SF view of 1916 is Stalinist, says Martin
The Minister for Enterprise, in a hard-hitting address on the legacy of the Easter Rising, also excoriated what he described as the other extreme faction who had pursued an anti-republican and anti-1916 agenda and dubbed anyone who expressed admiration for the Easter Rising as “crypto” or “fellow-travellers”.
Identifying RTÉ as one of the main conduits for this “exceptionally powerful lobby” during the 1970s and the 1980s, he said: “I hope that one day the public will receive a full account of how our public broadcaster came to be so under the influence of one particular faction during a substantial part of that time.”
Mr Martin was delivering the annual Robert Schumann Lecture in University College Cork last night.
In a robust defence of the rising, Padraig Pearse, and its ideals he described 1916 as a catalyst for change that inspired Ireland’s constitutional tradition.
“I believe that modern Ireland is in fact a vindication of 1916,” he said.
He said extreme republicans and extreme-anti-republicans alike demanded: a world where the public must “either reject 1916 or must believe in violence”.
He conceded that the State may have fallen into an uncritical or complacent uniformity until after the 50th anniversary. He said the serious scholarship that questioned the orthodoxy was necessary and welcome.
Mr Martin said that the ‘unbroken chain’ claim of the Provos was an abuse of memory. Instancing the fact that SF never refer to the first two leaders of the party, Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera, he argued: “In fact, in the best Stalinist traditions they have become non-persons to their self-described successors.”
