The Easter Rising is not just a set of violent events that unfolded during an April week in 1916. It is also a continuing source of inspiration for some and revulsion for others, an arena for passionate argument and bitter disagreement.
Every major political party in the Republic, with the exception of the Green Party, can trace its history to the Irish Volunteers or the Citizen Army, which staged the rebellion. Each of them claims at least a share of its legacy. The Unionist parties in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, tend to see it as an act of profound betrayal. These historic divisions have in turn determined the way the State has commemorated the Rising: celebrating it in times of relative peace, more or less ignoring it in times of conflict. This year, on the 90th anniversary of the Rising, the State will revert to the practice of having an annual military parade to mark the event. The decision to do so suggests a belief that the Rising can again be regarded as an uncontroversial focus of national unity. The response to the decision suggests that this is, as yet, a vain hope, and that the debate will continue.
Today, we publish a special 16-page supplement on the Rising that is unlike anything ever presented on the subject by any Irish newspaper. It aims not to contribute to that debate, but to inform it. When an event is as contested, as mythologised and as resonant as the Rising has been, it is easy to assume that everyone knows what actually happened. Yet it is fair to suggest that far more energy has gone into debating the meaning of the Rising than into telling the story of the most dramatic week in the last two centuries of Irish history. Moreover, even those who are well-informed about the Rising in general will probably not have had access to the most important new source of information: the hundreds of personal statements by eye-witnesses which were collected in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the Bureau of Military History and that have recently become available in the National Archives.
Our supplement uses some of these statements, and other contemporary accounts by witnesses and participants, to construct a day-by-day account of what happened. We have tried to give readers a flavour of what it was like to live through the Rising, of the hope and excitement, the anger and bewilderment, the terror and suffering.
There will be many opportunities in The Irish Times for columnists and contributors to make value judgments about the Rising, but the supplement makes just two such judgments. One is that the Rising cannot be understood without remembering that Europe was in the midst of perhaps its greatest catastrophe, the first World War, and that the actions and reactions of those on all sides were shaped by that central fact. The other is that the Rising was not just seven men who signed a Proclamation, but the thousands of Irish people who participated in it as combatants on both sides and the tens of thousands who were civilian witnesses or victims. In remembering those realities, we may yet find ways to remember the Rising without reanimating the bitterness it evoked.