Connect: Last Sunday, the Observer newspaper published an article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Headlined "The Evil Legacy of the Easter Rising", it was among the most ignorant tirades I've ever read. It's not that Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising is beyond criticism and a provocative newspaper column can certainly make engaging reading. But Wheatcroft's contribution was wretched.
He compared the Rising to the Nazis. He misunderstood Yeats. He misleadingly said home rule was granted, without mentioning it had never been enacted. He never referred to British royals, for whom "blood" is even more defining than it was for Patrick Pearse. He called the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland "lawful" (slavery and hanging children were also lawful once but that doesn't mean they were right). He said the Rising's legacy has "poisoned Irish life".
He had other complaints too, but the half-dozen examples listed above will do for starters. What may have coloured Wheatcroft's attitude to this topic remains unknown - at least to me. He has written a book titled The Strange Death of Tory England, so perhaps lamenting Britain's empire put him in the mood to offend Irish people. He claims surprise at the reaction his article has generated.
It's easy to be angered by bilge like Wheatcroft's. Maybe it was intended to infuriate through insult but that seems irresponsible for a newspaper that claims to be among Britain's most serious. There are admissible criticisms to be made about 1916 but the myopic, colonialist attitudes of Wheatcroft's contribution are wearying - especially 90 years later.
"It was Ireland's misfortune that the greatest European poet of the age should have been Irish and extolled the Rising. WB Yeats wrote of Easter 1916 that 'a terrible beauty is born' and he hymned the martyred 'Sixteen Dead Men'," wrote Wheatcroft.
"A terrible beauty" is arguably Yeats's most famous phrase but "terrible" (strong enough, Geoffrey?) shows the ambiguity he felt about it.
Few, if any, Irish people want to rule Britain and, unionists excepted, few - though there are some - want to be ruled from London. It's remarkable that people such as Wheatcroft should apparently have difficulty in understanding this. The notion that any people (strangely, it's usually your own) should have the right to rule other countries and debar challenge to that rule is selfish and idiotic.
To me the tone of Wheatcroft's article was to exalt British imperialism. The people who fomented and carried out an insurrection against British rule in 1916 may or may not have been misguided. That argument continues, but to liken them to Nazis is vile. Not only is such a comparison vile, it's lazy and astonishingly ignorant, especially considering the early support given by British royals to Adolf Hitler.
This column has commented before on the alarming levels of ignorance in Britain towards Ireland. Certainly, there are excellent British people (Chris Mullin, Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and others) who understand that, for centuries, their country treated ours shamefully. But it's mostly ignorance, fuelled by undue hauteur and articles like Wheatcroft's, that prevails.
Imagine, say, middle-class British Home Counties buyers of the Observer. They may feel relatively "liberal" - considered, knowledgeable, educated - in their choice of Sunday newspaper. Then they read tripe - and for me it was pure tripe - such as Wheatcroft's crass polemic on 1916. What are they to think? Ireland is unlikely to feature prominently in their consciousness.
So the ancient enmity continues. Many British believe a "lawful" - and for most, especially people at a distance, that means a "morally lawful" - government was gratuitously attacked by deluded and incorrigibly mad Irish militants. The natural predilection to think well of any group that includes yourself reinforces these perceptions. British people are being made ignorant by such journalism.
Mind you, it's not just British people who are playing politics with the events in Dublin at Easter 1916. Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern denied this week on RTÉ 1's Questions and Answers that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was resurrecting the commemorative military parade for political reasons. In itself, that's almost as insulting to Irish people as Wheatcroft's rubbish.
Everybody - even the greenest of Fianna Fáil supporters - knows that tomorrow's parade has been organised to counter Sinn Féin's claim to the legacy of 1916. As a political move, this may well be wise - Bertie Ahern, after all, is a canny operator - but to deny any political motivation is an abuse of political discourse. Furthermore, it treats us all like children.
Anyway, arguments will continue over 1916 and it's right they should. The roles of 1798, the Famine, the huge upsurge in pro-Land League and later pro-nationalist journalism in Ireland, the literary revival of the 1890s, the Gaelic League, the GAA, the Shan Van Vocht magazine, the Irish-Ireland movement, Edward Carson and all the rest contributed to the Easter Rising.
How you interpret the influences of these and other strains of the period in Irish life will determine your attitude to 1916. However, the idea that one country should invade another, kill, enslave and debase far more people than it endured in the process, yet remain morally superior, is contemptible. Consider Iraq today and Ireland of yesteryear. Then think of the Wheatcrofts among us.