1916 AND THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION OF TODAY
On Sunday 24th April, there will be a citizen’s pageant to commemorate and reclaim the vision of 1916. It starts from 2pm in Merrion Square, Dublin and People Before Profit is urging supporters to join our contingent at this event.
This pageant has a different character to the state’s commemoration of the 1916 rebellion. The main message of that event was that the leaders of 1916 had sacrificed their lives to help create our modern 26 county state.
These claims are unfounded.
First, 1916 was not a ‘blood sacrifice’ where there was a deliberate attempt to sacrifice lives in order to awaken the Irish people to a sense of their own identity. This mythology was developed by traditionalists who presented the 1916 leaders as martyrs belonging to a Catholic tradition of sacrifice. It was later taken up by revisionist historians who portrayed the 1916 leaders as ‘mad fanatics’.
In reality, the 1916 rebellion was a serious attempt to overthrow a depleted British garrison and involved nearly 1,500 armed insurgents. The original plan was to import German guns to overthrow British rule in Ireland. It was only when those plans did not come to fruition that the rebels were faced with a terrible choice – either face the tender mercies of British justice or proceed regardless.
The 1916 rebellion was one of the first major uprisings against a global imperial order. Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, almost every country in the world was conquered by one of the imperialist powers. Colonial ideology presented the natives of the conquered countries as ‘half devil –half child’ and in need of the stern hand of the imperial master. The Irish rebellion struck a deadly blow against this order and was later repeated many other anti-colonial revolts around the world.
At a time when the horrors of imperial control once again stalk the world, it is vital that the anti-imperialist message of 1916 is honored and spread.
Second, contrary to establishment claims the Southern Irish state did not come out of the 1916 rising. How could it? The current Irish state functions as a tax haven for multi-nationals and facilitates the greed of the Irish rich by doing everything to stoke up another property boom. This has nothing to do with the ideals of James Connolly or even Patrick Pearse who thought that the common good should supersede individual ‘property rights’.
The current Irish state was in fact born of a counter-revolution that accompanied the ending of a brutal civil war.
From 1918 to 1922, Ireland was in the throes of a revolutionary process whereby masses of people boycotted the institutions of British rule. Workers took industrial action to free political prisoners or to stop the transportation of British guns. Small farmers and agricultural labourers began to size land or stage militant strikes.
The republican leadership did not want the national struggle to spill over into a social revolt and told people that ‘labour must wait’. They also put down the land seizures. The more they did this, however, the more the struggle became confined to a purely military affair which Britain could eventually contain.
The result was a truce and then a civil war
After achieving victory, the Free State was established on the basis of law and order. Strikes were put down; women were denied access to juries; a centralised state was created that allowed little local democracy. Republican courts were abolished and older model of British justice was restored. The Department of Finance was given huge control to ensure that there was no significant social spending .
This is the ‘order’ that the current Irish state arose from – not from the ideals of the 1916 rising.
No one can claim that their politics embraces the range of ideas that contributed to the 1916 rebellion. There are all manners of criticism that can be made –often in hindsight- against its leaders. But at the core of the rebellion was a revolt against an imperial order and an assertion that ‘all the children of the nation’ should be cherished equally.
This tradition should be maintained and extended. We still need to rebel against Shannon airport being used as a re-fuelling station for the US war machine. We should continue to resist pressure to bring Ireland into new colonial alliances, whether under the auspices of the EU or of Anglo-American imperial projects.
But we also need to take the fight for equality forward by uprooting the rule of corporations. We need to extend rights beyond ‘the children of the nation’ so that it embraces refugees fleeing war torn areas. We need to move beyond a purely military concept of revolt to one that is more rooted in people power.
This is the best way to extend the revolutionary tradition that grew out of 1916 and that is why People Before Profit will be joining the pageant on Sunday 24th April.