What kind of republic has no room for two frightened little girls?

ANOTHER year, another military parade. Another reading of the Proclamation of Independence on the steps of the GPO.

The numbers attending these parades seem to be declining each year, as if commemorating the dead of 1916 didn’t seem to have a huge amount of relevance nowadays.

But we have to go through the motions. On the website of the Department of the Taoiseach, for instance, there’s a whole section devoted to the 1916 Rising and its importance.

There’s even a picture of the original proclamation, together with a typed version beside it for easy reference. Naturally, it looks as if no one bothered to proof-read the typed version because it has several spelling mistakes and a couple of words missing.

Hopefully, whoever translated the proclamation into the Polish and Chinese versions that you can also find on the website wasn’t relying on the Taoiseach’s department.

Of course all that casualness and lip-service will change when we get to the actual centenary. We can expect a massive turnout in 2016, I imagine. One hundred years since Pearse and his comrades struck for Irish freedom “in the name of God and the dead generations”. We’ll all be there to celebrate that, and no doubt there’ll be no end of describing how much progress we’ve made in those 100 years.

The men who signed the proclamation declared it as their first objective that they wanted to “declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible”.

We mightn’t quite be able to celebrate that as an achievement, not in any literal sense anyway. There is no doubt that an awful lot of Irish people nowadays can claim ownership of a lot of stuff, but a significant proportion of this generation owns nothing at all.

But of course, the most inspiring passage of the proclamation — the one that gets the most lip-service anyway — is where the authors say the republic they are prepared to die for “guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government…”

We’re sufficiently serious about the proclamation to have a military parade in its honour and to have a portion of the Taoiseach’s website dedicated to it. But are we serious enough about the proclamation to ask what it means and how it might apply to our modern circumstances?

If Pearse and Connolly were around nowadays, what would they mean when they talk about the whole nation?

How would they define its parts? What are the differences to which, nowadays, they would be telling us to be oblivious? We can’t say for sure, of course.

The proclamation makes a distinction between “citizens”, with their equal rights and equal opportunities, and “children of the nation”, who need to be cherished equally.

As a layman, it has always seemed to me this notion of the “nation” was very important to the people who might be described as our founding fathers. The nation is what comes first in our constitution — and “fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State” are described there as “fundamental political duties of all citizens”.

There seems little doubt that when the proclamation talks about “differences carefully fostered by an alien government”, it is talking about differences in religion and in allegiance. But there are “different differences” nowadays.

When the Taoiseach’s department posts up a Polish and a Chinese version of the proclamation on their website, that’s a pointer to one of the obvious differences. By the year 2016, there will be a great many children in Ireland for whom citizenship will be an aspiration rather than an entitlement, even if they have been born here. There will be a great many children here whose colour would not have been familiar to the men and women of 1916 and whose first language may not be either of the languages of the “dead generations” from whom we received our “old tradition of nationhood”.

But aren’t they, too, the children of the nation? Mustn’t they also be cherished equally?

Did Pearse and Connolly really mean that for all the children to be cherished they would have to be born here, born white, born Catholic, born Irish-speaking?

Of course they didn’t. And when they placed the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of God, they added a further demand — that no one would dishonour that cause, or the Republic by an act of inhumanity.

Which brings us to Naomi and Jemima Izevbekhai. They used to have an older sister, Elizabeth, but she died. She died after an operation known as female circumcision. That operation is still routinely carried out in Nigeria, the country of Naomi and Jemima’s birth, and there is a serious risk that it will be done to them if they are sent back there. We, apparently, want to send them there anyway. And our law has been designed to ensure the risk of female genital mutilation is not one from which children must be protected.

Naomi and Jemima are, of course, children. Naomi is seven and Jemima is five. They’ve lived around half their lives in Sligo and all they want is to stay here. We don’t want to let them stay.

PERHAPS we don’t believe their mother when she describes the terrible risk that Naomi and Jemima face. Perhaps we feel that risk is none of our business.

But if it’s none of our business, then the Proclamation of Independence means nothing. If the fight for Irish freedom, the willingness to die in the face of oppression, has led us to a situation where we can really turn a blind eye to the oppression of others, then what is our freedom worth?

If we can shrug our shoulders and say that the fate of Naomi and Jemima Izevbekhai is not an issue for us, then how do we deserve to have unfettered control of our own destiny?

Of course it’s not possible for us to take responsibility for every child everywhere. Of course there will be those who will say we cannot afford to create precedents, we cannot afford to open ourselves to a torrent of immigration. And there will even be some who say that cruel and all as it is, if we allow Naomi and Jemima to go back to their uncertain future, it will deter others and therefore protect us.

But Naomi and Jemima are two little girls. They’re not a cause, not a symbol. They’ve been made welcome in a local community and become a part of that community. Our proud republic, celebrating the glories of the past and still reaching for the “august destiny” of the proclamation, no doubt deserves a military parade once a year. But how can we call ourselves a republic — what is there to be proud of? — if we decide that we no longer have room for two frightened little girls?