Underlying the President's dreadful speech at UCC last weekend was the clear predication that Irish nationalism was invented with the 1916 insurgency, writes Kevin Myers.
Thus, wiped from our public history, yet again, were the achievements of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who two years before had peacefully secured Home Rule. So Ireland in 1916 stood on the verge of self-government, once the Great War was over. Then along came the murderous lunatics. . .
We cannot remotely guess what path Home Rule Ireland might have followed without the Rising. But we can certainly deny that the Irish nationalism resulting from Easter 1916 was the absurdly benign confection of Mary McAleese's fantasies: "[not] the domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over others", but, "from the start. . . a multilateral enterprise, attempting to escape the dominance of a single class, and in our case a largely foreign class, into a wider world".
This is utter rubbish. Between 1920 and 1925, some 50,000 Irish Protestants were effectively driven out of the 26 counties. Another 10,000 Protestant artisans left Dublin. Thousands of (mostly Catholic) RIC men were forced into exile, and attacks on rural Protestants were widespread in the new State. When King George VII was crowned in 1938, some of the remaining Protestants in West Cork gathered in a church to hear the BBC radio report on the ceremony, with the doors locked, and with sturdy young men patrolling outside, on the look-out for attack. That's how confident the Protestant minority felt in the new "multilateral" Ireland.
Independent Ireland, first under Cumann na nGael, then Fianna Fáil, became an increasingly intolerant and confessional State. The sale of condoms, hitherto legal, was outlawed in 1926, and remained so for nearly 70 years, into the 1990s. The abolition of divorce laws inherited from the British followed. The official censor, James Montgomery, deliberately imposed Catholic teaching on all films. So he cut all mention of divorce from fictive films, as he frankly confessed, "even if it spoils the story." The same for "birth control", or abortion. All references deemed critical or offensive to the Catholic Church were similarly cut. And finally, under de Valera, the film censor's unofficial remit became official government policy, and the Catholic Church achieved special legal status not just over cinema, but over the entire State. The full Monty.
Thus Ireland retreated from the world, plummeting into poverty and cultural isolation. As I said recently: "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." For over 50 years, emigration was the destiny for the majority of Irish-born people.
Moreover, as dismaying as the factual inaccuracy of the President's address was its smugly sectarianly tribal silliness. Thus: "Those who think of Irish nationalism as narrow miss for example, the membership many of them had of a universal church which brought them into contact with a vastly wider segment of the world than that open to even the most travelled imperial English gentleman." Now this, surely, is one of the most fatuous observations in the entire history of the presidency (Come in, Catholic Paraguay: this is Catholic Ireland calling). A British imperialist at UCC comparably alleging that the empire provided a powerful cultural link between a crofter with his donkey in the Hebrides and a Mahratta lancer in Poona would have been hooted off the stage.
The truth is that the post-1916 convergence of both religion and nationality - the two becoming virtually indistinguishable by the 1950s - produced a cultural and economic disaster. Ireland was a bleak and impoverished madhouse, effectively run by a savage and parasitic caste of crozier-wielding bishops.
Yet this was an utter contradiction of what pre-1916 Irish nationalism had been or sought: then it had been neither isolationist nor narrow, and had attracted widespread Protestant support. (The 1914 Howth and Kilcoole gun-running operations to the Irish Volunteers, and the Gaelic revival, were largely Protestant affairs.) Tom Kettle, Stephen Gwynne, Willie Redmond, John Esmonde - Irish Parliamentary Party MPs - all enlisted in the British army in 1914 because they saw it as their duty to protect a fellow European country against the rapine and murder inflicted by the Germans in 1914 (who of course by 1916 were the insurgents' "gallant allies").
But the most depressing aspect of the President's direly chauvinist and reactionary address was that, contemporary references aside, it could have been made in 1966, as if all the scholarship and bloodshed of the past decades had never occurred. Certainly, her allusions to the public school administrators of Ireland gathering round the fire at the Kildare Street Club, to the "heroes" in the GPO, and to the largely (but not quite entirely) mythical "glass ceiling" for Catholics belong to the wretchedly simplistic and nationalist caricatures of 40 years ago.
As insightful as her wretched speech was the balance of the UCC conference itself, and its complete exclusion of some serious critics of the Rising - most notably Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Sunday Independent's superb columnist, and the author of easily the finest biography of Pearse. It is absolutely extraordinary, but dismayingly revealing of the underlying agenda therein, that she was not even invited. There's another, though lesser fellow who wasn't asked and who might have made a minor contribution or two. UCD history graduate. Writes a fair a bit about 1916: not a fan. But for the life of me, can't remember his name.