Well, Bertie Ahern has certainly got the "national conversation" he wanted well and truly started with some highly contrasting views about the "truth" of 1916. Take the following couple of paragraphs in Saturday's papers from Tim Pat Coogan and Paul Bew respectively:
The plain truth is that the public understands that modern Ireland was born in the bloody labour ward of the GPO. 1916 led directly to the securing of independence and to the ability to take milestone decisions such as joining what was then the EEC, or making massive investments in our educational system. Were it not for the securing of independence and the ability to make these, and related decisions, the Republic today would not be a Celtic Tiger, but on the same hand-out level as the Six Counties.
and
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.
Coogan wants to remind us that it was the Ulster Unionist and their British Tory allies who were responsible for the militarisation of Irish politics before the First World War by their extra constitutional opposition to their own Parliament's decision to place the Home Rule Act on the statute book. Bew is essentially saying that by wrecking the Irish Party of Redmond and Dillon, the Rising postponed for several generations the possibility of harmonious relations between Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists based on the principle of consent.
But the type of Home Rule that might have been introduced would have fallen far short of what would eventually emerge as dominion status, let alone something approaching genuine independence. Frustration with the limited devolution proposed by the Liberal government and the awareness that nothing would persuade Ulster Unionists from their essentially rebellious course meant that a more militant separatism, buttressed by the cultural nationalism that was gaining momentum since the 1890s, was likely to receive a major fillip. In the end a republic was the chosen constitutional form of those who planned the Rising. But this was something that was much more historically contingent than the fact that some sort of military uprising was bound to happen.
The Proclamation of 1916 and the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil make it clear that the Sinn Féin leaders wanted to create an Irish national democracy and was a huge advance on anything offered by the old Irish Party. Just how specifically republican it was is debatable and there is little evidence that there was much awareness of the core traditions of the classical republican tradition in Europe that grew between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Republicanism would have been associated with the political forms taken by the American and French Revolutions. Irish republicanism has since had a tendency to focus narrowly on national independence and the military means to achieve this. Iseult Honohan of the Politics Department UCD put it thus in her Thomas Davis Lecture last year:
The republic established under de Valera exemplified a more communitarian and authoritarian republicanism. It aimed to realise not politically determined common good based on deliberative participation, but a pre-politically defined vision of the good society that was shaped by cultural nationalism and a powerful institutional church.
So if Bertie Ahern wants to foster a more active notion of citizenship in our republic today he will have to realise that promoting civic virtue and common goods requires a more interventionist and less complacent polity than the one dominated by Fianna Fáil for the last seventy years. Crucially it means setting proper standards for conduct in public life and fostering a genuine sense of solidarity. Republicanism can take moralistic and authoritarian forms but it also provides a cluster of values that can re-enforce freedom, the central concept in the dominant ideology and political philosophy of liberalism.
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