Encounters with 1916 - in London
This year, the centenary of the Easter Rising, I will be taking part in quite a number of events commemorating not just that momentous year for Ireland, but also its legacy in the form of a century of Irish independence. I will also be marking the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, in which so many from all parts of Ireland fought and died.
In the past week, I have had two personal engagements connected with the events of 1916, one in Richmond, Surrey and the other in Central London. In both cases, I came into direct contact with powerful artefacts that conjure up that turbulent but formative period for Ireland and for our relations with Britain.
Together with members of the London-based Irish Literary Society (founded in 1892 by WB Yeats and others), I paid a visit to the UK National Archives at Kew to view some of their holdings connected with the events of Easter week 1916. Among the documents we were shown was a set of Court Martial files pertaining to the 15 members of the Irish Volunteers who were executed in May 1916 for their part in the rebellion that had taken place during the last week of April.
Most of these files are very slim. For example, the case against Con Colbert amounts to a single hand-written page indicating that he was part of a group of insurgents that had fired on the military on the 30th of April. Colbert seems to have offered no defence at his trial. The file notes that he had 'nothing to say'. Others like Eamonn Ceannt called four witnesses in his defence, including Thomas MacDonagh who had by then already been executed.
During the visit to the archives, I was asked by the members of the Irish Literary Society to read two significant documents from these Court Martial files - Patrick Pearse's last letter to his mother and James Connolly's statement to the Court. I was happy to do so. They are both powerful, eloquent statements written shortly before their deaths.
Pearse's letter is a particularly poignant piece of writing. One of the staff at the National Archives commented to me that even the most determined opponent of Irish nationalism could hardly fail to be moved by it. In the letter, Pearse calmly acknowledges that he does not expect his life to be spared. Indeed, he confesses that he did not 'hope nor even desire to live' but was consoled by the expectation that the lives of his followers would be spared. He believed that 'we have preserved Ireland's honour and our own' and predicted that he and his fellow leaders would be 'blessed by unborn generations.'
Connolly's statement is a less personal, more trenchant political statement. He insists that their cause was 'nobler' and 'holier' than that of the war in Europe. He thanked God that he had lived to see the day when thousands of Irishmen and women had asserted Ireland's right to independence during Easter week.
What to make of these documents from 1916? What's striking about them is their sober embrace of self-sacrifice in pursuit of their ideals. This was of its time and was by no means an exclusively Irish phenomenon. Here, for example, are some lines written by an English war poet, Charles Sorley:
On marching men, on
To the gates of death with song.
..
Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
So be merry, so be dead.
A few days after my visit to Kew, I attended the opening of an exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery near Oxford Street entitled ‘The Easter Rising 1916’, which consists of 70 black-and-white photographs connected with the Rising. They come from a huge collection of early Irish photographs belonging to a London-based Irishman, Sean Sexton, and the exhibition’s curator is Luke Dodd. There are photographs of the damage done to the centre of Dublin in 1916 and images of some of the rebellion's leaders. The images on display do not confine themselves to 1916 but stretch back to the period after the Great Famine (1845-48) and cover the land war of the 1880s and the Irish literary revival of the turn of the century. There are also photos from the years following 1916 when Ireland's independence struggle gathered pace and intensity. The exhibition provides a very good introduction to this contested period in Irish history. I hope that it will draw a substantial attendance in the coming months and that its effect will be to raise awareness and understanding in Britain of the particular path taken by Ireland during that turbulent era of war and revolution.
There are those who feel a continued need to interrogate the events of 1916 in search of moral judgements. I don't. In 1912, when the decade-long period of strife in Ireland began with the dispute over the Home Rule Bill, I am pretty sure that I would have been a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party and its leader John Redmond, MP for my home city of Waterford. What I do not know is how I would have responded to the unfolding crisis that gripped that tragic generation and led to so many deaths of young men on the Western Front throughout the war and in Dublin in 1916. I don't think it’s possible for us to enter fully into the zeitgeist of that faraway time, nor is it appropriate to try to pass retrospective judgement on the no doubt difficult, painful choices that were made and that had fateful consequences. I am content to explore those times with a desire to understand them better rather than any compulsion to judge. What I am clear about is the importance of recognising the rich legacy of those times, which includes a century of independence for the stable, democratic state I have been proud to serve throughout my working life.
On the 19th of March, we will be inviting members of the Irish community in Britain to come to the Embassy with any family memorabilia they may have that connects with the Easter Rising and its aftermath. The ‘Inspiring Ireland 2016’ collection day in London will be an opportunity for Irish and British people to bring their 1916-related objects for expert assessment and digitisation as part of the Digital Repository of Ireland’s award-winning website, www.inspiring-ireland.ie .
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London.