Easter Rising led to creation of Northern Ireland - UUP leader

The Easter Rising was not only the foundation event of the Irish State - but also that of Northern Ireland, Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt has said.

Mr Nesbitt suggested it was a "logical extension" of the nationalist narrative of the Rising that the events of Easter week 1916 too created Northern Ireland, as partition would not have occurred in the way that it did without it.

The Ulster Unionist Party has organised an event at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin to give the unionist perspective on the Rising.

Mr Nesbitt said it would be “plain wrong” for unionists to ignore the Easter Rising. “You can’t put your fingers in your ears and go ‘la, la,la’ until it all goes away,” he stated.

‘Seismic event’

“It was a seismic event as far as relationships on this island go and between this island and Great Britain. It seems important to me to come to Dublin to unapologetically say that this is the unionist narrative and this is what we believe the consequences are.”

Mr Nesbitt said Ireland could have gotten to where it is today without anybody having to die and that the Rising had been a “terrible beauty” which had led to politically inspired violence for a century afterwards.

"We will not get a shared narrative about 1916 any more than we will about the Troubles. I don't agree with the narrative of the Irish Government, but we have to permit each other to recount our narrative in a respectful and dignified manner."

Mr Nesbitt said the Rising centenary should hasten a period of reflection, as Queen Elizabeth II suggested during her visit in 2011, on what had been done in the past and what should have been done better.

That reflection should include Ulster Unionist majority rule in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1972. “Did omission or commission contribute to people taking up arms?” he said. “It would be right to question how we could do things better.”

The Ulster Unionist leader suggested there was little appetite to revisit the constitutional status in Northern Ireland.

Stability needed

He said the North needed a period of stability and to concentrate on “bread and butter issues”. Both the Scottish referendum and the forthcoming Brexit referendum were a distraction in that regard.

Opening the conference, Ulster Unionist MP Danny Kinahan praised the Irish Government’s centenary commemorations, which he said had been respectful.

Ulster Unionist Party MLA candidate Steve Aiken said the Irish Army on parade during the Easter Rising commemorations "was not so much a progression from the 3rd Battalion taking pot shots from the buildings of Lower Mount Street at the undertrained Sherwood Foresters, but rather that of the 6th-10th Battalions of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, embarking for deployment to Salonika, and to France, looking to help defeat Imperial Germany".

Act of ‘treachery’

He said the Easter Rising was largely seen as an act of “treachery” from the unionist perspective.

The references to the "gallant allies in Europe", namely Germany, he suggested, was inimical to the claim in the Proclamation guaranteeing "religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally".

The Rising created a lineage “that for us, is built on an insurrection fostered by an enemy power that was intent in destroying our British nation”.

He concluded by stating, however, that it was time to move on and not to treat history as some form of phoney “cultural war” or “conflict by other means”.

He said: “We should seek, at a first instance, to agree a timeline of events over the last 100 years; by first agreeing the ‘what happened’ rather then the ‘why it happened’ we can then allow the context to be built around an agreed framework.”