1916 and all that (again)

An oddly, though perhaps no unexpectedly, one-sided view of the Easter Rising from Dennis Kennedy in the irish Times. It’s also arguably remarkably ahistorical. We are treated to a number of contentions:

The event itself was an act of armed rebellion by an extremist group outside the mainstream of nationalist politics, and with no electoral mandate. It came at a time when the state – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – was in all-out war with Germany. That war had the overwhelming support of Ireland’s democratically elected representatives to the UK parliament. The leaders of the rebellion had sought and received aid from Germany.

That point about ‘democratically elected representatives’ ignores deeply problematic aspects of British democracy that are fundamental to any analysis of this issue.

We often hear that those who instigated the Rising were advanced nationalists, but they were also advanced democrats – in so far as they had a much more modern and progressive view of what suffrage meant – universal, non-gender restricted, etc. These aren’t small things, for in somewhat less advanced nationalism Redmond was famously antagonistic to the very idea of female suffrage.

Moreover there’s a sort of unwillingness to accept the reality of what British power actually meant, the minority status of Irish parliamentarians at Westminster – in other words the show of (flawed) democracy, but no actual substance to it.

Add in with that the fact that the dynamic of who was represented there in Westminster was such that it was pushing against the confines of the British state. Participation in the British government was all but unthinkable given the orientation of nationalism – even soft Home Rule nationalism – given the history of preceding decades and centuries.

That latter is far from unimportant too. For Kennedy the British government was the democratic and legal entity, the actuality of Home Rule agitation and nationalism in general called that deeply into question.

But they were still ideologues with no electoral support, prepared to kill and destroy in pursuit of their political aims at a time when unprecedented progress, albeit stalled by the war, had been made by democratic processes towards the goal of an independent Ireland.

Ah, that unprecedented progress, stalled not simply by war but by Unionism itself which was responsible during those few decades for reintroducing political violence or the threat of same into the equation, and had in London pushed back even the relatively meagre measures that were on offer. Indeed it’s hard to take seriously his contention that somehow 1916 was a ‘catalyst’ to partition given the role of that issue in the years before the Rising and particularly in 1912 and 1913. Actually Unionism and its role in fracturing aspects of the British polity, or bending them to near breaking point, isn’t addressed at all in his history.

Of course there’s a more contemporary, or near contemporary spin:

Should, 100 years on, a modern parliamentary democracy, committed to the rule of law and peaceful settlement of all disputes, celebrate as the seminal event in its history an armed insurrection by a small minority with no mandate?

Should a state with a long history of sporadic armed challenge to its authority be celebrating such an event? Should it do so when there are still organisations and individuals who believe their political aspirations are such that they entitle them to kill and destroy in pursuit of them?

The answer to those questions is yes. In part because it was a seminal event, that Britain as then constituted was far from what we would recognise as a democracy as well as being an imperial power and that the very existence of an independent Republic on much of the territory of this island, one that is, for all its flaws, generally acknowledged as legitimate is in and of itself an answer. There is little or no question as to the legitimacy of this state, certainly nothing approaching that which characterised the relationship to the British state in Ireland. And perhaps here we see some of what exercises Kennedy, for if this state is legitimate, then it follows that what came before was not – however hard he may attempt to paint it. And even that part of Ireland which remained within the UK was clearly insufficiently so, to the extent that it took until the late 1990s, and even after, until a dispensation was fashioned that was satisfactory to a critical mass of the population within its borders.

Which suggests that all the talk of democracy and modernity and legality actually are evasions when set against the reality of both the period prior to Independence in the South and after it in the North. That there was deep dysfunction in both parts of Ireland during those periods and that only in the most recent past has that been ameliorated to any significant degree.

That is an uncomfortable historical perspective.