Opinion

Easter Rising was failed by those who came after

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

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

Sackville Street (O'Connell St) pictured after the Rising
Sackville Street (O'Connell St) pictured after the Rising Sackville Street (O'Connell St) pictured after the Rising

The 1916 Rising did not fail. It was failed by those who came after it. For 100 years, the Irish people (including up to two million who emigrated) have watched as governments, political parties and armed groups paid homage to 1916, while abandoning the Rising's social, economic and political principles.

As a general rule, the more vociferous the homage, the greater the abandonment. So as we await this Easter's speeches, pageants and patriotic prancing-about, we can only marvel at the widening gap between the Proclamation's ideals and the sad state of modern Ireland.

How we got here is an interesting story of political and personal self-interest, which has developed such a degree of denial, that Ireland is about to celebrate ideals which never materialised.

The Rising aimed to achieve independence, social and economic equality and cultural maturity for the Irish nation. Selected events exemplify how these aims were washed away.

The IRA which emerged from the ashes of the GPO abandoned the Proclamation's social and economic objectives. It was an army (and a good one) but not a revolutionary movement. The most it could achieve would be re-painting Ireland's postboxes from red to green.

In any case, Britain won and partitioned Ireland, causing the Civil War. Apart from Liam Mellows, one of 77 executed by the Free State, few on either side mentioned social or economic issues.

The new government shunned the idea of state welfare and the voluntary sector was required to largely deal with the near famine conditions in 1925. Because the Proclamation's ideals were selectively remembered, republicans cried, "Who shot the 77?" but did not ask who betrayed the Free State's three million.

Some in the Catholic Church denounced free school meals for starving children as communism and when the Carrigan Report (1931) found an "alarming amount of sexual crime" against children, the Cumann na nGaedheal (now Fine Gael) government failed to publish it.

When Fianna Fáil assumed power the next year, it banned the report. The Proclamation's ideal of cherishing our children was dumped in the cause of religion. At the same time, Leitrim's Pearse-Connolly hall was burned down (probably by the IRA) because local clergy objected to the "pernicious consequences" of dancing there and opposed the hall's socialist advocate, Jim Gralton.

Like John Mitchel, Gralton was then deported for his beliefs, the only Irishman to be expelled from Ireland by the Irish. He was lucky. In the 1940s de Valera executed six republicans, including George Plant, a Protestant, who was found not guilty of murder by the Special Criminal Court and was immediately sentenced to death by a military court.

Meanwhile nationalist obsession with partition facilitated unionist anti-Catholic bigotry in the north, until the civil rights movement took the border out of politics in 1967 and faced unionism on its own terms. But this non-sectarian movement was soon challenged by the bigoted Paisley and by a new IRA, which was founded in 1969 to counter left-wing republicanism and to by-pass attempts to reform the state.

The border was again an issue of sectarian violence. Their supporters even painted the postboxes green. Three years later, Jean McConville was murdered and secretly buried in the name of Ireland. Neither church nor state nor the IRA cherished the ten McConville orphans.

Again the British won the war, this time so comprehensively that they now have the IRA defending Stormont's existence and Sinn Féin abandoning the historic concept of the Irish nation for their theory of two nations, one Catholic, one Protestant.

The IRA fought its way from a welfare state in 1969 to an anti-welfare state in 1998, without noticing. When Sinn Féin did notice, it returned some welfare powers to the Conservatives, half of whom later rebelled against their own meanness.

Today there are 40,000 people on the north's social housing waiting list, while the housing executive (a civil rights achievement) is in collapse and housing plans are still discussed in Clifton Street Orange Hall. Local government boundaries have been gerrymandered to share the sectarian spoils and planning is back in the hands of sectarian political parties.

In the south there are 130,000 on the social housing waiting list, while 100 families face eviction in Tyrrelstown, Dublin, because the rental arrangements have been taken over "by a Goldman Sachs vulture fund." We are back to the pre-Rising era in both parts of Ireland.

Of course, all of this was predicted, because the poet, Pearse, was also a prophet. In Mise Éire he wrote Mo chlann féin a dhíol a máthair (My own children who sold their mother.)

This Easter, maybe that's the bit we should remember most.