‘Road to the Rising’ tramples on our history

The event which enveloped O’Connell St on Easter Monday was a crass tribute to the realities of Dublin and Ireland in 1915, when poverty and war was everywhere, writes Emer O’Kelly            

I WAS in O’Connell St in Dublin on Easter Monday and I ran out of it. Or I would have if there had been the space. The street we used to think (wrongly) was the widest in Europe was too crowded for that. Admittedly the weather was unseasonally beautiful but that wasn’t the reason for the crowds.

They were “celebrating” Easter Monday 1915, a supposed recreation of Dublin (and Ireland) a year before the events which would change our history forever. And what I saw as a commemoration of that entirely ordinary Monday of 1915 was a disgrace, a tatty shambles of fake “craic” and jollity.