Opinion

Arlene Foster right on Easter Rising and the Somme

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

First Minister Arlene Foster. Picture by Hugh Russell 
First Minister Arlene Foster. Picture by Hugh Russell  First Minister Arlene Foster. Picture by Hugh Russell 

CONGRATULATIONS to Arlene Foster on becoming first minister and, more unexpectedly, on displaying a more comprehensive understanding of Irish history than all the nationalist parties.

Mrs Foster stated bluntly (and correctly) that the Easter Rising was an armed attack on the United Kingdom (and thus on the British Empire).

The Taoiseach was disappointed at the first minister's inevitable conclusion that she would not attend any 1916 commemorations.

He argued that since nationalists are willing to commemorate the Battle of the Somme, unionists should be prepared to commemorate the Rising.

In an interview with this newspaper (a welcome change for a DUP leader) Mrs Foster became the first modern politician on the island to suggest that there is no equivalence between the two. Is she right? If so, why are nationalists, including the Irish government, associating the two events?

The Great War was essentially a conflict between two empires, Britain and Germany.

(It was also a family squabble: the Kaiser was Queen Victoria's grandson and therefore a cousin of England's George V.

Poor George had to change the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, when his cousins ignored the rules of cricket and bombed London from a Gotha aircraft.)

In Germany, 93 intellectuals, including 11 future Nobel winners, argued that the war was a sacred mission in support of Christianity. In Ireland the Catholic Church supported the war in defence of "Catholic Belgium". (Being God must be difficult in times of war.)

So the Battle of the Somme in 1916 was just another fight (claiming God's backing) for the ownership of foreign territories.

From July to November, the allies advanced six miles and suffered 419,654 casualties - 40 men killed or wounded for every yard of ground gained. (In 1918, the Germans re-captured it all.)

Whether they knew it or not, the Irish at the Somme were fighting for the injustice, tyranny and genocide inherent in the British Empire.

They may not have known, for example, that the British deliberately adopted policies which killed 29 million Indians through famine and disease in the late 19th century.

But they were hardly ignorant of the causes and consequences of the Irish famine.

Nationalists believed they were fighting for Home Rule. Unionists believed they were fighting against it. Both sides could not have been right.

The 74,000 Indian troops who died in the war for dominion status for India (a form of home rule) were betrayed by Britain, which rewarded their sacrifices with the post-war Rowlatt Act (a predecessor to our Special Powers Act).

At one protest meeting against the new law, British soldiers fired on 15,000 unarmed civilians at Amritsar, killing 1,500 of them. One side or the other would likely have suffered the same fate in Ireland.

So while the 1916 Rising was a fight for freedom, the Somme was a battle to deny freedom to the one quarter of the world's population in the Empire, including 13 million new subjects won in the war.

Irish nationalists closely followed news of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in which Britain first used concentration camps.

It was begun by Cecil Rhodes, who introduced enforced racial segregation in South Africa, in the belief that the British were a master race.

Lord Patten (effectively founder of the PSNI) suggested this week that Oxford students who do not like the statue of Rhodes on the university campus might go and study in China.

Imperial culture is not dead in England.

Concentration camps were used again in Kenya in the 1950s when an estimated 100,000 Kikuyu people were beaten to death or died from disease in the full knowledge of British cabinet ministers.

British control of Kenya was established in World War I.

Some nationalists argue that the Somme should be commemorated because so many Irish fought there.

However, an estimated 170,000 Irish-born men fought in the American civil war, almost as many as served in the Great War.

Last year was the 150th anniversary of the war's closure. There was no Irish state commemoration.

Most of them fought on the Union side in opposition to slavery. The Somme soldiers fought for an empire founded on slavery.

If those commemorating the Somme wish to illustrate that the Irishmen who fought for Britain were victims, duped into fighting for fascism, repression and tyranny, that is understandable.

However, if their commemorations suggest that fighting for Britain was somehow noble or moral, then they understand neither the Rising nor the Somme.

Mrs Foster is right to suggest that there is no equivalence between the two. It will be interesting to hear the Taoiseach's counter-argument - if he has one.