Mary McAleese's triumphalist address at UCC last weekend also probably ranks as among the most imbecilic ever by any president, ever. It's as if we hadn't just gone through a quarter-century of catastrophic, 1916-inspired violence, writes Kevin Myers.
Two things happened at Easter, 1916. There was a proclamation of the Republic by Patrick Pearse, and there was an armed uprising by an unrepresentative group of men, most of whom were utterly ignorant of the proclamation and its contents. It is historically wrong to suggest that the two were inextricably related. And until the last minute (when it became too late for most of them to back out, though some did) most of the insurgents thought they were going on yet further manoeuvres, as they had done every previous Sunday.
The proclamation declared: "The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens." It might more honestly have then added - "unless they are Dublin Metropolitan Policemen", as the unarmed Constable James O'Brien discovered when he was shot dead by Sean Connolly outside Dublin Castle minutes after Pearse had finished his GPO speech. The similarly unarmed Constable Michael Lahiff in St Stephen's Green made the same terminal discovery some time later when Countess Markievicz gunned him down. Constable William Frith perceived his rights in this new Republic when he was murdered in the bedroom of Store Street police station.
At Mount Street Bridge, the harmless, armless old buffers of the Georgius Rex ex-servicemen's association discovered how the new republic cherished them when they were massacred on their regular route march to Ticknock. Five were killed, and seven more were injured.
Nor did his new Republic's guarantees of rights and liberties extend to Irish soldiers of the crown, 36 of whom were killed, with another 118 injured. Nor were equal rights, opportunities (et cetera) extended to the RIC, 14 of whom were killed, and another 23 injured.
From the moment of its inception, these Irishmen were intentionally excluded from the "equal" citizenship of the Republic (though the citizenship of the graveyard lay ahead). Hundreds of other Irish civilians found their citizenship of the new Republic permanently terminated during Easter Week, 36 of them going to their graves unidentified; and the President last week called the men who caused their deaths "heroes".
There are few accounts of how such victims died. Martin Walton, a 16-year-old volunteer, provided one. "When I arrived then at Jacob's, the place was surrounded by a howling mob roaring at the Volunteers inside, 'Come out to France and fight, you lot of so-and-so slackers'. And I shouted up to the balustrade, let me in, let me in. And then I remember the very first blood I ever saw. There was a big, very big, tall woman with something heavy in her hand and she came across and lifted her hand to make a bang at me. One of the Volunteers upstairs saw this and fired and I just remember seeing her face and head disappear as she went down like a sack." Scratch one more citizen. My - it's all go round here, isn't it?
Now, I know this "republic" that was declared in 1916 very well indeed. It is not a republic at all, but the formal inauguration of a political cult of necrophilia whose most devoted adherents over the past 36 years have been the Provisional IRA. Each Easter during the 25 years of the Troubles they rededicated themselves to this same Republic which "guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens". And each year, like Aztecs placating their heathen gods, they went out and killed more of its citizens.
If Pearse had simply read out his proclamation and declared it to be his election manifesto, that would have been one thing. So too would it have been if he had declared the volunteers would use arms to prevent conscription. Can't argue with that. But to have made his proclamation and then immediately to have violated its central claim - its guarantee of equal rights to all its citizens - means that it was worthless. It comes down to this, always, always, always. How do you judge a man: by his words or his deeds? Naturally, those sick 1916ophiles never dwell upon actual events. They intellectualise
upon various sanctimonious abstractions of the Rising, with the Proclamation as the focus, as if the entire affair had been a poetry festival, allowing indefinite scope for pious, murder-free exegesis. This is where the President - naturally - focused her address. However, once one starts discussing the sheer murderousness of the Rising, it gets rather messy: for 1916 in essence was a triumph of proto-Provoism.
I've written often enough about this - and do you know, no one ever answers the same few questions that I always ask. Such as: what right had the 1916 insurgents to start killing innocent Irish people in Dublin? What right? (No, no, no: don't ask what right the British had to rule Ireland. That's quite another question, to which, of course, the poor victims of the 1916 insurgents had no answer.) Next question. Why had none of the signatories of the Proclamation, not one of them, ever stood for parliament? No answer? So here's another question. How could they possibly call the butchers of Belgium "gallant allies"? Silence, again, eh?
OK, stay mum for this final one: how can supposedly civilised people today "celebrate" an orgy of violence in which hundreds of innocent Irish people died? More tomorrow.