1916 (58 page)

I consider the liberal democratic value system ethically superior to the nationalist one for a variety of reasons. First, it places the individual person at the centre of its value system, and places correspondingly great weight on individual freedom. By contrast, the nationalist tradition, strong on the freedom of the nation, has been ambivalent on individual freedom, particularly where such freedom might be used in ways of which nationalists might not approve.

Second, Irish nationalism was heavily influenced by romantic and nineteenth century German metaphysical doctrines about nations as essences, with individuals constituted as persons by being Irish, French, German, or other. Liberal democracy stands free of that view, rejecting the idea that persons are, in any strong sense, ‘parts’ of a nation, and sceptical about the historical warrant for the romantic idea of the nation. With the same metaphysics of what a nation is, fascism emerged in the post-1918 era from groups with views similar to those of the 1916 insurgents. The strong nationalism of Pearse and the cultural nationalists was anthropologically wishful, politically illiberal, and philosophically questionable.

Christian thought largely endorses the liberal democratic critique of nationalism. While it would be unhappy at liberalism’s tendency to take individual persons to be the only locus of moral significance, Christianity rejects the nation as a locus of moral value equal to or exceeding that of the person, and allows only the human race (and humanity’s common good) as having comparable (though not superior) moral value. Catholicism in particular also views nationalism as a force with a marked tendency to war.

I turn, then, to evaluating the Easter Rising of 1916 within a larger context than that of ‘just war’ theory. That context is the ethical–political framework where democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are primary and overriding values.

Finally, note the contemporary contextual factor that ethical evaluation of the Easter Rising is also coloured by one’s view of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement concerning the future of Northern Ireland. Support for the agreement implies endorsement of the view that it would be good that power be shared between nationalist and unionist, that political violence should be forsworn and neither community coerced, that the nationalist and unionist communities should each accept that the other has some moral right to a different perspective and different values, and that the Republic should abandon any formal ‘claim’ to Northern Ireland. One might allow for ignorance, political immaturity, and naïveté on the part of the 1916 leaders, and mitigate criticism accordingly. But one cannot
consistently or coherently praise them for doing the very things that we would condemn if done today.

III. 1916
IN ETHICAL REVIEW

I deem the Easter Rising ethically wrong for the following reasons:

1. The unnecessary War of Independence

The 1916 Rising started a chain of events culminating in the War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–3). It was, of course, not the only causal factor leading to those events. But then, the notion of causality in history and the sciences is not that of a necessary or sufficient factor: a cause or causal factor is simply that which raises the probability of a certain outcome. The historian’s task is to weigh different factors and apportion responsibility proportionately. Ethical evaluation is not unlike it.

To evaluate the Easter Rising negatively because it was a cause of those events is not to say that its leaders carry sole responsibility for later wars. But they do carry a great deal of responsibility. The 1919–21 War of Independence seems to have been extraordinarily unnecessary, given that what the Treaty achieved was not that different from what the home rule legislation had achieved.
⁶
(The anti-Treaty faction was convinced that what the Treaty offered was closer to Redmond’s home rule than to Pearse’s republic.) The claim is supported by the fact that subsequent Irish governments eliminated virtually all of the objectionable provisions of the Treaty without firing a shot, thus vindicating the gradualism of the Irish party. The only thing they could not eliminate was that which was not,
pace
the nationalist myth, in Britain’s gift to give, viz. the consent of the northern unionists to be part of a united and independent Ireland.

2.The long civil war

Militarily insignificant, the Rising’s political impact has been considerable, so ethical evaluation of the Rising must focus primarily on it.

Pearse, Eoin MacNeill and the other Irish Volunteers had (in contrast to the IRB) initially resorted to arms, not so much to achieve Irish independence as laid out in the Proclamation, but to respond to the arming of the Ulster Protestants in 1912 and the British government’s relatively passive response to that event, and Redmond’s failure to negotiate away the proposed partition of Ireland in the 1914 home rule bill. Even when one allows for nationalist wishful thinking that Britain was the ultimate cause of northern unionist opposition to home rule and that it could easily have changed northern minds if it had wished to do so, it is still impossible to see how a military uprising in Dublin, directed against British forces, would bring the northern Protestants to heel. If anything, it was more likely to do the opposite.

The 1916 leaders knew precious little about northern Protestants, and didn’t take them seriously. It is no answer to point to northern Protestant IRB members like Bulmer Hobson. In the early twentieth century, James Craig was, and Bulmer Hobson was not, representative of northern Protestants. In the 1880s, Parnell had remarked that 1,000 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) men would be enough to take care of any Orange mob once home rule arrived, but by 1914 his successor John Redmond had learned the hard lesson that northern Protestants presented too formidable a force, even without the support of Conservatives and Liberal unionists, to be so lightly dismissed.

It was a lesson that the leaders of the Easter Rising, even those like Seán MacDermott who had some northern experience, were unable and
unwilling to learn: that’s an ethical failure. If they imagined that the Proclamation’s ideals of equality for all Irish people, regardless of religion, would have removed unionist fears, they were extremely naïve: in matters such as this, naïveté is morally culpable. The Proclamation referred to struggles for independence going back to 1600, as if its authors hadn’t a clue about the Ulster unionist view of the seventeenth century struggles, or had no idea of the great and impassable gulf between seventeenth century Irish Jacobite values and the post-religious Jacobin values inherent in Wolfe Tone’s dream of a union of Protestant, Catholic and dissenter under the common name of Irishman. While it is not the worst moral failure, ignorance is ethically culpable, particularly when it concerns issues for which one is prepared to kill people. To claim today that the 1916 Proclamation was a serious reaching-out to unionists goes beyond naiveté to silliness.

It would be closer to the truth to say that the 1916 leaders were – even if they were in collective denial about it – prepared to coerce the Ulster unionists into a united Ireland, and that they rejected the Irish party because it was not prepared to fight such a war.
⁷
Today, we accept that a united Ireland can come about only by consent, and appear to accept it not just as a practical necessity but also because it is morally wrong not to accept it. The implication is that Redmond was realistic and prudent and the Easter leaders were neither, which in turn implies that Redmond’s actions (in this area) were morally correct and those of the Easter leaders were morally wrong. That ethical wrongness is compounded by the fact that they couldn’t actually manage to fight such a civil war, yet by their action they and their successors in the War of Independence started a process bound to heighten unionist insecurity with repercussions for northern nationalists.

The actual political effect of the Rising was to undermine the Irish party and its leadership or hegemony in Irish nationalist politics. Whether the 1916 leaders were aware that such was its objective thrust does not matter; in any case it needed no profound political insight to see it at the time. Redmond and Dillon instinctively realised what was happening, but could do little about it. In addition, given a context where the Irish party virtually incarnated Irish democracy, such as it was at the time, a political attack on it by such means was an attack on Irish democracy.
⁸

Here, the Easter Rising did succeed in starting a civil war that has continued for nearly a century, between nationalists who believed that work to achieve nationalist goals had to be subject to constraints of democracy and the rule of law, and nationalists who, following the model of 1916,
considered that no such values could override or constrain ‘the march of the nation’.

That civil war began with the Easter Rising, registering its impact as the Irish parliamentarians felt the tectonic plates shifting under them in the following months.
⁹
It was fought out in the 1918 general election between the Irish party and Sinn Féin, in the ‘formal’ civil war struggle between pro- and anti-Treatyites, and in the low-level but ongoing struggle between the governments of the south and the IRA until the 1990s. The struggle has varied as groups of ‘true believers’ have periodically seen the light and defected to constitutionalism, but it has continued. While its military element has sometimes been important, its political importance has been greater, involving a struggle over the legitimacy of the institutions of the Irish Free State and later the Republic of Ireland.

Thus, the Rising started a new political culture. As it undermined the Irish party and the political culture and
modus operandi
it represented, so the Rising’s self-avowed heirs have rejected the compromises and messiness of politics, including any moral imperative to accept the verdict of a popular vote. Britain may have been the avowed enemy in a military sense. But the political enemy was the messy, ambiguous culture of democracy, with its support for political compromise, squeamishness about the rule of law, and respect for constitutionalism.

Occasionally, constitutional politicians have attempted to claim the mantle from ‘the republican movement’ for the democratic state. It never works, for the reason that the gap between the methods and goals of the insurgents and those of the democratic constitutional Irish state is too great. The gap is highlighted by the fact that such politicians are unable to argue with the IRA/SF supporter who challenges their claim, realising, no doubt, that they can’t win the argument.
¹⁰

3. The dictatorship of the voluntariat

As some of Yeats’ poems (e.g.
Easter 1916
,
Sixteen Dead Men
,
and
The Rose Tree
)
suggest, the Rising modeled an approach to achieving independence that led to the outbreak of war in 1919. It moved the dynamic aimed at Irish independence from the democratic parliamentary mode to the elitist military mode. When the shooting started in January 1919, it occurred almost accidentally: not on foot of a mandate from the Dáil whose members were elected in 1918, but simply arising from the private enterprise of local volunteers starting to shoot RIC men. It was inspired by and in line
with the model of the Easter Rising: individuals feeling called to kill and be killed for Ireland, without authorisation by any elected body.
¹¹

The Dáil assumed a
post factum
responsibility for this undeclared war in August 1919. By so doing, it indicated that the individuals who had started the war (or this phase of the war) had authority to do so. For a state to allow such authority to private individuals amounts to acceptance of anarchy. It was the logical consequence of its endorsing the political and military model of the Easter Rising. It thereby accepted that its own authority was subordinate to that of the Volunteers, private individuals and groups willing to kill for Ireland according to their own lights.

In April 1922 prominent anti-Treaty figures announced that they were prepared for military action against the acceptance of the Treaty. One journalist asked Rory O’Connor if that meant he and his associates were imposing a kind of military dictatorship. He reportedly replied: ‘You can take it that way if you like.’ Had Pearse, after he had read out the Proclamation on Easter Monday morning, been asked the same question, the answer could hardly have been different: the insurgents were already shooting civilians who obstructed them.

As regards the Dáil in 1919, its mentality was not unlike that of people who live under a military dictatorship, albeit willingly. A military dictatorship might have an elected parliament, and the parliament might be supportive of the dictatorship, even voting to legitimate its existence. Yet it is still a military dictatorship and remains so, as long as the military makes major decisions (for instance, about going to war or making peace) in which the parliament acquiesces.
¹²
Not until the late spring of 1922 was there any attempt to break from the model of military dictatorship, an attempt led by Arthur Griffith, who was determined to insist on the subordination of the military to the civilian government. While he and Collins were at one as regards implementing the Treaty, Collins remained ambivalent about subordinating the military to the civilian government.