Sir, – A deeper study of history would dispel the fallacy of any legitimate linkage between present-day paramilitary attacks by fringe dissident organisations and the Easter Rising. While it is true that the Irish Republic declared in the Proclamation extended in principle to the whole country, James Connolly backed by Pearse gave strict instructions a few weeks beforehand to the Belfast Volunteers that there were to be no shots fired in Ulster. Nor were there.
The Rising occurred because Home Rule remained stalled, and because the Great War revived the possibility of full independence, at least for most of the country, as an achievable post-war outcome.
Support for the principle of Home Rule by key British figures like Lloyd George and Churchill did not signify impending British disengagement from Ireland. On the contrary, they made no secret of their determination even post-1921 to prevent the emergence ever of a fully independent sovereign Irish State.
One attitude the British government then and today’s remaining apologists for ongoing paramilitarism share is their contempt for the will of the Irish people as overwhelmingly expressed in 1918 and 1998 respectively.
Lord French, quasi-military governor of Ireland from mid-1918, and his advisers routinely described the Dáil as a “mock” or “burlesque” parliament, before suppressing it. Today paramilitary political front organisations describe the Dáil as well as Stormont as “illegal assemblies” (according to whom?). As intended by John Hume, public ratification of the Belfast Agreement north and south made it even less plausible to stretch the mandate of the 1918 general election or the Second Dáil to justify any violence today.
Accrediting dissident organisations with being the present-day heirs of the Rising would be the effect if the State ceased official commemoration of it, in which representatives of all the main churches participated on May 8th at Arbour Hill, and it is safe to say that no government would be so irresponsible as to do what is advocated by Patsy McGarry ("State must end practice of commemorating 1916 Rising", Rite & Reason, May 7th). – Yours, etc,
MARTIN
MANSERGH,
Tipperary.