Home Rule Bill gave island chance to embrace different traditions

Those who seek to justify the 1916 Rising at the expense of the 1914 Home Rule Bill, make a number of mistakes.

Firstly, they trot out the line that the Ulster Volunteers were armed to the teeth and would never have allowed the bill to be implemented, and yet those same Ulster Volunteers didn’t stop it being passed at Westminster and becoming law. Once it was the law of the land there is no reason to doubt the British government would have implemented it just as it implemented all the other major reforms that were passed at Westminster. Secondly, 1916 apologists refuse to acknowledge why the majority of Ulster people were opposed to Home Rule in the first place. It was because they were fearful for their religious freedoms and business interests.

Thirdly, the real crux of the debate about 1916 is not so much the Rising itself — the Proclamation could have been read out anywhere, be it the new Irish Parliament proposed under Home Rule or at a Council meeting, for all the relevance it has ever had to the lives of real people — but rather the chain of events it created. Was the Rising worth the War of Independence it caused, or the Civil War, or the decades of economic and social stagnation, the social damage inflicted by a Catholic theocracy?