Conn Hallinan: 1916 was an inspiration in the struggle against colonialism

‘Poblacht na hÉireann”: The speaker of these words, standing in front of Dublin’s General Post Office and reading from a proclamation, the ink was barely dry, of the “provisional government of the Irish Republic” was the poet Patrick Pearse.

It was just after noon, the opening scene in a drama that would mix tragedy and triumph, the twin heralds of Irish history.

It has been 100 years since some 750 men and women threw up barricades and seized strategic buildings in Dublin’s city centre.

They would be joined by maybe 1,000 more. In six days it would be over, the post office in flames, the streets blackened by shell fire, and the rebellion's leaders on their way to face firing squads against the walls of Kilmainham Gaol.

And yet the failure of the Easter rebellion would eventually become one of the most important events in Irish history, a “failure” that would reverberate worldwide and be mirrored by colonial uprisings almost a half-century later.

Anniversaries –particularly centenaries – are equal parts myth and memory, and drawing lessons from them is always a tricky business.

And, while 1916 is not 2016, there are parallels, pieces of the story that overlap and dovetail in the Europe of then with the Europe of today.

Europe in 1916 was a world at war. The “lamps,” as the expression goes, had gone out in August 1914, and the continent was wrapped in barbed wire and steeped in almost inconceivable death.

Shortly after the last Irish rebel was shot, the British launched the battle of the Somme.

More than 20,000 would die in the first hour of that battle, and, by the end, there would be more than a million casualties on both sides.

Europe is still at war, in some ways influenced by the footsteps of a colonial world supposedly long gone.

Britain is fighting its fourth war in Afghanistan. Italian Special Forces are stalking Islamists in Libya.

French warplanes are bombing their old stomping grounds in Syria and chasing down Tuaregs in Mali.

And Europe is also at war with itself. Barbed wire is once again being unrolled, not to make killing zones out of the no man's land between trenches, but to block the floods of refugees generated by European and American armies and their proxies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria.

In many ways, the colonial chickens are coming home to roost. The British and French between them secretly sliced up the Middle East in 1916, using religion and ethnicity to divide and conquer the region.

Instability was built in. Indeed, that was the whole idea.

There would never be enough Frenchmen or Englishmen to rule the Levant, but with Shia, Sunnis and Christians busily trying to tear out one another’s throats, they wouldn’t notice the well-dressed bankers on the sidelines, tut-tutting about the lack of civilised behaviour and counting their money.

The rebels of 1916 understood that gambit: after all, they were its first victims.

Ireland was a colony long before the great powers divided up the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the strategies that kept this island poor, backward and profitable were transplanted elsewhere.

Religious divisions kept India largely docile. Tribal and religious divisions made it possible to rule Nigeria.

Ethnic conflict short-circuited resistance in Kenya and South Africa. Division by sect worked well in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

For Ireland was the great laboratory of colonialism where the English experimented with ways to keep a grip over the population.

Culture, religion, language and kinship were all grist for the mill. And when all else failed, the island was a short sail across the Irish Sea: kill all the lab rats and start anew.

The European left denounced the Easter Rising, mostly because they couldn’t make much sense of it.

What was a disciplined Marxist intellectual and trade union leader like James Connolly doing taking up arms with mystic nationalists such as Patrick Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett?

One of the few radicals to get it was Lenin, who called criticism of the rebellion “monstrously pedantic”.

What both Connolly and Lenin understood was that the uprising reflected a society profoundly distorted by colonialism.

Unlike in the rest of Europe, here different classes and viewpoints could find common ground precisely because they had one similar experience: no matter what their education, no matter what their resources, in the end they were Irish, and treated in every way as inferior by their overlords.

The uses of nationalism

Most of the European left was suspicious of nationalism in general because it blurred the lines between oppressed and oppressors and undermined the analysis that class was the great faultline.

But as the world would discover a half-century later, nationalism was an ideology that united the many against the few.

In the end, it would create its own problems and raise up its own monsters, but for the vast majority of the colonial world it was an essential ingredient of national liberation.

The Easter Rising was not the first anti-colonial uprising. The Americans threw off the English in 1783; the Greeks drove out the Turks in 1832.

India’s great Sepoy rebellion almost succeeded in driving the British out of the sub-continent in 1857. There were others as well.

But there was a special drama to the idea of a revolution in the heart of an empire, and it was the drama more than the act that drew the world’s attention.

The Times of London blamed the Easter Rising for the 1919 unrest in India, where the British army massacred 380 Sikh civilians at Amristsar.

How the Irish rebels were responsible for this, the Times never bothered to explain.

But the rebels saw the connection, if somewhat differently than did the Times. Roger Casement, executed for his part in the Rising in August of that year, said that the cause of Ireland was also the cause of India, because the Easter rebels were fighting "to join again the free civilisations of the earth".

As we all know, as a rising it was a failure, in part because the entire affair was carried out in secret.

Probably no more than a dozen or so people knew it was going to happen.

When the Irish Volunteer Force and the Irish Citizen Army marched up to the Post Office, most of the passersby – including the English ones – thought it was just the "boys" out having a little fun by provoking the authorities again.

But secrets don’t make for successful revolutions. The plotters imagined that their example would fire the whole of Ireland, but by the time most the population had found out about it, it was over.

It was not even an overly bloody affair. There were about 3,000 casualties and 485 deaths, many of them civilians.

Of the combatants, the British lost 151, the rebels 83, including the 16 executed in the following weeks.

It devastated a square mile of Dublin’s city centre, and, when the British troops marched the rebels through the streets after their surrender, crowds spat at the prisoners.

But as the firing squads did their work day after day, sentiment began to shift. The authorities refused to release the executed leaders to their families, burying them in quicklime instead.

Some 3,439 men and 79 women were imprisoned. Almost 2,000 were sent to internment camps, and 98 were given death sentences. Another 100 received long prison sentences.

All of this did not go down well with the public, and the authorities were forced to call off more executions.

Plus, the idea of an “Irish Republic” was not going to go away, no matter how many people were shot, hanged or imprisoned.

The Easter Rising was certainly an awkward affair. Pearse called it a “blood sacrifice,” which makes the rebellion sound uncomfortably close to the Catholic Church’s motto that “The blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church.”

And yet, that is the nature of such events.

1916 churned up all of the ideologies, divisions, and prejudices that colonialism had crafted over hundreds of years, making for some very odd bedfellows.

Those who dreamed of reconstituting the ancient kingdom of Meath manned barricades with students of Karl Marx.

Illiterate tenant farmers took up arms with Countess Markievicz, who counselled women to "leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver".

Enduring differences

Some of those divisions have not gone away. The establishment parties – Fine Gael,

Fianna Fáil

and the

Labour

Party – had organised events leading up to the main commemoration yesterday. Sinn Féin will have its own celebration.

There are several small splinter groups that will present their own particular story of the Rising.

And if you don’t get to the commemoration events this bank holiday weekend, you can go on the internet and buy an Easter Rising T-shirt from Amazon or a hundred other sites.

Everything is for sale, even revolution.

In some ways, 1916 was about this country’s long, strange history. But it is also about the willingness of human beings to resist, sometimes against almost hopeless odds. There is nothing uniquely Irish about that.

In the short run, the Easter rebellion led to the execution of people who might have prevented the 1922-23 Civil War.

In the long run, however, the Rising made continued British rule in Ireland impossible. In that sense, Pearse was right: the blood sacrifice had worked.

Does the centenary mean anything for today’s Europe? It may. Like the Europe of 1916, the Europe of 2016 is dominated by a few at the expense of the many.

The colonialism of empires has been replaced by the colonialism of banks and finance.

The British occupation impoverished the Irish of the time, but they were not so very different to today’s Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese – and yes, Irish – who have seen their living standards degraded and their young exported, all to “repay” banks from which they never borrowed anything.

Do most Europeans really control their lives today any more than the Irish did in 1916?

How different is today's "troika" from Whitehall in 1916? The latter came unasked into Ireland, the former dominates the economic and political life of the European Union.

In his poem Easter 1916, William Butler Yeats called the Rising the birth of "a terrible beauty". And so it was.

But Pearse’s poem The Rebel may be more relevant: “I say to the masters of my people, beware. Beware of the thing that is coming. Beware of the risen people who shall take what ye would not give.”

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus