Sir, – All political revolutions by their very nature have lacked legitimacy, if they are to be judged solely by reference to the pre-existing constitutional order.
This applies to the seven magnates who, by inviting William of Orange to England in 1688, initiated the “Glorious Revolution”, the ever-celebrated foundation of the Orange and unionist tradition in Northern Ireland.
It equally applies to the seven signatories of the Easter 1916 Proclamation, which has been commemorated and celebrated this last week, principally as the foundational event in the formation of this State, long since a republic.
Legitimacy always follows rather than precedes revolutions, immediately successful or not, that become the basis of a new constitutional order. This happened in France, when in June 1789 the Third Estate transformed itself into the national assembly in defiance of the crown, and again in 1940-44, when Gen de Gaulle laid the foundations of a new postwar legitimacy that lasts to this day while possessing no electoral mandate and no initial support.
Even if it started as a tiny, secret conspiracy, the 1916 Rising has been mainstreamed and democratically endorsed by the people of this State from 1918 to the present day.
A democratic Irish state replaced incorporation into the United Kingdom by decision of an utterly unrepresentative parliament, excluding the vast bulk of the population, that passed the Act of Union in 1800. The union was intended and held to be eternal and irreversible by all British governments from then until at least May 1921, and was only changed following a sustained struggle for independence.
It is argued that the Irish people should have been patient, and all this could have happened peacefully in due course. A far more plausible case could be made that if the American colonies had been prepared to wait several decades longer they might peacefully have achieved the dominion status that Canada gained in the mid-19th century, and avoided a later civil war on a terrible scale. On what moral grounds should peoples be made to wait, until the empire may be ready to respond, if ever? If some of our domestic critics attempted to apply that argument to the founding fathers of the United States, they would get very short shrift.
Their concern, largely based on the claims of legitimacy made by or on behalf of the Provisional IRA campaign and its political supporters or indeed more recently by smaller dissident organisations, ignores the fact that this State has always firmly resisted such claims, and to do otherwise now would completely destroy the degree of trust that is the basis of the peace process.
That process was based on reaching agreement about how fundamental and deeply held differences of identity and allegiance could be managed by exclusively peaceful means in the future, and on resolute rejection of violent means to resolve them.
That absolutely excluded the idea of any shared retrospective endorsement of armed paramilitary campaigns during the post-1969 Troubles.
Even when the 1916 Rising was originally planned as countrywide, Pearse and Connolly gave strict orders to Denis McCullough of the Belfast Volunteers (see his papers in the UCD archives) that there was to be no shot fired in Ulster, a fact which is not nearly well enough known.
They clearly did not want the Republic to be sullied by any sectarian clashes.
It means, of course, that there was never any subsequent mandate or precedent that could be derived from the 1916 Rising for using armed force to extend the jurisdiction of the Irish Republic as proclaimed over all of Ulster. – Yours, etc,
MARTIN MANSERGH,
Friarsfield,
Tipperary.