It's not surprising, though perhaps a little wearying, that apologists for Patrick Pearse should direct their arguments in support of him and against me in such an egregiously ad hominem manner. But then they would do, wouldn't they, since the material with which to defend their hero as a peaceloving democrat is virtually non-existent. In its absence, is it not easier to play to the republican gallery with cheap innuendo about my allegedly imperial sympathies?
Thus the Benedictine priest Brian Murphy: "In this unity of purpose and in this harmony of means between the British censor of 1916 and Kevin Myers of the year 2000 one may discern the true relevance of the latter's recent article on Pearse. It tells us nothing about Patrick Pearse; it tells us everything about Kevin Myers." And from the Taoiseach's special adviser Martin Mansergh, a rather more elegantly worded stiletto, though with similar accusatory intent: "Kevin Myers has a better insight into and feeling for the imperial tradition than most."
Argument won
Ah well. I'm used to this sort of thing. The consolation is that the great argument of 1914 within nationalist Ireland, and which is so admirably examined in Senia Peseta's recent study of the period, Be- fore the Revolution (Cork University Press), has been comprehensively won by Pearse's opponents. As Derek Simpson wrote on Thursday, "the sun has set on Pearse's romantic vision and the Redmondites' hour has come round again."
People might pretend that this Republic is Pearsite, and that its achievements are those first adumbrated by the leader of the 1916 Rising, rather as the leaders of the People's Republic of China declare that their state and their economy are models of Marxism. But this is merely specious sloganeering, the loud promulgation of a politically necessary fiction to conceal an ideologically unpalatable truth. The economic guru who is triumphant in China is Adam Smith, not Karl Marx: the intellectual antecedents for the political leadership of the Ireland of today did not take their places in the GPO in 1916, but were present in the House of Commons as loyal members of John Redmond's party, law-abiding, European and answerable to the mandate of the Irish people.
Patrick Pearse was not in any sense answerable to the Irish people. Not surprisingly, having reached for the trusty old paint brush to smear me with imperial sympathies, Martin Mansergh then resorts to that other old reliable standby, historical populism: ". . . the warlords who sent people in their millions to the trenches in the First World war . . . were in many instances the same people responsible for bloodshed on a much smaller scale in Ireland".
I don't know who he means by warlords, though to lay the blame for the great catastrophe of 1914-18 at the feet of this mighty few will certainly please the crowds, and go down well in whatever Fianna Fail cumman he graces with his presence. But how is this meant to exonerate Pearse? Far from deploring the hecatomb that was consuming Europe's manhood and civilisation, he exulted in it ; far from excoriating the waste of life across Europe's battlefields, he rejoiced in it.
Allies
And let us examine the people Pearse so enthusiastically threw in his lot with, "the gallant allies" of the 1916 Proclamation. This very day, 86 years ago, German troops lined up and shot 150 civilians to death in the Belgian town of Aerschot. The reason? Because Belgium had not submitted to the free movement of German armies through its territories into France. All resistance was considered to be criminal resistance, and was rewarded with savage German reprisals against Belgian citizens.
Aerschot was bad; Dinant was worse. There, that August Sunday in 1914, 664 civilians, the youngest Felix Fivet, aged five weeks - were systematically shot to death, in accordance with the wishes of the Third Army's commander, General von Hausen, who had decreed that Belgians should be treated "with the utmost rigour without a moment's hesitation". His standing order was for "the arrest as hostages of notables such as estate-owners, mayors and priests, the burning of houses and farms and the execution of persons caught in acts of hostility".
Executions
The studied policy of Schrecklichkeit i.e. frightfulness, spread through conquered Belgium. In Namur, 110 civilians were executed, in Andenne, 211, at Sielles 50, at Tamines, 384, and in Nomeny in France, 86 years ago this weekend, 50 civilians were shot or bayoneted to death. All these towns were then looted and destroyed by fire. When von Kluck's army had finally taken an undefended Brussels, the capital was fined 50 million francs (£2.5 million) in indemnity for Belgian resistance. The province of Brabant was fined a comparable sum, to be paid within 10 days.
On August 25th, 1914, German soldiers began the systematic destruction of the ancient university city of Louvain, massacring uncounted civilians, day after day after day, and burning down its unique library, built in 1426, with its 250,000 volumes and medieval manuscripts. These were not spontaneous deeds done by maddened soldiery, but deliberate doctrine according to the German army' s Kriegsbrauch - "Usages of War".
Such atrocities, involving the slaughter over a few days of more innocent people than were killed in all of the violence in Ireland between 19161922, and conclusively attested to then and since, were well-publicised in Ireland at the time, and served to swing constitutional nationalists here decisively behind the allied war effort. Though whether they were the events which moved Pearse to refer to the Germans as "gallant allies" is of course a different question.