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1916: One Hundred Years of Irish Independence

From the Easter Rising to the Present

St. Martin's Press

The Road to the Rising

Cathleen Ní Houlihan woke. It was the end of Easter Week, 1916: the guns had finally fallen silent on the violent events of April – and Kitty found herself suffering from a hangover historic in its severity. The acute effects of that hangover would affect Cathleen very much over the next seven years. Indeed, they would continue to trouble her to a greater or lesser degree throughout the course of the century to come.

The mythical figure of Cathleen Ní Houlihan personified Irish nationhood. She had appeared on stage at the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902, the eponymous subject of a play written by the poet W. B. Yeats with some help from his literary patron Augusta Gregory – Lady Gregory. Cathleen was also emblematic, then, of the Irish Literary Revival then taking shape: that movement in fin-de-siècle Ireland which witnessed a revival of interest in the country's ancient Gaelic heritage. In the hands of Lady Gregory and Yeats, Cathleen was an explicitly and potently nationalistic figure, seeking a sacrifice of blood and life necessary to transform her from a poor old woman into a youthful figure 'with the walk of a queen'. As we shall see, the events of Easter 1916 would make of Cathleen not merely a symbol of Ireland but one of fiery action in the cause of national liberation.

In spite of her great symbolic potency for nationalists, however, Cathleen had not been warned to expect any such Easter awakening. Life had been relatively quiet of late, both within her restless family and in its relationship with her powerful British neighbour. She had grown accustomed to living within the constraints imposed by two forms of colonial straitjacket, one manufactured by Britain and the other by Mother Church. Her political jacket, indeed, had if anything grown somewhat less constraining in recent years. After all, Cathleen had been led to believe that when the Great War, now raging in far-off Europe, was ended, the jacket would be either removed completely or its straps would be loosened to a point where they would no longer trouble her.

Cathleen's inner garments, meanwhile, were restrictive yet also warming. They had been fashioned by Mother Church to help cope with the sharp winds of oppression and economic deprivation, while at the same time keeping at bay the dangerous draughts of independent thought, godless Republicanism and the influence of the Protestant Churches. Indeed, it had been with the assistance of Mother Church that Cathleen had survived the greatest catastrophe to befall her: the devastating Famine of the 1840s and its recurrences in the 1870s and 80s. The charitable efforts of Roman Catholic clergy and nuns, together with a mindset fashioned in schoolroom and pulpit, had helped Cathleen to learn how to adjust her religious straitjacket so that she could cope with such vexations as clerical authoritarianism and the life-denying teachings of the Catholic Church on the relationships between men and women.

But the heavy, outward cloak with the 'Made in Britain' label that governed her movements in the fields of law and order – this was another matter. Its weight and chafing may have eased a little by 1916, but they had by no means disappeared completely. Cathleen, of course, had railed against the wearing of that cloak on numerous occasions during the preceding century and before – with disastrous results. Still, she had not expected that this Eastertide would witness another protest against British power and authority in her land. Now, as she surveyed the shocking aftermath of Easter 1916 in Dublin, Cathleen Ní Houlihan was aware that elements in her world were changing before her eyes, were altering violently and breathlessly. There had indeed been a sacrifice of blood – but could Cathleen walk confidently with the walk of youth, with the walk of a queen? A new world of terrible beauty was in the process of being born – so much was abundantly, unmistakeably clear. What Cathleen could not know – what no Irishman or Irishwoman in those days could know – was how much would change and how much would stay the same in the years to come.

* * *

The century and more leading up to 1916 in Ireland had certainly witnessed its share of turbulence. The Irish parliament – subordinate though it was to Westminster until its partial reform in 1782 – had at least provided something of a national legislature. In 1798, however, British rule was challenged by an uprising of the United Irishmen, spearheaded by a young Protestant-born intellectual named Theobald Wolfe Tone. The rebellion failed, and, in its aftermath, Tone chose to die by his own hand rather than face the hangman. Now, the ties binding Ireland to Britain were drawn tighter still: in 1800, the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence; and in 1801, the Act of Union copper-fastened the link between Great Britain and Ireland. Irish parliamentarians would henceforth assembly not in Dublin, but at Westminster.

Unrepresentative though the Irish parliament certainly had been – it was dominated by the Anglican and landed 'ascendancy' class and it legislated for a country in which, as in Britain, Roman Catholics were disenfranchised by reason of their faith through the Penal Laws – its mere existence had provided the possibility of a gradual, evolutionary political change. Now, however, new circumstances were set in place – and revolution rather than evolution would from this time be the preferred option for a segment of Irish nationalist and separatist opinion. Tone's writings, in this new context, took on a force and authority of their own: for they were inspired both by separatism and by French republicanism – and they left Irish revolutionaries with the concept that the solution to Irish ills lay not in reimagining the link with England, but rather in severing it completely.

In spite of this new focus, the hopes of those who favoured separation and force as a means of healing Ireland's ills remained largely aspirational throughout the nineteenth century and for the opening years of the twentieth. The 1798 uprising had been crushed savagely by the authorities, the intention being thoroughly to discourage any other large-scale military rebellions during the coming century. The attempted uprising by the young Dubliner and Protestant Robert Emmet against British rule in 1803 is remembered vividly in Irish history – but the facts speak for themselves: this was a small-scale uprising, it was one doomed to failure and it ran its course against the less-than-heroic backdrop of loud cheers and tobacco spits issuing from the drunken mobs who roistered in Emmet's wake through the streets of the Irish capital.

Emmet is remembered for his gallantry in the face of insurmountable military odds – but also for a gleam of glory, in the form of his impassioned speech from the dock:

Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

The speech had both an international and a national impact. In the infant United States, Abraham Lincoln learned it by heart; and Emmet's stirring words helped to sustain many a young Irish patriot during the dark night of the soul that gripped Ireland for several decades after his unsuccessful rebellion and death.

Ireland, however, has always brought forth substantial leaders – and in these years it produced one political figure of international stature. Daniel O'Connell demonstrated remarkable political skill in utilizing his segment of the hundred or so Irish parliamentarians at Westminster – generally speaking, he could normally depend on the support of only a third of these – to secure Catholic Emancipation in 1829. It was not an unalloyed plus. The forty shilling freeholders, as they were known – the poorer and most numerous class of landowners – lost the franchise, but the larger property-owning Catholics were entitled to vote, and to rise in the professions. The main beneficiaries, however, were the clergy: the Roman Catholic hierarchy's influence on the Irish educational system began to rival that of the Protestant ascendency. But O'Connell's greater dream, repeal of the Act of Union that bound Britain and Ireland, failed: and he died a broken man in 1847. And as he died, the greatest disaster in modern Irish history was ravaging the Irish countryside.

As I have argued in The Famine Plot, the British government in these years permitted the failure of the potato crop to create a famine – this, in a country that exported food all through the turmoil of these years. Some British cities continued to receive 80 per cent of their meat from Ireland throughout the Famine period. Butter, eggs and wheat were also consistently exported. Generally speaking, the Irish peasantry, some three million of them, lived in primitive conditions and on small plots of subdivided land, suitable for producing one crop only – the potato. Some of the most powerful British statesmen of the period, such as Lord Palmerston, were also the owners of vast Irish estates: such men argued that the chaotic, uneconomic condition of the Irish land system could only be rectified by a removal of the excess population on the land.

The population of Ireland had been nearing nine million when blight struck the potato. By the time the Famine officially ended in 1852, it had fallen to six, and it would continue to decline steeply in the following decades. In spite of this horror, however, the political life of Ireland, and its political energies, managed to sustain itself. In 1848, for example, with the Famine at its peak, the country had a modest taste of the radical spirit then sweeping Europe in that Year of Revolutions. It was administered by a group of idealistic young intellectuals known as the Young Irelanders, who might be considered as providing the intellectual component of nationalist ideology in these years. Protestants such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, through the medium of The Nation and United Irishman newspapers, promoted the idea of a nation and of a coming-together between Protestants and Catholics. These individuals and such others as landowner William Smith O'Brien and lawyer Charles Gavan Duffy were men of stature and integrity, and their circle had a lasting impact on Irish nationalist and republican thought – even if their attempt at militarism, an abortive attempt at a rising in that year, was a fiasco. For the school wedded to the concept of 'physical force' in Ireland, this abortive rebellion bolstered their theory of a rising erupting in the country with every generation: whatever its chances of success, each such rebellion passed the flame from one generation to the next. And less than twenty years later, the truth underscoring this theory was evident once more, as members of the so-called 'Fenian' nationalist group agitated in Ireland, Britain and North America against Britain's rule of Ireland.

Ireland witnessed further upheavals in the 1870s, sparked on this occasion by the issue of land agitation. As a result of Catholic Emancipation, increasing numbers of Irish children had been able to benefit from education, albeit through use of officially prescribed textbooks teaching them that they were in fact intrinsic members of a larger British state. Nevertheless, the expansion of education in general led inexorably to social and political change – and to the formation in 1879 of the National Land League, established specifically to address the vexed issue of land reform. The League operated against a context of years of tumultuous agitation usually referred to as the Land War. Under the leadership of such figures as Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, the League had by the 1880s succeeded in introducing a measure of equity to the system of land tenure in Ireland. Unusually, the League also included in its numbers two significant female figures: Parnell's sisters Fanny and Anna Parnell. When their brother was imprisoned, these two women took over the running of the League – although both were in due course sidelined, and their energies marginalized.

As the League's efforts bore obvious fruit, Irish nationalists began to hope that their larger objectives might at last be within reach. Certainly Parnell, now the undisputed leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and of nationalist Ireland, wasted no time in pursuing his ultimate political aim: that of Home Rule, and of an independent parliament restored to Dublin. Parnell was a highly skilled politician and member of the House of Commons, and adept at using the patterns of British electoral ebb and flow in the 1880s to extract concessions from William Gladstone's Liberal Party, and to bring the tantalizing prospect of Irish Home Rule ever closer.

But there were four provinces in Ireland – and in the fourth, Ulster, with its large Protestant population, the majority of people did not share Parnell's vision. They would not willingly wear green clothes which they saw as being designed by a pope in Rome – and in London, the Conservative Party saw the opportunity to play on their fears, and did so very deliberately. Randolph Churchill, writing to his friend Lord Justice Fitz Gibbon, said: 'I decided some time ago that if the GOM [Gladstone] went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out to be the ace of trumps and not the two.' Churchill also gave the unionists their watchword at a meeting held in Belfast's Ulster Hall in February 1886: 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.' In that phrase lies the reason six of Ireland's northeastern counties are today part of the United Kingdom. In vain did Catholic Ireland vote in successive elections for Home Rule, sometimes by majorities as great as five to one. In London the Conservatives, and an immovable anti-Home Rule majority in the House of Lords, were able to make the Ulster Crisis sufficiently an issue to prevent Home Rule passing into law.

Ultimately, however, it was not the travails of Westminster politics that caused hopes for Home Rule to crash. Instead, a scandal in the life of Parnell ended his political life – and caused at the same time the ruin of Home Rule. Parnell had for years been in a discreet relationship with Katharine O'Shea, the estranged wife of an Irish Parliamentary Party MP, Captain William O'Shea. In 1889 O'Shea was induced by Parnell's opponents to bring a divorce suit in which Parnell was cited. Divorce court proceedings had moral and political repercussions both in Catholic Ireland and the Nonconformist section of Britain on which Gladstone depended to carry Home Rule. The result was a hugely damaging split as Parnell's leadership was challenged from right and left. Denunciations flowed from Land League leaders like Davitt and from the Irish Catholic bishops. Parnell fought back, but died under the strain in 1891, seemingly taking Home Rule to the grave with him.

The Irish Parliamentary Party splintered, political momentum stalled – but now another, more potent pulse began to beat in the Irish nationalist community. As the land issue calmed and the effects of education began to spread further, a new consciousness was abroad in the land: that of the meaning of Irishness itself, what this could and should mean. As the nineteenth century came to its close, the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association were born, and the Literary Revival began to flower, carrying with it an interest in Irish language, in Irish singing and dancing, in Gaelic football and in the ancient Irish sport of hurling. And in the midst of these activities could be discerned the yeast-like effect of the Irish Literary Theatre, founded in 1899 and in 1902 renamed the Abbey Theatre. The principal Abbey figures were Yeats and Lady Gregory, together with the playwright John Millington Synge and a host of dramatists, actors, designers and directors whose work in putting forward the value of an Irish identity inevitably had an impact on swelling nationalist and republican themes.

In Westminster, meanwhile, the diligent and honourable John Redmond began, slowly, painfully, to resurrect the riven Irish Parliamentary Party. Redmond was much less charismatic than his predecessor Parnell – but in the opening years of the twentieth century, Westminster parliamentary arithmetic, and a Liberal government once again in power after 1906, suggested that Home Rule might again be attainable. Redmond built his party into a position of numerical and strategic strength in the House of Commons once more. The House of Lords veto, which hitherto had sunk every Home Rule proposal, was abolished by means of the Parliament Act (1911); and in due course, limited proposals for Irish Home Rule seemed on the verge of being passed into law.

These new laws envisaged an Irish government consisting of the monarch and of two legislative houses: a Senate and a House of Commons. The head of the Irish executive would not be the leader of the majority Irish party – but rather a Lord Lieutenant, appointed by the British prime minister, who would also nominate Irish ministers and the members of the Senate. Judicial appointments would also be the Lord Lieutenant's responsibility. The British House of Commons would retain the right to make laws involving foreign relations, the army and navy, international treaties and trade, navigation and merchant shipping. It would also control taxation; and while Irish representation at Westminster was to continue, the ranks of Irish MPs were to be reduced from 100 to 42.

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Excerpted from 1916: One Hundred Years of Irish Independence by Tim Pat Coogan. Copyright © 2015 Tim Pat Coogan. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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