The recurring debate about whether there was any necessity for the Easter Rising or the War of Independence, or whether we could have achieved a happier independent State than we have today via the uncertain route of Home Rule (also with Partition), is like all counterfactual historical arguments - incapable of definitive resolution. All anyone can do is weigh probabilities.
Most independent states, most democracies came into being as the result of a revolution. Ireland is no aberration in that regard. Revolutions have costs as well as benefits in human terms, losers as well as winners.
The ANC has acknowledged that some actions in the struggle against apartheid were wrong and reprehensible. This did not invalidate its cause. In the long term, if the result is a stable, peaceful and ultimately prosperous democracy, almost everyone who comes after gains.
It is hard to envisage Americans accepting, for example, that they became too excited over stamp duty and excise on imported tea and that if only they had waited another few decades, their colonial assemblies might have become dominion parliaments without resort to bloodshed.
Could one persuade the French that since, in 1789 they had their estates-general back after a 175-year interval, albeit at royal pleasure, the tennis court oath and the storming of the Bastille, now the national day, were precipitate mistakes?
As for the English, they already had parliaments from time to time. So why did they behead Charles I and chase James II out of his kingdoms, before the bona fides of his policy of toleration could be fully tested when, in time no doubt, the divine right of kings would have been waived in favour of some more representative form of government?
Most of us value and are proud of our hard-won independence. It could have evolved more peacefully if on many different occasions the British had been willing to allow it to do so.
Having waited 30 years for a Home Rule that never came, not to mention over a century for a sovereign Irish parliament to be restored, why should the Irish people have had to wait longer for half a loaf?
The most favourable time had arrived when other subject nations of Europe were about to regain full freedom and independence with the moral backing of the president of the United States. It would have been unpardonable to have passed up the opportunity.
Enforced external rule creates the dilemma for those subject to it, who have a legitimate right to be free, of resisting using only the constitutional rules laid down by the external power or by physical struggle against vastly superior force.
Why in historical retrospect is the morality of external force so rarely challenged, compared to the constant criticism of the valiant but fallible efforts of either constitutional nationalists or physical force separatists?
The countries of central and eastern Europe were fortunate in 1989 that, but for Romania, autocratic governments crumbled before mass popular protest and that the Soviet army did not intervene as it had previously in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some of the later decolonisations in the 1950s and 1960s were also peaceful.
Ireland as a pioneer was not so lucky. For a long time, the idea of restoring limited self-government was out of the question. Then, when it was eventually put forward by one side, it was systematically and successfully obstructed by the other.
From the Treaty of Limerick to the Boundary Commission, Ireland was given the run-around at critical moments.
Unionists adamantly opposed any compromise between separation and union. From the 1860s to 1914, Ulster Protestants were often regarded as the Prussians of Ireland, the only community with fighting qualities, ready to resist incorporation in a Home Rule parliament. The compromise made sense for nationalists, if it kept the country united.
If Ulster unionists would not be part of Home Rule at any price, why should nationalists in the rest of Ireland have settled for so little? Putting the third Home Rule Bill on the statute book and promptly freezing it after the first World War broke out was literally a paper exercise, nor did it come into force when the war ended.
I agree with Garret FitzGerald that there may have been quite a narrow window of opportunity to win independence. When the 1918 general election validated the 1916 Rising with the sweeping mandate given to Sinn Féin in terms of seats (the percentage counter-argument used to question the result of no other democratic contest is risible sophistry), the British government used force to suppress the government of Dáil Éireann.
Lloyd George still refused in the post-truce pre-negotiations to accept the principle of government by consent, if that meant Ireland had a right to be a republic, externally associated with the Commonwealth or not.
British threat of force pushed through the Treaty and destroyed the compromise on the agreed draft constitution of May 1922 which could have averted civil war. Economic sanctions were applied in the 1930s, when Ireland, using the Statute of Westminster, sought to remove the shackles of the Treaty, and again, more surreptitiously, when it maintained its neutrality in the second World War.
One can naturally look at political conflict in terms of power or morality. But if one chooses the yardstick of democratic morality, then it is overwhelmingly British policy in Ireland that is indefensible, not the imperfect efforts of successive Irish leaders, whether for or against physical force. We should honour both Redmond and Pearse (as de Valera did).
None of this need prevent Britain and Ireland being close and friendly neighbours and partners today, both bilaterally and in a broader context, just as Britain and America are, despite their history. Indeed, friendship, rather than enmity or attempted coercion from any side, is proving far more successful in resolving the Northern Ireland conflict peacefully.
Progress includes recognising the fallacy of treating the issues involved in the struggle for independence and in the later Northern Ireland conflict, as if they were identical.