90 Years Since the Rising - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The First World War (1914-1918).
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By Clann
#853315
POBLACHT NA h-EIREANN

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State. And we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irish woman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities of all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority in the past.

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provision Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government,


Pádraig Mac Piarais
Séamus Ó Conghaille
Tomás Ó Cléirgh
Seán Mac Diarmaid
Seosamh Pluincéad
Tomás Mac Donnchú
Éamonn Ceannt
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By Tim
#853346
Last Tuesday, Denis Donaldson was found savagely murdered in County Donegal. Next weekend, the government of the Irish Republic will noisily celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Perhaps only in Ireland could anyone fail to see the connection between the two.
Although it claimed to be a national rebellion, the rising was a very strange affair. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was a tiny sect with little popular following. In 1914, there had been deep sympathy in Ireland for Belgium as a small Catholic nation brutally violated, the official Nationalist party had supported the Great War and for every 'volunteer' who took part in the rising, there were 100 Irishmen fighting on the Western Front for home rule, which had already been granted by the London government.

As it turned out, the rebels lost their battle but won the 'narrative', to use an irritating but valid term. Sentiment was revolutionised by the executions which followed the rising, Sinn Fein swamped the constitutional party (just as it has recently done in Ulster), a free state was created in 1922 and it soon became what one Tory politician predicted at the time, the most reactionary corner of Europe.

Nor should that have been surprising. Although revisionist Irish historians have spent the past generation examining the creation of the state and its underlying myths, even the best of them tend towards insularity and have not noticed how Ireland fitted into a European pattern.

In the early decades of the 20th century, there was everywhere a reaction against constitutional liberalism into irrationalism, whether it was Mussolini's successful 'march on Rome' in 1922 or Hitler's unsuccessful Munich putsch of 1923.

The Easter Rising was the forerunner, echoed all too often thereafter. Patrick Pearse's exalted (or insane) words about the tired old earth that needed to be enriched by the spilling of much blood - that at a time when the blood of several million young men was being spilled on the Western Front - was the very language of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) that the National Socialists would soon use.

It was Ireland's misfortune that the greatest European poet of the age should have been Irish and have extolled the rising. WB Yeats wrote of Easter 1916 that 'a terrible beauty is born' and he hymned the martyred 'Sixteen Dead Men'.

When Hitler came to power, he built a great mausoleum in Munich to the 'old comrades' who had fallen there in the failed putsch. They were just the same number, 16 dead men.

The Free State, now Republic, is not a fascist country, but it is a country with a hang-up and an internal contradiction. You realise this when you go into Leinster House in Dublin, the home of the Dáil or parliament. The first things you see in the antechamber are three images. Ahead is the 1916 proclamation and on either side are two portraits of men in uniform - Cathal Brugha and Michael Collins - there for party balance.

Both were killed in the savage little Irish civil war of 1922-23 which succeeded the previous Troubles, Brugha fighting on the Republican side from which the governing Fianna Fáil party descends and Collins for the Free Staters who are the forebears of the opposition Fine Gael party.

And so here is the legislature of what claims to be and, indeed, is a parliamentary democracy; and here are three images celebrating bloody rebellion against parliamentary democracy. One simple fact will be brushed over in next weekend's celebrations.

In 1916, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a democracy with limited representative government and a rule of law. Obviously, it wasn't a perfect democracy - what is? - but it was much more of one than most countries on earth then or many today.

Over the years, the contradiction worsened. In 1966, Dublin marked the 50th anniversary of the rising with an orgy of nationalist bombast. Eamonn de Valera had been one of the leaders of the rising and was by then President of the Republic, in which capacity he renewed the irredentist claim on Northern Ireland and in the coarsest Son-of-the-Gael terms.

Although that wasn't the only cause of the horrible bloodshed in Ulster over the next 30 years, there can be no possible doubt that it helped to validate that 'armed struggle'. After all, violent republicans continually invoke the Easter rebels, claiming to be the true heirs of Connolly and Pearse.

When 12 Protestants were burned to death at the La Mon House hotel in 1978 or 11 worshippers were killed by a bomb on Remembrance Sunday at Enniskillen in 1987, or another 10 Protestants, two of them children, were blown to pieces in the Shankill Road in 1993, a deed publicly celebrated by Gerry Adams, or 29 people were killed at Omagh in 1998 - on all those occasions, the Provisional IRA or its splinter factions thought that a terrible beauty was born. In 'Irish republican' terms, maybe they were right.

Before the haunting but morally repugnant 'Easter 1916', Yeats had earlier written the play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, and he would wonder: 'Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?' It was a good question.

Today his shade might ask: 'Did that poem of mine send out certain men who murdered children?' or hundreds of men and women up to and including Donaldson.

In another unforgettable line, Yeats wrote that 'the blood-dimmed tide is loosed' and ever since 1916, Ireland has been lapped by that tide. Most Irish people don't really like this cult of violence and yet they cannot escape the legacy of the rising which has poisoned Irish life.

The problem is quite simple. If the Irish want to celebrate the Easter Rising they may, but they must realise that they are in no moral position whatever to condemn any other violent insurrection against another lawful government carried out by people who feel strongly enough. Looking around the world today, the Easter rebels have a good deal to answer for.

Guardian
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By Clann
#853685
Point?
User avatar
By Tim
#853688
Point?


Critical Interpretation
User avatar
By Clann
#853692
Critical interpretation my arse. It was a rebellion against British rule, albeit unsuccesful, it layed the seed for a wider rebellion and eventual partial independance. The rebels fought and they were right. And all the revisionist historians, Bertie and McAleese can piss off aswell.

"...the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland..." - James Connolly
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By jaakko
#853700
If the Irish want to celebrate the Easter Rising they may, but they must realise that they are in no moral position whatever to condemn any other violent insurrection against another lawful government carried out by people who feel strongly enough.

Why not? It is morally possible to celebrate some INSURRECTIONS while condemning others. It's not immoral to serve lemonade to children, even though vodka is LIQUID too!
User avatar
By Tim
#853719
Critical interpretation my arse. It was a rebellion against British rule, albeit unsuccesful, it layed the seed for a wider rebellion and eventual partial independance. The rebels fought and they were right. And all the revisionist historians, Bertie and McAleese can piss off aswell.


You do the irish stereo-type no favours at all Clann.

"...the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland..." - James Connolly


Insightful. His logic is amazing, because he said it, it must be true. Wow.
By motojackal
#854029
Quote:
"...the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland..." - James Connolly


Insightful. His logic is amazing, because he said it, it must be true. Wow.



Perhaps instead of pointless invective, you could tell us why you think he is wrong ? Seems to me a perfectly simple anti-colonial statement, what do you object to ?
User avatar
By Clann
#854257
You'll find Connolly said alot of things that are right. Stereo-type? What stereo-type?
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By The Immortal Goon
#854728
It should be pointed out that in July of 1914 the Irish National Volunteers had complete control of Ireland already.

The police, who had been ordered to take arms from the Howth landing and refused to so so and paralized the force. The army, who had shot and murdered unarmed nationalists on Bachelor's Walk were also paralized - to the point that on July 27 the public actually chased away soldiers unrelated to the event in Dublin.

Cork, immediatly after Bachelor's Walk, mobilized the INV and had all but complete control. In Ulster as well, after a Catholic constible was attacked by a unionist mob, the INV mobilized and protected nationalist areas as the police could not.

Had Redmond not taken the Provisinal Committee just prior to this the revolution would have certainly started at this point. However, as it was:

1. The Irish Party, who controlled the Volunteers and were in parliment circulated the view that the Liberals were on the forefront of a world-wide democratic revolution as implemented in England by the Act of Parliment in 1911 and should thus be supported.

2. Though the official (even in the Irish Party) stance was that the INV was Ireland's official army, after the split the majority went to fight in the 49th Battalion of the 16th (Irish) Division which was then considered the legitimate and authorized Irish military by the moderate nationalists. Had Kitchener not finally conceded this very small point, it is likely that the INV would not have participated.

Thus, the war essentially stopped the Rising from happening two years earlier. It's true that the majority of Dublin at the time was against it, but only because they had been coaxed to the above two points. Once the 16th and the IPP were both shown in British light, however, the population when enthusiastically back to where they had been in 1914.

-TIG :rockon:
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