The ghosts of the Fenian dead have little to offer us

This article is from The Sunday Independent


The most misunderstood phrase of the Proclamation is 'cherishing all the children of the nation equally'.

IT WAS first publicly read, outside the GPO on Easter Monday 1916 to unimpressed bystanders, by Patrick Pearse, president of the provisional government, "Cu Chulainn in uniform and slouch hat". It has been declaimed on countless occasions over the decades. Today, it will be solemnly delivered once again at the official State commemorative ceremony.

With a print-run of 2,500 (surviving copies now fetch obscenely high prices), a text of less than 500 words, a reading time of five minutes, the 1916 Proclamation was to become the most seminal document in modern Irish history. It was invoked, and its text cited, in the Sinn Fein election manifesto of 1918, in the Declaration of Independence and the Social Programme of the first Dail Eireann in January 1919. For that Dail, the Republic "proclaimed" in 1916 was as much a source of legitimacy as the democratic mandate given by the 1918 elections. For various categories of republicans, the Proclamation remains their title deed, their holy writ. Innumerable gravestones and memorial plaques commemorate those who shed their own and others' blood "for the Republic as proclaimed in 1916".

The high-minded sentiments of the Proclamation are in a theatrical and romantic 19th-century vein, which is also exemplified in the set-piece military strategy of the Rising.
The language revival had been a formative influence on many of the revolutionaries. Pearse, the chief author of the Proclamation, was a central figure in the Gaelic League, and only the year before the Rising had committed himself to an Ireland that would be "not free merely but Gaelic as well". It seems surprising, then, that the Proclamation was an English-language-only document and that it made no reference to a Gaelicising policy. The two or three Irish words at the very top (by the way, "Poblacht na hEireann" is not exactly the same as "The Irish Republic") set the headline for the hypocritical token use of the cupla focail down the years.
But of course English was always the language of political nationalism, which in the IRB's book took primacy over the cultural dimension. Besides, the Brotherhood would have had little time for the founders of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde. Anyway, if you wanted to get a hearing, you used the tongue of the hated oppressor. Only the other week, Minister Eamon O Cuiv reflected this harsh truth when he told the Dail he was "purposely speaking in English because there is no way of getting the English-language media to listen if one speaks in Irish". Similarly, most of the signatories used the English form of their names. If you're engaged in a life-or-death enterprise, you declare your real identity. Pearse used both forms, but in all the Easter Week documents, he is "PH Pearse". The later, popular hybrid, Padraig Pearse, was not his usage.

Perhaps the most progressive concept in the Proclamation is gender equality. Men and women are addressed explicitly three times (though there is one reference to "manhood") and there is an expectation of universal adult suffrage. Gender equality was a feature of the Irish Citizen Army, of Connolly's thinking in general and of suffragism in advanced nationalist circles, in contrast to the conservatism of John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.
This modernity is strikingly at odds with the archaic and mystical personification of Mother Ireland, calling "her children" repeatedly to action. Also, God is invoked as the venerable patron of the whole enterprise, thereby characterising Irish Catholic republicanism as markedly different from, say, the French model, anti-clerical and irreligious. God was in great demand by rival interests at that time. His help had been solicited by the Ulster Covenanters in 1912 and by both sides in the Great War. A contemporary satirical ballad depicted a bewildered deity scratching his celestial head and exclaiming, "My God, says God, what am I going to do?" In the event, God appears to have had as little impact on the dramatic event as the "exiled children in America" and the "gallant allies in Europe".

The dead generations are also enrolled in the insurgents' cause, just as, in turn, the 1916 martyrs were to cast a huge influential shadow on subsequent events. Yeats spoke of the power of those "dead men to stir the pot" and of "MacDonagh's bony thumb". Conflicting factions competed for the endorsement of these holy ghosts. All this calls to mind the good sense of Thomas Paine's observation: "The most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies is the vanity and presumption of governing from beyond the grave."
"Sovereignty" and "Republic" are mentioned again and again in the Proclamation. The sovereign republic, sanctified by the blood of the signatories, was to become the Holy Grail pursued in the following decades. The IRB had already "established" a phantom republic in 1873. The 1916 Proclamation reduced the complex fabric of nationalist history down to a single republican thread - "her old tradition of nationhood".
Likewise, the sweeping claim that "the Irish people" had fought for sovereignty "in arms", "six times during the past 300 years", is historical nonsense. The confederate Catholics of the 1640s and the Irish Jacobites of 1689-91 were primarily concerned for Catholic rights and possession of lands. Nor can the complex issues of 1798 be neatly categorised as a clear-cut republican struggle. And even if we accept that Emmet's 1803 debacle, the insurrectionary fiasco of 1848 and the Fenian skirmishes of 1867 all had the same objective as the 1916 insurgents, these unrepresentative events were certainly not carried out by "the Irish people".

And so we come to the hardest thing to swallow about the Proclamation. "Ireland" is depicted as acting "through us", that is, through a self-appointed apostolic elite, a "prophetic shock minority", who regarded their idealistic convictions as sufficient justification for their insurrectionary violence in the name of "the people". Essentially, this has always been the position of the IRA.
The social and economic agenda outlined in the Proclamation is in the democratic and radical tradition of James Fintan Lalor and Michael Davitt, but it doesn't reflect, it seems to me, the robust socialism of James Connolly in his prime. But then, in the heel of the hunt, Connolly had gone all Catholic and nationalist - in the words of Louie Bennett, the trade unionist and suffragist, written in Easter Week, he "had as much of the fanaticism of the patriot as any poet in that rebel crowd".

The Proclamation is suffused with a self-conscious awareness of making epic history - with such phrases as the Irish nation's "august destiny" (tiocfaidh ar la!) and its future "exaltation among the nations" (echoes of Emmet's speech). The chivalrous hope that no insurgent will "dishonour the cause by cowardice, inhumanity or rapine" was a naive counsel of perfection in the context of street warfare.

The most misunderstood and misapplied phrase in the whole document is "cherishing all the children of the nation equally". The mistaken belief persists that these words occur in the constitution, and/or that they form an aspiration to social justice and/or that they are actually about children. But the context makes it perfectly clear that the reference is to the nationalist-unionist divide. Here the underlying, and unwarranted, assumption is that there is only one nation in Ireland, and that unionist-nationalist "differences" are simply the consequence of divide-and-conquer British machinations. This is only a half-truth, at best. The refusal to recognise that unionism is a genuine and independently existing position has clouded nationalist understanding about the North almost down to the present day.

In many respects, the Proclamation is an outdated text, reflecting a political situation now consigned to history, and putting forward historical interpretations that were never sustainable. We have advanced beyond the confines of the insurgents' preoccupations. We are not bound by the sentiments of the Proclamation, it is not a sacred text for this generation and the dead should keep their place. If we want to promote social justice, then we should implement the ideals of a living and developing Bunreacht na hEireann (especially Article 45) rather than waxing sentimental about a ghost document.

John A Murphy is Emeritus

Professor of Irish History at University College, Cork