There is no comparison between the Provisional IRA and the Irish Volunteers who staged the Easter Rising in 1916. Patrick Pearse’s generation of republicans never set off bombs in crowded pubs or on shopping streets, indiscriminately murdering civilians. They never pulled people out of vehicles and shot them dead because they were Protestants.
But there is one parallel that Gerry Adams was able to point to at his successful defamation case against the BBC: the Rising had no democratic legitimacy. When the issue of the Provisional movement’s lack of electoral mandate for “atrocities” was mentioned in court, Adams replied: “Pádraig Pearse. James Connolly. The men and women who went out in 1916, they had no mandate for what they were doing.”
Adams has a point, but it doesn’t reflect well on the IRA of which he has always denied being a part. It reflects poorly on an ill-thought-out insurrection that the State now publicly reveres above any other episode in Ireland’s journey to independence.
Twenty years ago, then-taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced the reinstatement of an Easter Monday military parade at the General Post Office in Dublin. He said there was a need to “reclaim” 1916 from hardline nationalists. But two decades on, has the move backfired?
Fr Séamus Murphy, who teaches philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, believes so. “I don’t demand that the State disown the men of 1916. But it has to stop praising them and calling their action the foundation of the State,” Murphy says.
The Jesuit priest explores the question further in a new book Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It is an unusual work in that it tries to bring philosophical insights to bear on Irish history. Murphy, who has written extensively on just war theory and Irish neutrality, asks some deep questions about the ethics of commemoration:
What duties do we have to our ancestors? How much commemoration is too much? Is there a hierarchy of “emotional hurt” from historical events?
Murphy examines the work of the German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who believed history “needed not so much to be explained as to be confronted”. This meant, among other things, acknowledging the “ongoing impact” of events – and how political violence leaves a scar on society that can be unpicked in the future.
Too much remembering can have negative effects on a population. In Northern Ireland, people were horrified at the recent clashes with police officers during street protests. But the thuggery was not entirely surprising in a province where two communities have been glorifying acts of violence for decades.
Elsewhere in the world, commemoration of historical victimhood can be weaponised to commit crimes against humanity. “It’s a human thing. We remember our people’s sufferings, while being indifferent to those of others, including the sufferings our tribe or nation inflict on the others. In the latter case, we can be inclined to say: they had it coming, they deserved it,” says Murphy.
Ultimately, the question arises: who is history meant to serve – the living or the dead?
“It is bad for us to behave in the present as if our ancestors, dead grandparents, etc, no longer mattered in any sense. It would be treating them with contempt. Same goes for how we behave in the present with respect to how it would likely affect future generations,” says Murphy. But we should not be afraid to adapt history “for the needs of the living”. That includes foregrounding the celebration of those events that pave the way for the future we wish to see.
“The nationalist side – our people – has to acknowledge that, just as Sinn Féin/IRA’s political enemy in Northern Ireland from the 1970s to today was the SDLP – or any other party with a significant nationalist following – so the political target of the 1916 Rising was not the British government or the Ulster unionists but the Home Rule party,” says Murphy.
“John Redmond and the Home Rule party were moving, slowly, to doing a Bertie Ahern and signing a Good Friday Agreement, recognising that unionists couldn’t be compelled into a united Ireland. The Rising is the scream of rage against that. We can’t – without engaging in massive pretence – claim to endorse the Rising and the Good Friday Agreement with no qualification: they contradict each other at several points.”
Here lies a test for all of us. To create a shared future on this island, and internationally, we must move beyond uncritically celebrating the actions of any particular tribe. Standing in our way is an imagined moral duty to people who are long dead and who had their own flaws. Surely our overriding moral duty is for the living?
WB Yeats’s line “Was it for this ... that all that blood was shed?” has an emotional force in debates on Ireland’s future. But, says Murphy, “just as you shouldn’t feel compelled by your dead parents’ wish that you should become a neurosurgeon – or a priest – so a political agenda of a previous generation cannot compel today’s political action. Your parents have no right to say – adapting Yeats – to you, if you choose to be a journalist rather than what they wanted: was it for this that we made all those sacrifices?”
