A year lasts 687 days on Mars, the planet of war. It certainly seems as though the state celebrations of the Easter rebellion have lasted a long Martian month, with the actual centenaries of the executions still to come, glory be. No doubt someone in the Department of Arts, Culture and Chronological Inventiveness is planning yet further commemorations, according to the Russian Orthodox, Zulu and Chinese calendars.
At the outset of this Martian month, we were assured respect would be shown to all the victims of the insurrection. Really? The insurgents’ first victim was the unarmed James O’Brien, a constable with Dublin Metropolitan Police, who was cold-bloodedly murdered at the gates of Dublin Castle. At the instigation of Gerry Lovett, a retired garda, a few of us gathered last Sunday to honour O’Brien’s memory. Several senior gardai were present, but I saw no one from the Oireachtas or the Defence Forces. Wreaths were laid by the British ambassador Dominick Chilcott; by Michael O’Sullivan, a descendant of Constable O’Brien; and by Pat McCarthy of the Harp Society, representing former police officers, north and south.
Most touchingly, the delightful Freya Connolly, the great great granddaughter of O’Brien’s killer, Seán Connolly — himself soon to die — laid a wreath. And then we few, we pitiful few, traipsed up to St Stephen’s Green where McCarthy and Colonel Max Walker, the British military attaché, laid further wreaths at the spot where Constable Michael Lahiff, also of the DMP, was murdered.
Later that day, the exuberant Laochra celebrations took place in a packed Croke Park. And we were assured this splendid carnival signalled the end of the centennial commemorations. Only it didn’t. On Tuesday, the defence minister Simon Coveney led an official ceremony marking the executions of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Thomas Dickson and Patrick McIntyre. According to a statement from the Defence Forces press office, they were “all pacifists and not involved in the fighting during the Easter Rising”.
A press release reported Coveney as saying: “Today is the centenary of that awful event which we contemplate in all of its injustice and solemnity [sic]. We remember them and honour their memory. The particular circumstances of the arrest and subsequent execution of these men is [sic] both unjust and shocking.”
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Such cumbrous gobbledegook perfectly matched the baseless assertions of the Defence Forces press office. For McIntyre and Dickson were not pacifists; they were both unionist and keenly pro-war. Repeatedly, we have heard that Sheehy Skeffington was “murdered” by the British, though the M-word is never used — apart from here — to describe what happened to O’Brien or Lahiff.
Why has The Irish Times never quoted from its own archives the statement made by Tim Healy KC to the public inquiry into the Sheehy Skeffington murder? He said that “in a time of war like the present”, all topics of racial prejudice should be eliminated, and it should be made clear this incident concerned “an Irish regiment and Irish officers”, and therefore the “discredit which must indelibly remain on them” would be Ireland’s, and “did not appertain to Great Britain”. Got that? Not British murders, but Irish ones.
And equally, why are other murders the same week never mentioned? Two uniformed army officers, Lt Algernon Lucas and Lt Basil Henry Worsley-Worswick, and two Guinness employees, Cecil Dockeray and William John Rice, were shot by Irishmen of the Dublin Fusiliers in the Guinness brewery on April 28 under the command of an English NCO, Sergeant Robert Flood. At his court martial on charges of murdering Lucas and Rice, Flood clearly lied through his teeth but was acquitted anyway.
The slayings of poor Worswick and Dockeray were the subject of neither trial nor inquiry, unlike the killing of Sheehy Skeffington. What they had in common was that they were all shot by Irishmen. And yet only Sheehy Skeffington is remembered today as having been “murdered”.
Dockeray’s son Gerald became a doctor, thereby founding a Hippocratic dynasty that endures to this day. The other civilian casualty of this sordid affray was Rice, and thereby hangs another medical tale, the symbolism of which is certainly worth saluting during this Martian month of commemorations.
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Rice’s sister Ada was a nurse in the Meath hospital. Of the 52 nurses there in 1911, 18 of them were, like her, Protestant. But such a significant proportion of non-Catholics in any public body would soon become impossible, as Protestants fled an increasingly confessional and intolerant state, the seeds of which had been flagrantly sown amid the endless recitations of the rosary in the GPO. Needless to say, the hysterical religiosity that underwrote the Rising was completely omitted from all the recent and anachronistically secularised representations of it.
This nonetheless created a unique and deadly symbiosis between old church and new state, with dire cultural consequences. Between 1923 and 1940, Irish censors banned dozens of films and hundreds of books.
Moreover, seven years of republican violence brought relatively little return for the vast loss of life and wealth. By 1923, Northern Ireland remained a self-governing entity within the UK, though now with a catastrophic Orange veto. Britain still controlled the Treaty ports, and TDs had to swear an oath of allegiance to the crown, while the constitutional head of the Irish Free State was the same fellow as in 1916 — namely King George V.
One nugget reveals the grisly synergy that defined independent Ireland. In 1942, the taoiseach used a special provision within the Emergency Powers Act to permit his son Lieutenant Rúaidhrí de Valera to relinquish his army commission — yes, in the middle of a world war — so he could succeed his brother-in-law Brian Ó Cuív, husband of the taoiseach’s daughter Emer, in the cherished position of tenured lecturer in early and medieval Irish and Welsh at the Catholic church-run St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.
So, yes, indeed, the Rising was a triumph — for some. For the rest of Ireland, it was an economic and cultural disaster.