It was essentially nascent fascist sentiments which drove the leaders of the 1916 Rising, writes Lord Laird.
Exactly 12 months ago in a television interview President Mary McAleese was comparing the unionist community with the Nazis. A year on, in a speech delivered at University College Cork, Mrs McAleese is endeavouring to persuade us that the 1916 Rising was not sectarian and narrow. Equally implausibly, she is also claiming that the content of the Proclamation of 1916 has "evolved into a widely shared political philosophy of equality and social inclusion".
The principal architect of the Proclamation, evidenced both by the style and content of the document, was Patrick Pearse who was also commander-in-chief of the volunteers and president of the self-styled provisional government.
Far from being a prophet of "equality and social inclusion", Pearse - and most of the leaders of the Rising - subscribed to a dangerous and proto-fascist melange of messianic Roman Catholicism, mythical Gaelic history and blood sacrifice.
The head of what purports to be a modern and progressive European state ought to be extremely wary of Pearse's almost mystical views on republicanism's potential as a redeeming force and his contempt for "the corrupt compromises of constitutional politics".
In an article entitled The Coming Revolution, published in December 1913, Patrick Pearse wrote:
"We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them."
Are these really the sort of sentiments - essentially nascent fascism - which democrats should be celebrating after the experience of our recent Troubles?
In December 1915 Pearse penned the following observation extolling the bloodshed of the Great War:
"It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country."
Are these the values which sensible men and women would wish to inculcate in the young? It may be a cliche, but is it not infinitely preferable to teach young people to live for Ireland rather than die or kill for Ireland?
On Christmas Day, 1915 Pearse wrote: "Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed a trust to us living men. Ghosts are troublesome things, in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things and they must be appeased, whatever the cost."
Am I alone in finding such views alarming? My view is that people who hear such voices should be dealt with compassionately but be confined in a high-security mental establishment. Such people should not be held up to the young as appropriate role models. In his play, The Singer, Pearse gave expression to his messianic Roman Catholicism:
"One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike, I will go into the battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree!"
Is this not blasphemy?
The 1916 rebellion was profoundly undemocratic. It was essentially a putsch, not unlike that mounted by Hitler in Munich in 1923. The 1916 rebellion was also unnecessary and a mistake. What Irish nationalists had sought since the formation of the Home Rule Party in 1870 was on the brink of realisation, albeit imperfectly.
Despite the rebellion and the War of Independence, in broad outline, murder and the mayhem did not improve, territorially at any rate, the terms which were peaceably available to John Redmond in 1914. But then, paraphrasing Pearse's The Coming Revolution, FSL Lyons attributed to Pearse the view that "nationhood could not be achieved other than by arms".
Fr Francis Shaw went even further when he observed, almost certainly correctly: "Pearse, one feels, would not have been satisfied to attain independence by peaceful means."
An important feature of the rebellion was the rebels' hostility to all things English and to all things Protestant, Thomas MacDonagh's enthusiasm for Jane Austen's novels being a conspicuous, if not necessarily important, exception. Is this to be cause of celebration?
Mrs McAleese and the Irish Government may be attempting to challenge the Provisional Republican movement's claim to be the undisputed heirs of Easter Week but it may prove to be a high-risk strategy. How can the 1916 rebellion be repackaged and sanitised? As Peter Hart in The IRA and Its Enemies and Richard Abbot in Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922 have amply demonstrated, there is no valid distinction to be drawn between the murder and mayhem of the so-called "good old IRA" and the Provisionals. Murder is murder.
The 50th anniversary of the rebellion in 1966 gave rise to a lot of irresponsible talk and hot air about "unfinished business" in the "North". Such talk coincided with and helped provoke the re-emergence of political violence in Northern Ireland. Do Mrs McAleese and Bertie Ahern wish to run the same risks on the 90th anniversary this year or in 2016? As realists appreciate, there will not be a united Ireland in 2016 either.
Lord Laird of Artigarvan is a cross-bench member of the House of Lords.