Easter Week 1916: myth and grim reality

Thomas MacDonagh in a letter to his wife Muriel, 

written a few hours before his execution:

 “I counted the cost of this, and I am ready to pay it”. 

Eamonn Ceannt in a letter to his wife Áine, 

written an hour before his execution:

 “I am here without hope of this world, and without fear, calmly awaiting the end”.

One of the things we’ve been taught to believe about the Easter Rising is that the people of Dublin rejected the rebels, spat at them and shouted abuse as they were led away. It was only when the execution of the leaders occurred that public sympathy turned. I’ve always found that hard to believe. Maybe, as a prominent republican suggested to me recently, maybe a reporter in one Dublin street saw open hostility and assumed it applied in all streets. And indeed some people had reasons to react against the Rising: if you were a unionist, if you’d lost property or family in the battle, if you were a Redmondite, if your husband or brother or father was off fighting with the British Army in Europe.

But there were contrary reports that suggested a different public mood, even before the execution of the leaders. A Canadian journalist, Frederick Arthur McKenzie, noted that particularly in poorer areas, there was “a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels, especially after the rebels were defeated”. Thomas Johnson, a Labour leader, saw “no sign of sympathy for the rebels but general admiration for their courage and strategy”.   It figures. The Irish people, like most people, don’t like trouble or destruction or bloodshed. But equally, like most people, they admire those who are dedicated to their country’s future and they instinctively side with the underdog. Pearse and his followers were classic cases of both. The Easter Rising was like a leap over a cliff-edge,  done in the belief that miraculously, good things would come of it.  The leaders accepted that their lives would end but they believed the sacrifice  would awaken the Irish people.

Contemporary commentators in the south, who live in a state which has successfully removed British rule, are quick to pull up the ladder after them.  Talk of a reunited Ireland is nineteenth-century nonsense. Jobs and mortgages and banks are what must receive our attention now. And whatever you do,  don’t suggest this is to insult the Irish people,  by assuming they can deal with only one thing at a time.   Don’t suggest that striving for the ideals of those who died in 1916 and saving the Irish taxpayer from decades-long penury can both be goals of the Irish people. Sure they wouldn’t be up to it.

The men of 1916 were brave. You have to be when you initiate actions you know will result in your death. They were also far-sighted men who believed that by taking on the British Empire they could wound it mortally and start Ireland on the road to freedom.

The Empire is dead ; Ireland’s journey to freedom continues.  

Joseph Plunkett  in a letter to his fiancée Grace, 

written on the day of surrender:

“This is just a little note to say I love you and to tell you that I did everything I could to arrange for us to meet and get married but that it was impossible. Except for that I have no regrets”. 
[In fact they were married the night before his execution.]

Padraig Pearse in a letter to his mother

 on the eve of his execution:

“We have preserved Ireland’s honour and our own. People will say hard things of us now, but we shall be remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations”.

[This blog appeared as a column in The Andersonstown News earlier this week.]