From the RTE archives -for Easter Week

[Blue Angel]

I thought people might find this interesting - especially those from an unionist perspective including WASP (If he is not ready to bash my head in today about some differing political or other point of view:).



www.rte.ie/laweb/ll/ll_t06_schedule_main.html

Clicking on the days along the top of the page will let you look at clips or listen to excerpts from the programmes for each day. For me listening to Kathleen Clarke was interesting as she in many ways looked more like one of my older aunties than a revolutionary which illustrated how the people in the period were at heart ordinary folk in many case.

There is also some colour footage without sound :-

www.rte.ie/laweb/ll/ll_t06_colour_main.html

[Wasp]

THIS is my day off from head bashing. Will take a look at this later when I have more time.

[Wasp]

TBH I have no interest in the easter rising and I couldn't care less about it. I really don't see the big deal in celebrating it as I have been doing a wee bit of reserach into the subject although it bores the life out of me. Here is some of what I found from the following articles.

'Although it claimed to be a national rebellion, the rising was a very strange affair. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was a tiny sect with little popular following. In 1914, there had been deep sympathy in Ireland for Belgium as a small Catholic nation brutally violated, the official Nationalist party had supported the Great War and for every 'volunteer' who took part in the rising, there were 100 Irishmen fighting on the Western Front for home rule, which had already been granted by the London government.

As it turned out, the rebels lost their battle but won the 'narrative', to use an irritating but valid term. Sentiment was revolutionised by the executions which followed the rising, Sinn Fein swamped the constitutional party (just as it has recently done in Ulster), a free state was created in 1922 and it soon became what one Tory politician predicted at the time, the most reactionary corner of Europe......................

The Easter Rising was the forerunner, echoed all too often thereafter. Patrick Pearse's exalted (or insane) words about the tired old earth that needed to be enriched by the spilling of much blood - that at a time when the blood of several million young men was being spilled on the Western Front - was the very language of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) that the National Socialists would soon use.

It was Ireland's misfortune that the greatest European poet of the age should have been Irish and have extolled the rising. WB Yeats wrote of Easter 1916 that 'a terrible beauty is born' and he hymned the martyred 'Sixteen Dead Men'.

When Hitler came to power, he built a great mausoleum in Munich to the 'old comrades' who had fallen there in the failed putsch. They were just the same number, 16 dead men.

The Free State, now Republic, is not a fascist country, but it is a country with a hang-up and an internal contradiction. You realise this when you go into Leinster House in Dublin, the home of the Dáil or parliament. The first things you see in the antechamber are three images. Ahead is the 1916 proclamation and on either side are two portraits of men in uniform - Cathal Brugha and Michael Collins - there for party balance.

Both were killed in the savage little Irish civil war of 1922-23 which succeeded the previous Troubles, Brugha fighting on the Republican side from which the governing Fianna Fáil party descends and Collins for the Free Staters who are the forebears of the opposition Fine Gael party.

And so here is the legislature of what claims to be and, indeed, is a parliamentary democracy; and here are three images celebrating bloody rebellion against parliamentary democracy. One simple fact will be brushed over in next weekend's celebrations.

In 1916, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a democracy with limited representative government and a rule of law. Obviously, it wasn't a perfect democracy - what is? - but it was much more of one than most countries on earth then or many today.

Over the years, the contradiction worsened. In 1966, Dublin marked the 50th anniversary of the rising with an orgy of nationalist bombast. Eamonn de Valera had been one of the leaders of the rising and was by then President of the Republic, in which capacity he renewed the irredentist claim on Northern Ireland and in the coarsest Son-of-the-Gael terms.

Although that wasn't the only cause of the horrible bloodshed in Ulster over the next 30 years, there can be no possible doubt that it helped to validate that 'armed struggle'. After all, violent republicans continually invoke the Easter rebels, claiming to be the true heirs of Connolly and Pearse.............

The problem is quite simple. If the Irish want to celebrate the Easter Rising they may, but they must realise that they are in no moral position whatever to condemn any other violent insurrection against another lawful government carried out by people who feel strongly enough. Looking around the world today, the Easter rebels have a good deal to answer for.'

I don't think it is worth the blink of an eye nevermind celebrating it.

[Blue Angel]

what idiot wrote that pile of shite may i ask WASP?

[Wasp]

Why is it a pile of shite?

[Blue Angel]

apart from anything the extraordinary attempt to link hitler to it all via the number of people executed in his putsch matching the number of leaders executed after the rising had me rolling on the floor in hysterics. Other events/things below in which the number 16 coincidentally appears:-

There are sixteen different personality types in the Myers-Briggs classification system.
A note played for one-sixteenth the duration of a whole note is called a sixteenth note or a semiquaver.
In the 16-bit era, 16-bit microprocessor ran 16-bit applications.
Sixteen Kingdoms, part of Chinese history.
Canada's Yellowhead Highway is designated as Highway 16.
Interstate 16 is the designation for a US interstate highway in Georgia.
The fighter jet, the F-16 Fighting Falcon.
16 mm film was originally an amateur movie format, but is now used by professionals.
16 is one of the "Lost Numbers" on the television show Lost, along with 4, 8, 15, 23, and 42.
16 is a song by Green Day on their album 39/Smooth.
The M16 rifle.
The number 16 is the symbol of the Day of solidarity with political prisoners and victims of the Lukashenka regime in Belarus, which is commemorated on 16th of every months by demonstrations and flash mobs worldwide.
In tarot, card No. 16 is "the Tower".
A sixteen is a slang term for a verse in a hip hop song, which are often written in sixteen-bar stanzas.[2]
Android 16 of the Dragonball Z television series.
The amount of waking hours in a day in an "8 hours of sleep" schedule.
In the story of the Sleeping Beauty, a spell is placed on the princess that when she reaches her 16th birthday, she will "prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die."

Funny the article should mention that small nation Belgium as I reckon we might find a better comparision there of Ireland another small nation longing to be free.

It doesn't matter if the regime running Ireland was the most enlightened ever to exsist at the time, for a start that argument smack of colonialism and bringing civilisation to the natives. Secondly, it's irrelevant - the people wanted to be ruled by themselves - yes the Easter Rising was staged by a minority but the results showed nothing had been learnt by the British govt. in dealing with the people of Ireland since the last rebellions in Ireland. Failure to keep promises and deceitful double-dealing was what led down that road in the first place.

[Wasp]

Yeh and don't forget you, well not you but those who were born in the country you claim to belong to ended up killing eachother and all to often they were killed while unarmed. Just shows how violent the nature of republicanism really is.

[Jim]

For such a "boring" subject, Wasp, it turns out to be probably the most important event in Irish history, even for irish unionists.

I wrote an essay on that period, lately, for coursework, since I'm doing a politics degree. My politics lecturer is a professor and specialised in the Irish/NI conflict and particularly this period and we had an interesting conversation when going over my work. I thought it was interesting hearing a proud English man say that the large numbers of Irishmen in the British army during the war was because they were promised home rule and they had no patriotic reasons for enlisting. He was completely right in that assesment. My great Granda, a protestant, fought in the war, it wasnt out of patriotic duty. Both my grandas fought in WW2, it wasnt out of patriotic duty. Remember that while your quote says that home rule "was already granted by the british government", that it took days/weeks for word to reach Ireland and the cabinet made promises to Irish men of home rule than made different promises to protestants in the north (who were ready to rebel against their own country) to enlist them. That is a fact.

I'm not even going to comment on the Hitler "links", I'll just mention that Connolly was executed after the rising. If you try and put "Connolly" and "Hitler" in the same sentence than you honestly havent a clue, the man was more red than Lenin, he was everything Hitler would have completely and utterly despised, enough to make his blood boil.

Connolly was completely right, he knew the score and he done more to try and unite the working class people in the North than any big-wig posh unionist did.

Why should Irishmen have went off and fought in Belgium for the same national rights the British Government denied (and still denies) the Irish?

In 1916, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a democracy with limited representative government and a rule of law. Obviously, it wasn't a perfect democracy - what is?

LOL. Who wrote this pish article BTW? Democracy was barely a concept back then. Ireland was overly represented as far as MP numbers but it held absolutely no power in forming Governments of backing up Governments. It was by no means democratic, considering mostof the Irish population that should have been, wasnt even allowed to vote. We didnt have the numbers to influence Westminster which is why Labour took off so quickly. This writer hasnt a fucking clue.

[bearhunter]

Ah come on WASP, tell us where you got it. I'm no republican nation-state fantasist, but this is utter shite...

[Wasp]

It was either the guardian or the independant, I think the guardian but I am not 100% sure.

[earl]

wasp said:

Yeh and don't forget you, well not you but those who were born in the country you claim to belong to ended up killing eachother and all to often they were killed while unarmed. Just shows how violent the nature of republicanism really is.

Tell me WASP, did Loyalists ever kill an unarmed man? If so, then what's your point?

It would seem that Geoffrey Wheatcroft is intent on blaming all modern insurgencies on the IRA. In a way, he's right, they were a big influence on armed uprising, and practically invented modern urban guerilla warfare. But for most of the last century, these tactics were used worldwide to tackle the evils of imperialism. It would seem that this man is more interested in condemning the act, and doesn't even want to know the cause behind these situations. People don't just wake up one day and suddenly decide to join up to a group just to kill people!

[Jim]

Very surprised to read such a shit article from the Guardian, usually they have a bit of political knowledge. Funny that, a newspaper that prides itself on its anti-imperialist stance writing an article like that. Plebs.

Infact, his whole article he could probably try and argue that that Empire was democratic since the insurgencies against it were "undemocratic". Absolute piss. Shit article that uses "Democracy" as a yay word without realising the impact the Easter Rising had to installing real democracy in one part of Ireland.

[bearhunter]

Ah right, it was in the comment is free section. That gives you a hint: it's an opinion piece, not a factual piece. The name of that section comes from a quote from a former Guardian editor which is appropriate here, I think: "Comment is free, but facts are priceless."

[Wasp]

It was by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

[bearhunter]

Jesus, that gobshite. The man who thought Thatcher was God...