Irish History:A return to the 'lived reality' of the events of Easter week in words and pictures
The 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising saw the first official public commemoration of Easter Week since the uneasy days of the 1970s. Most people (on both islands) felt a real sense of relief that the legacy of 1916, ambiguous though it may still be, no longer needed to be awkwardly suppressed.
Some, though, continued to argue that the "physical force party" can never fade into a harmless historical memory. A few, indeed, spectacularly indicted the 1916 rebels as enemies of democracy and spiritual progenitors of all subsequent political violence and terrorism - from Nazism to al-Qaeda.
In these circumstances, The Irish Times entered something of a minefield in issuing its special supplement in March this year. The newspaper is, of course, part of that experience itself. It was the only Irish paper to attempt to maintain publication during Easter week, though it failed to get beyond Tuesday. Its print shop on Lower Abbey Street became the unwitting source of the catastrophic fires that gutted all the upmarket stores and hotels around the GPO at the end of the week (and exposed the rebels to the charge that they had deliberately chosen an area that would cause the maximum economic damage to the city). In the midst of the fighting it maintained a composed tone, urging "the loyal public" to await "calmly and confidently" the inevitable end of "this desperate episode in Irish history". When it got back in circulation the following week, however, its tone had become more menacing, calling for "the surgeon's knife" to remove "the whole malignant growth" of "corruption in the body politic of Ireland". For this, historians have tended to judge it harshly, though it made some amends by publishing in 1917 a collected edition of all its reports of Easter week and its aftermath, which has remained an invaluable source.
So it was appropriate that the newspaper marked the 90th anniversary with a notably judicious and balanced special supplement, now published (with some adjustments) in book form. The casual browser may get the impression that this is merely a simple day-by-day narrative of the fighting, enlivened by some well-chosen photographs, but it has a claim to be more than that. As Fintan O'Toole explained in the introduction to the March 28th supplement, it quite deliberately seeks not to engage with the long-standing arguments about the significance of the Rising, but to "return to the lived reality" of the events of Easter week. It is, perhaps, a pity that this introduction has been left out of the book in its final shape, because it made a very persuasive case for the kind of sources that were to be woven into the narrative. These, especially the "Witness Statements" amassed by the Bureau of Military History after the second World War, are at last becoming familiar to readers after half a century of seclusion in a closed archive. Historians have begun to use them to enrich our grasp of the texture of that lived reality, but there is plenty of material that has not yet been fully explored. The selection displayed here is skilfully woven into a vivid, convincing, and humane picture, certainly one of the best since Max Caulfield's in the 1960s. It presents, among other things, the fullest account yet of the arrest of Bulmer Hobson, and is especially strong on the grisly process of the executions. In one or two places the shape of the fighting perhaps gets slightly skewed - as with the suggestion that Ned Daly's battalion was centred on the Four Courts rather than King Street, or Eamon de Valera's in Boland's mill rather than Boland's bakery (which detaches it from its real focus, the Kingstown railway line and Grand Canal Street bridge).
The appeal of an illustrated book such as this lies, of course, as much in the pictures as in the text. Although some of the pictures here are, inevitably, familiar, quite a few are not - one being the striking image of the prime minister, Asquith, arriving at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) in May 1916 clad in a vast leather coat that would not have disgraced a German field-marshal. It is a neat idea to juxtapose a photograph of Constance Markievicz surrendering with Grace Gifford's cartoon of the same event - even if Gifford herself, as pictured here, hardly looks capable of such witty work. (And the caption describing her as "a member of Cumann na mBan" surely misses her famous lack of political awareness.) The photo of British soldiers wearing full battle kit, including steel helmets, is more problematic: as the other pictures show, tin hats were not used in Easter week. However, the outright fake (an image from a later movie, showing impossibly close fighting between rebels and helmeted troops) featured in the original supplement, has sensibly been taken out. It remains something of a mystery why no photographs of actual fighting exist: ordinary Dubliners were there in numbers (often, sadly, with fatal results), but the photographers were not. Even The Irish Times, it seems, missed out on a real scoop.
• Charles Townshend is professor of international history at Keele University and author of Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion(Penguin)
• The Irish Times Book of the 1916 RisingBy Shane Hegarty and Fintan O'Toole Gill & Macmillan, 216pp. €24.99