The Rising produced an economic and social philosophy which condemned Ireland to material failure until the 1960s, writes Paul Bew
It is hard not to admire the bravura of the President's recent speech on 1916 given in Cork. The Irish Parliamentary Party and John Redmond, the democratically elected leadership of Irish nationalism on the eve of the Rising, was retrospectively excommunicated from the Irish body politic.
The Rising was recast in a modern idiom - a revolt against the reactionary elitism of the Kildare Street Club, a rising designed to push Catholics through the glass ceiling of social opportunity.
From the Kildare Street Club to the K club, triumphant indeed is the story of modern Ireland.
There is only one problem. The President's speech is an exquisite misdirection as to the meaning and implication of the events of Easter 1916.
Let us take the issue of the "glass ceiling" first. With a malicious precision of timing, Harvard University Press has just republished Gustave de Beaumont's celebrated and highly sympathetic 19th-century text Ireland - Social, Political and Religious. As early as 1863, de Beaumont is able to point out that eight of the 12 High Court judges in Ireland were Catholic.
It is true that even in 1916 there were pockets of anti-Catholic discrimination in Dublin but the fact remains that the peculiarity of the Rising lies in the fact that it is a largely Catholic revolution, one of whose principal targets was the Catholics who had already gone through the glass ceiling.
John Redmond, for example, who had turned down a position in the British cabinet; those dozens of UCD doctors who served in the British army and were highly decorated in the first World War; those Catholic officials who worked at the apex of British administration in Ireland. These were the people who were about to inherit the political leadership of a home rule Ireland, and these were the people who were knocked out of place by the insurgents.
Inevitably the insurgents had to gain popular appeal by intensifying the sense of religious and historical grievance, the reasons for which are outlined in de Beaumont's book.
The Redmondite elite, on the other hand, believed that the moment was coming which would allow a genuine reconciliation between Ireland and Britain and Protestant and Catholic.
The former Redmonite MP Stephen Gwynn in his 1938 essay on "Hatred" acknowledged the cost implicit in the triumph of 1916: "We know in Ireland, and probably they know in Poland, in Slovakia and in Russia, and a score of other countries where revolution has succeeded what is the cost of victorious hate."
The consequences are still with us - consider the Dublin reaction to the "Love Ulster" rally and the brutal death of Denis Donaldson, the most recent victim of the cult of the gun sanctified by 1916.
Let us also take the case of the poor old Kildare Street Club. It was indeed a haunt for Irish conservative and even reactionary opinion; though as Michael Laffan has pointed out, it also contained members very sympathetic to constitutional nationalism.
The source for the President's remark is almost certainly a speech given by John Dillon - Redmond's senior colleague - on May 11th, 1916: "In my opinion, at present the government of Ireland is largely in the hands of the Dublin clubs. In my opinion, and I think I really am speaking on a matter that I know, the British cabinet has much less power in Ireland than the Kildare Street Club and certain other institutions. It is they who are influencing the policy of the military authorities, there is no government in Ireland except Sir John Maxwell and the Dublin clubs."
It is important to note, however, that Dillon is describing the situation after the Rising when military reaction ruled and the leaders of 1916 were executed. He is not describing the situation before the Rising. He is describing the situation created by the Rising. Anyone who has read Dillon's intimate and cosy correspondence with the Irish Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell from 1907-16 will discover that Dillon himself was one of the prime influences on the governance of Ireland in this period, as Birrell sought to prepare Ireland for home rule and a formal handing over to the political class represented by Redmond and Dillon.
If the President is going to take John Dillon for an authority, some of his other remarks are worthy of notice. Consider his entirely accurate, as it turned out, criticism of the Sinn Féin project as he went down to defeat in East Mayo in the 1918 general election: "If they (Sinn Féin) can get an independent republic, and separate this country completely from England, and by way of a hors d'oeuvre - squelch Carson and the Orangemen (laughter) - they will be very remarkable men".
But of course, remarkable as the Sinn Féin revolutionaries were, they were not that remarkable. Soon the life-long nationalist Dillon was openly saying that the revolutionaries had created a situation in Ireland more intolerable than British rule.
The other interesting aspect of the President's speech is the treatment of the issues of sectarianism and Catholicism and their relationship to nationalism. We are reminded that the culture of Catholicism is broader than the narrow culture of the British Empire in this period. There is a pleasing vigour to this line of argument but it does also recall the arguments of the Catholic Bulletin in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary epoch.
The Bulletin played a central role in placing the martyrs of 1916 firmly within the Catholic tradition and later in undermining the relative caution of the Cosgrove government, as compared to a more enthusiastic Catholic and nationalist approach embodied by Fianna Fáil.
But the Bulletin believed some other things that are not so widely believed today - and certainly not by President McAleese. It believed that Salazar's Portugal was the proper model and ally for Ireland in inter-war Europe. It believed that an Irish government dependent on anything other than Catholic votes was not fully legitimate - a line of thought which achieved inglorious apotheosis in the O'Connell Street riot in recent times.
The truth is that 1916 did play a vital role in creating modern Ireland. It led to independence but also endowed the country with an economic and social philosophy which condemned it to material failure until Seán Lemass had the courage to change its course in the 1960s. It is not to impoverish the success and self-confidence of modern Ireland to point out that the route back to 1916 is a complex one with many dark sides.
The irony is that in its relations with Britain and its relations with the Northern unionists, the Irish State has returned today to where Redmond was in 1916; a belief in the principle of consent and a desire for Anglo-Irish harmony. It is this reality which makes the President's act of simply writing the Redmondites out of history so ungenerous.
Paul Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University Belfast.
Series concluded
See Martin Mansergh, also in Opinion