Build on the opportunity won in 1916 - A time for Ireland to celebrate

TOMORROW we will celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Most of us will do so with enthusiasm. 

Others, possibly those of a more excitable disposition, will celebrate to a degree that would be disapproved of by today’s health police. Others still will try to dominate the track and to plunder the betting ring at Cheltenham. However you choose to mark our national day, and even if you choose not to, you are making your own kind of statement. It will be a day when we can, for all of our difficulties and challenges, be proud to be Irish. All around the world, the usually closed doors of powerful political and business leaders will open, momentarily, to acknowledge the huge role played by generation after generation of Irish emigrants in building proud societies in faraway places.

Next week, the celebrations around the centenary of the 1916 Rising will reach a climax. Those events will be an opportunity to reflect on how this Republic was established, and how very difficult that struggle was. It should give us all an opportunity to reflect on earlier generations, too, those whose lives were consumed by that centuries-long struggle for freedom, even if they were denied anything like the freedoms we take so for granted. We must remember that next week’s pageantry will mark a culmination in the struggle for national self-determination, rather than a grand, single, defining act. We should remember that the 1916 Rising might never have happened had those who had gone before not believed in the cause of Irish freedom. We should celebrate that those who confronted ‘Goliath’, in Easter Week of 1916, were part of a noble continuum stretching back to those who fought at Kinsale in 1601, to those so brutally dispossessed by Cromwell’s plantations, and those who risked, and paid, all to rebel in 1798. That we will, in the coming days, celebrate in freedom, is, itself, almost testimony enough to those who, a century ago, changed this country forever. That we can do so in secure, comfortable, and largely decent material circumstances adds to the integrity of the celebrations. They should not, however, distract us from the reality that building a true Republic, and a society worthy of freely given sacrifice, remains an unfinished project. The gift of freedom comes with an obligation to maximise its opportunity to improve the lives of all Irish citizens.