Historical reality of 1916 leaders

While the words on the banner hung in front of Liberty Hall (‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland’) still resonate a century on, representing the values of a patriotic anti-imperialist neutrality, they mask an historical reality that was a good deal more complex than is generally allowed (Letters, July 4).

While James Connolly regarded the Great War, as it was called then, as barbaric, and would have wished the labour movement across Europe to have refused to participate, he also took the view that the war having started he wished the British Empire to be beaten, and that, if forced to choose between the two, the German Empire was ‘a homogeneous Empire of self-governing peoples’ (Poland, German South-West Africa?) and contained ‘in germ more of the possibilities of freedom and civilisation’.

The reality is that the leaders of 1916 were neither neutral nor anti-imperialist. They were anti-British imperialism. The Proclamation referred to ‘our gallant allies in Europe’, which were principally Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which incidentally was Arthur Griffith’s and the early Sinn Féin’s model for Irish independence. Undoubtedly, German support for Irish revolution turned out to be a mirage, apart from the guns landed at Howth and Kilcoole in the summer of 1914, which were a fraction of those landed at Larne for the unionists, but it was enough to facilitate the rising. Even after that, as Michael Collins told the American journalist Hayden Talbot in 1922, in his estimation, the Rising and the subsequent national revival ‘were all inseparable from the thought and hope of a German victory’, on which they were counting to gain a place at the peace table.