The recent series of letters marked "Myers on 1916" has proved to be salutory reading. I didn't expect many people to agree with me, but I had hoped that people might at least understand why nothing that the British government was or wasn't doing justified the murder of its servants or the slaughter of the citizenry of Dublin in 1916. Rory Masterson, Ph.D. was my most recent critic. What, I wonder, was the Ph.D. for? Still, nice of him to tell us he's got it.
Now. Let us repeat a central truth: the leaders of the 1916 Rising had never bothered to stand for election. Yes, as one reader pointed out, John MacBride had, once, over a dozen years before; but as we know, he was the only one, and he got involved in the Rising at the last minute. His execution probably was probably as much an act of homicidal revenge for his role in the Boer War as it was for his role in Dublin that Easter.
Armed insurrection
Rory Masterson cited the repeated defeat of the Home Rule Bills and the raising of the Ulster Volunteer Force as grounds for the 1916 Rising. This is old stuff; and it doesn't wash. How does my killing Dubliners in the centre of Dublin do anything to disarm Ulster Unionists? How will an armed insurrection in Dublin convert Northern unionists to the cause of the Republic? How does the destruction of the centre of the capital and the killing of 28 children undo whatever injustices have been done to the Irish people by past British governments?
That others might have behaved wrongly, badly, criminally, stupidly, does not create a historical justification for my doing the same; and because I might be humanly provoked into doing so does not mean that I can then create an enduring political ethic out of that response. The repeated defeat of the Home Rule Bills was a truly deplorable and unpardonably arrogant refutation of Irish popular will; but at least in 1914, that injustice was in part remedied. And Rory Masterson - Ph.D., mind you - is of course right when he points to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and Tory collusion in that formation, as factors contributing to the 1916 Rising.
But I have never argued that the 1916 Rising came out of the blue. It did not exist without a historical context, and others, especially British unionists, had much to answer for in the creation of that context. So of course Irish nationalists had had good reason to feel aggrieved both in the repeated defeats of a constitutionally expressed aspiration for Home Rule, and the treasonable Tory complicity in the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force; but those affronts could not be righted by a resort to violence in Dublin. It is as much a denial of the truth to declare that the 1916 Rising was simply a symptomatic reaction to both the humiliations endured by constitutional nationalism and the British capitulation to Ulster loyalism as it is for the IRA today to insist innocently that its campaign since 1971 was merely for republicans to achieve a fair place in the governance of Northern Ireland.
Studied rejection
Neither is the case. The Rising was not an armed expression of protest. The declaration of a republic was a deliberate and studied rejection of the democrats of the Irish Parliamentary Party, as well of British rule in Ireland; and that rule simply did not consist of an insupportable tyranny. Home Rule had been granted. Not one single elected representative of the Irish people had felt the need to complain about any general sense of oppression in 1916. Unlike the Nottinghamshire teenagers slaughtered at Mount Street Bridge, young men of Ireland were not subject to conscription. Indeed, paramilitary bodies in opposition to government were allowed to gather under arms and openly to parade beneath the very noses of the Castle itself; where else in Europe could anything of the kind have happened?
Reasonable possibility
If the Rising was merely a dramatic expression of anger at an unjust past, that would have been one thing; but of course it was not just theatre. It caused the deaths of hundreds then, and thousands later; and throughout, most of the victims of the violence have been uninvolved, each, in Francis Ledwidge's words, the hapless child of circumstance. And as I have repeatedly said - and have been repeatedly unanswered by opponents on this issue - violence was spectacularly and incredibly unsuccessful. The Catholic Church is theologically sound on war: aside from the need for just cause, there must also be a reasonable possibility of achieving your war aim. Violence intended as a means of self-expression is mere egotism and is morally inexcusable; and we know, it could never achieve a united Irish Republic.
Nobody has been able to refute my central claim: that the Treaty of 1921 yielded barely more than the Home Rule Act of 1914 had, and that the Anglo-Irish war realised far more British war aims than Irish ones. There was no republic; they kept the ports; Ireland stayed fiscally subordinate to Britain; Northern Ireland remained and remains within the Union; the Irish even ended up paying RIC pensions. Detail by detail, the facts are irrefutable. So why do so many people feel compelled to pretend the opposite?