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The 1916 Rising Was Not A Blood Sacrifice or Terrorism
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
opinion/analysis
Tuesday March 25, 2008 10:21 by Jim
Revisionists of all shades need to be refuted. Two intellectually lazy revisionist views have gained ground in the popular Irish historical mythology in relation to the Easter Rising. The truth is that Easter Rising was very nearly a successful overthrow of British Rule. |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3the best part of the population does not need to be persuaded that the brave irish men who faught in the rising were anything other than great irish heroes they are and always be remebered fort heir bravery and sowing the seed for irish freedom and in time the northern republicans and the volounteers of the 50s onwards will be celebratedi n the same light and so will the next group of bravei rish men who will not tolerate brittish rule in the north and the giveawy of our natural resources by gangsters in dail eireann . tiochfiad ar la................are day willl come...... a glorious day... for irelands fighting son......the day will come....we will be free .......tiochfiad ar la..... the dawn of liberty.....
The notion that so many people on both sides of the atlantic , including the Military staff of Imperial Germany , were prepared to go to such lengths to indulge a poets supposed death wish/blood sacrifice is , of course , absolutely preposterous and illogical . Lets not forget the standard myth has Padraig Pearse dreamily setting out to sacrifice himself , with the hard headed connolly somehow taking a fit of head staggers and somehow unexplainedly finding himself in the GPO . The reality is it was Pearse who had to step in and prevent Connolly from launching an insurrection with only 200 men and no arms shipments , no Clann support or offers of further assitance from Imperial Germany . He took Connolly into his confidence by convincing him that chances of success were a lot better under the IRB Military councils structures with the arrangements they had for an insurgency . Success was the goal , not glorious defeat .
1916 was no more an intentional blood sacrifice than Emmets failed uprising or the Viet Congs Tet offensive . As per usual the historical narrative has just been dumbed down in order to avoid addressing the pertinent issues which the 1916 leaders set out to address .
your analysis of the military possibilities are interesting and credible. The full force of the Irish Volunteers would have offered a significant challenge to British forces especially given the pressure under which they operated in 1916 elsewhere in Europe.
However, this assumes that the entire Volunteer force could be mobilised. MacNeill created the Volunteers as a defence force to bolster the implementation of Home Rule. He didnt support and offensive or Separatist agenda and knew that the maneouvres on Easter Monday were planned as a sepatarist attack. So, he was likely to come to the same conclusion whether Casement had successfully landed arms or not. Had the arms been landed on Good Friday, there would have been great logistical difficulties in ensuring their delivery to Dublin, Cork, Limerick to support a greater Volunteer attack in any case.
Given all that knowledge, Pearse decided to push ahead, knowing that only defeat awaited him. Connolly was keen to launch an attack much in the style of the yet to occur, Russian revolution, in the hopes that the proletariat would rush to his aid. The events of 1916 showed that whether MacNeill had supported the Rising or not, there was no popular rising up amongst the population and most were indifferent or hostile through the week. Lenin at the time understood that the Rising had taken place too soon and too much in isolation from similar pending revolutions across Europe.
It was only months later that popular opinion began to change through British mismanagement of the aftermath rather than calculated Irish leadership. The Volunteers became less important as the popular support the Rising leaders had hoped for, finally emerged. Influence moved to the IRB and ironically to Sinn Fein who was largely a spent force before April 1916. Sinn Fein capitalised well on the changing mood and became the dominant Irish party two years later.