.
It is doubtful if the harm done (hundreds dead, the centre of Dublin devastated) was proportionate to its prospects of success (it had none).
In that context, the apologists for the Rising adopt two lines of reasoning to get around the problem. The first is to assert that the whole home rule business was a chimera, a mirage, that would never become a reality. Only armed rebellion would deliver “freedom”. That was not the perception of the vast mass of the Irish people in 1916; it would have negated what the entire leadership and followers of the Irish Parliamentary Party, from Parnell to Redmond, had stood for.
The second line of defence is that of “post-event justification”.
This reads history backwards, using the 1918 election results to validate retrospectively the 1916 rebellion.
It is exactly the sort of dangerous illogicality that has allowed the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin to justify their murderous campaign between 1968 and 1998. The end, in other words, always justifies the means. I am sure that your readers can see where that can lead.
I also got the sense at the seminar that Mr Bruton had a real grasp of the human tragedies that lie behind the Rising and the wars of 1919-23.
Prof Ronan Fanning suggested that, in the context of the Great War then raging, the fatalities of the Rising were “a drop in the ocean”.
Mr Bruton pointed out that this was a false comparison; the Rising’s casualties were additional; and, in his view, unnecessary. No death is “a drop in the ocean”; each left parents, children, lovers, siblings and friends bereft. Whatever about the military men and rebels, no-one asked those civilians who died whether they were happy to do so for Ireland.
Finally, it was also pointed out that the 1916 rebels’ appeal to “our gallant allies in Europe” in the Proclamation was utterly counterproductive, since it ensured that the Irish separatist case was ignored at the Versailles peace conference. The British, the French and the Americans were not going to treat with people who had openly sided with those posing an existential threat to their states. – Yours, etc,
IAN d’ALTON,
Rathasker Heights,
Naas, Co Kildare.
Sir, – I am driven to wonder what John Bruton hopes to achieve by his repetition of the thesis that Ireland would have done better if the violent events of 1916 to 1922 had not occurred.
Leaving aside his limited view of the Irish side of the equation – noble-hearted John Redmond gently leading us all across Jordan to a rather inadequate land promised, tardily and reluctantly, by London – it is his perception of the Britain of the period that surely calls for remark.
The British Empire had no experience of or inclination towards letting bits go. Eventually fortified by victory in the Great War, it tended to be pugnacious in the defence of its God-given dominion over palm and pine. Hence also in 1916 the response had been solely military, including the inevitable gunboat, and the drumhead dispatch of the leaders and signatories. That reaction was not a British policy mistake; it was entirely consistent with the British approach to native trouble wherever it arose.
To suggest that by mere acceptance of the Home Rule Act, we might have avoided revolution and the independence struggle, or negotiated better terms leading to separation (the essential aim of the Irish majority over the centuries) is unprofitable speculation, lacking even amusement value.
Reference to current events in Scotland, which has been made, brings sharply to view how very different today’s PC and welfare state Britain has become, with its enormous national debt and rather fewer gunboats to its name. The Scottish nationalists have it easy. – Yours, etc,
DAVID NELIGAN,
Silchester Road,
Glenageary, Co Dublin.