History wars

Who's afraid of the Easter Rising? 100 years ago, on Easter Monday 1916, a few hundred men started a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. They seized the General Post Office in Dublin where they read out a proclamation inaugurating the Irish Republic. Though they fought bravely their forces were divided before the Rising began. After a week of intense artillery bombardment the Rising was crushed, the rebels rounded up and their leaders executed.

Within three years the Irish people had turned their back on the British Empire and elected a rebel parliament. What looked to many at the time like a quixotic act turned out to be the 'blood sacrifice' that would set Ireland on the road to freedom.

The Rising of 1916 was celebrated on the 50 anniversary in 1966 as the foundational act of the Irish Republic. A film was made, medals were struck, and the act was celebrated across the land. 25 years later on the 75 anniversary, in 1991, the Taoiseach Charlie Haughey rushed through a 'short, dignified ceremony' and issued some stamps commemorating the Rising. The whole event was over so quickly that some of the officials taking part were locked out of the Post Office.

The commemoration of historical events can be important affairs for states; the ownership of the past establishes the hierarchy in the present. Telling a national story is a way of building solidarity. But the origins of the Irish state of today in the Rising of 1916, and the independence struggle that followed it, have proved deeply uncomfortable to its present-day leaders.

Between the anniversaries of 1966 and 1991 people's idea of the Rising had changed. Heroic sacrifice it seemed on the 50 anniversary, but 25 years later a lot of people were saying that it was the act of political extremists – even Fascists – that put the gun into Irish politics, at a terrible cost in human lives over the decades.

Between 1966 and 1991 all changed when guerrilla war broke out once again in the six north-eastern counties of the Province of Ulster – that part of Ireland that had not joined the Free State in 1921, but instead had been kept in the United Kingdom. The so-called 'troubles' broke out in 1969, a conflict first between Civil Rights protestors and the Northern Irish State, quickly overcome by a state of war between Irish republicans and the British Army; that war led many to despair that Irish republicanism would always tend towards violence.

Many remembered that the young men and women who took up the gun had often been moved by the 1966 celebrations commemorating the Easter Rising 50 years earlier. Innocent and cheerful celebrations, but did they inspire a new generation to take up arms in the cause of the Irish Republic?

Some of those who took part in the first civil rights protests in the Six Counties in 1969–70 wondered where the bright future of those days had gone. The mood of sixties protest gave way to sour warfare and even sectarianism. Does Ireland suffer under the burden of too much history, they worried?

Genuflecting to the totems of the Easter Rising was less liberation than conformism, they thought, the past weighing down upon the future. Historians and political scientists set about re-examining the history, bravely tearing down the heroes of yesteryear in books and articles. An oedipal revolt against the men of Easter began.

Truth to tell there was always a strong streak of distaste for the Easter Rising. Most obviously the British statesmen, military leaders and British propagandists and historians have painted a harsh picture of the Rising and the traditions it gave rise to – which is hardly surprising since the rebellion was made against them. In the Six Counties, the political leaders of the Northern Irish State and the Orange Order that sustained them carried a special hatred for the men and women who challenged British rule in Ireland. In the south of Ireland, too, the respectable people who only wanted to hold together an orderly state and make their peace with the British Empire were shamed by that constant reprimand that the Easter Rising was to them: why is Ireland still divided?

Looking back at the history of Ireland in the 20 century many have properly focussed their attention on what is specific and unique to the country and its traditions. But looking today, in this parade of centenary commemorations, it is hard not to be struck by just how much the story of Ireland's uprising was a part and parcel of a conflict that was taking place across the whole world, the Great War, the First World War, from 1914 to 1919.

'The Easter Rising damaged the Irish psyche', said the former Taoiseach, John Bruton at a debate at the Irish Embassy on the centenary of the Irish Home Rule Bill, 1 July 2014. The Rising was 'completely unnecessary', and 'led directly to the brutal violence of the war of independence and the civil war that followed'. The Rising's leader Patrick Pearse 'had justified the provos' – the Provisional IRA.

These words are striking because the Easter Rising, the rebellion of 1916 led by Patrick Pearse, has until recently been held to be the beginning of Ireland's emergence as an independent state, with a government chosen by its own people – the very government that John Bruton led.

In Ireland today the history of the independence movement that sustained the people for so long is being re-written.

With the 100 anniversary of the rising approaching the Irish Times was genuinely worried. 'The Rising was a complex event', they wrote: 'There is a danger that shorn of context, it can be presented as a glorification of the cult of violence, as happened in 1966'. The spectre of the 50 anniversary of the Rising, in 1966, is almost as problematic as the original event of 1916. That is because many believe that the forthright celebration of that anniversary led directly to the outbreak of conflict in the still-occupied Six Counties of northern Ireland in 1969. So, for example, a special report by the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly worries that Eamon De Valera's celebrations in 1966 'may have contributed to the environment from which the troubles may have emerged later in the decade'. Celebrating history in Ireland, it seems, is fraught with fears of stirring up ancient hatreds.

The Rising, claims the leading political commentator Stephen Collins, was a violent conspiracy that was out of keeping with the Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond. 'Most of our modern political leaders have far more in common with the values of the old Irish Parliamentary Party and its leader than they have with those who directed the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood' – the militants of the Rising. 'Yet our current generation of politicians', writes Collins, are 'falling over themselves to pay obeisance to revolutionary leaders whose values they don't actually share'. Angered by the revolutionary moment embedded in Irish politics, Collins protests that 'the majority of law-abiding people who live by...