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?

What did we get by 1922 that we wouldn’t have got by 1922 under Home Rule?

When people are reluctant to worship at the altar of 1916, they raise issues of guilt that make those who do feel uncomfortable and it is well known that Irish people far prefer to wallow in denial than face reality. As we approach 2016, it has to be asked what exactly is it we are celebrating? Are we celebrating the avoidable deaths of the War of Independence, or the bitterness caused by the Civil War, or that the Rising created partition and ensured that there would never be a united island?

People who say it doesn’t matter today need to be reminded that the reason Ireland lost its economic sovereignty in 2010 and is still in an economic cul-de-sac is directly linked to the type of politics that was created in Ireland after independence with cronyism and localism dominating the decision process.

If we are ever to learn from our past mistakes, to avoid repeating them, we have to have to debate our past. In 1914 we had Home Rule for the entire island, based on inputs from both traditions, but those in the nationalist tradition squandered the chance to create a country based on the best of both traditions and instead inflicted two countries based on the worst of each tradition.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf

London

England