It was, I suppose, to want too much to hope that Pat Rabbitte would simply condemn the Taoiseach's unilateral decision to revive the commemorations for the Easter Rising, on the grounds that it was a ghastly and anti-democratic abomination.
Instead, he wrote approvingly of James Connolly: "Connolly's rising was a strike, not against Britain, but against British imperialism, and the social conditions it generated in Ireland."
That the Rising is a central feature in our history cannot be denied, in much the same way that the Famine is. But it is a horror: an unspeakable horror in which unspeakable deeds were done to living human beings, just as they were in Flanders and Picardy at the same time, and no one in his right mind today would dream of celebrating the contemporaneous events in those places.
What was the moral pretext for the violence of 1916? What justified the taking of human lives, the vast majority of them Irish, both then and in the years to come? Well, consider the police raid, one month before the Rising, on the shop beside Liberty Hall, which itself had secretly been turned into an arsenal and arms factory for James Connolly's Irish Citizens' Army.
When Connolly saw a policeman looking through some documents in the shop, he drew his pistol and said: "Drop those or I'll drop you." The officer put the papers down and explained he had come to confiscate some outlawed publications. Connolly asked him for his warrant, and he replied that he didn't have one. Connolly ordered him out and he obligingly withdrew. Later an Insp Bannon arrived with four men and a warrant, which Connolly made him read out aloud. Connolly said the warrant did not apply to the hall, so the officers again left.
Now was this in any sense a tyranny which justified homicide? Moreover, would it have been so terrible if Insp Bannon had arrested Connolly for drawing a gun on a police officer, then forced his way into Liberty Hall and found the munitions hidden behind firebricks in a fireplace, thereby forestalling the Rising? Of course we cannot say how a what-if history might have been; but we can say that Insp Bannon and his meticulous adherence to the rule of law was infinitely preferable to what happened in Dublin four weeks later, when hundreds of innocent people were killed by men who had never sought a national mandate of any kind.
To be sure, Connolly had run twice in Dublin Corporation elections for Wood Quay, but the electors were not fools - they rejected the ambitions of a Marxist lunatic who yearned for bloody class war. In 1915, Connolly wrote approvingly of the consequences of a future Rising: "Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord."
In other words, Connolly
was a war-mongering totalitarian-in-waiting, a proto-Lenin: not surprisingly, the Kaiser supported them both. And in return, the leaders of the 1916 Rising acclaimed the butchers of Belgium as "gallant allies". However, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union certainly did not approve of Connolly's antics. Ten days before the Rising, it effectively evicted him and his Irish Citizen Army from Liberty Hall, extracting from him an undertaking never to return.
So, contrary to almost everything taught as a matter of doctrine today, Connolly in no sense had the consent of the trade union or labour movements when he deployed the armed and largely illiterate lads of the ICA against the wholly unarmed colleagues of Insp Bannon. However, this profoundly immoral use of impressionable youngsters was matched by Pearse, who sent his pupils in St Enda's to war (though nearly half didn't show up).
So in 1916 it was Bannon and his men who held the banner of civilisation, not James Connolly, who at one stage during Easter week ordered his men to shoot looters. Very socialist indeed. Clearly, the Rising was utterly unconnected with improving the conditions of the poor (unless one includes killing them - including at least 28 children - in very large numbers, and thereby putting them all out of their misery).
Almost no intended goal has resulted from the Rising. Ireland is not Gaelic, not united and not constitutionally a republic. Ours is the most anglicised non-British country in the world, one which rebroadcasts all major British television services throughout its entire jurisdiction, and which has native editions of every major British newspaper. Our national media even report on English cricket. And by God, we are certainly not socialist, which explains our popularity with people from eastern Europe, who know a thing or two about true socialism.
Contrary to Pat Rabbitte's contention that British imperialism made Ireland poor, the reverse was true. In 1910, emigration notwithstanding, Ireland was one of the richest countries in a desperately poor world, and was more prosperous than, for example, Norway, Sweden, Italy and Finland. By 1970, self-governing Ireland, though untouched by the second World War, had become just about the poorest country in Europe.
In other words, 1916 propelled this country into a catastrophic trajectory from which one of its participants, the great Sean Lemass, finally strove to free us. In 1966, he signed a free trade treaty with Britain, symbolically undoing the central purpose of the Rising half a century before. Yet now, 90 years onward, once again, we are about to "celebrate" one of the most abysmal and politically dysfunctional episodes of blood-letting in Irish history.