The Easter Rising and the perils of mythology

The IRA wielded 1916 to legitimise their own campaign of violence in the Troubles.

On Easter Monday in Dublin, 1916, a small group of poets-cum-rebels proclaimed the birth of a sovereign Irish Republic. They took over the General Post Office and fought the British authorities until forced into surrender a meagre five days later. Much of the city was destroyed; 485 people died, 40 of whom were children. The more sane nationalists disapproved: the Easter Rising was a marginal pursuit and a minority concern.

That is until the British forces did something I am sure they were quick to regret, executing 15 of the insurrection’s leaders. Martyrdom, as it turns out, is a powerful vibe-shifter, and the quixotic event soon took on a mythic resonance, a heroic arc with a small cast and heavy Christian allegory.

WB Yeats abetted the transition with his poem “Easter, 1916”. Without his help, the rising could have been remembered rather differently. (“No, this wasn’t glorious sacrifice but a failed coup launched by a coterie of radical lunatics,” perhaps.) Instead, in a stroke of dark luck, the events that followed – the executions, the poem – turned their bungle of an insurrection into a symbol. A terrible beauty born, and all that.

It is extraordinarily difficult to judge the historical resonance of events when they are happening: will Donald Trump’s “liberation day” be a turning point, or a macroeconomic blip? Yeats, writing just a few months after the rising – though the poem had its first public airing in this magazine in 1920 – was likely overstating it when he wrote “all changed, changed utterly”. But distance causes problems too: the distorting effect of time allows shoddy analogy to fester (hence the modern liberality with Hitler comparisons) and a cartoonish version of the past to take hold.

I am thinking about bad history because on Easter Sunday in Dublin, the rising will be commemorated. Ireland’s armed forces (there are a few) will stand outside the General Post Office, still pockmarked with bullet holes from nearly 110 years ago, and someone will read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in Catholic solemnity. The complexity of the rising might be understood by historians, but will elude most.

This is not just a function of the commemoration. In Irish schools – including my urbane all-girls school in leafy Dublin suburbia – it is the Easter Rising, not the War of Independence or the day Ireland became a full sovereign republic, that is vaunted as the great national moment. This was the prequel to modern Ireland, they say.

Romantic, sure. But the logic afforded to the rising – even if you are unpopular and even if you do kill lots of children, it will all be remembered as glorious sacrifice for the greater good in the end, and hey, maybe someone will write a world-beating poem about you too – is available to everyone. For three decades, the tale of Easter 1916 – dissident rebels turning to violence against the will of their countrymen – was used by the Provisional IRA to legitimise its own campaign of violence in Britain and Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century.

The tendency to excavate the past for moral sanction in the present is, I suspect, in our DNA. In 2022 the historian James H Sweet rightly bemoaned the way history had become “an evidentiary grab bag” for people “to articulate their political positions”. He was lamenting the institutional capture of his discipline by the “woke” strictures of the American third-level system. But the misuse of history is not limited to Sweet’s contemporary political antagonists.

The IRA may have wielded history dishonestly. But there are far less malign ways that bad history can lead to poor analysis of the present. I’ve committed a lot of time and column inches to writing about how Ancient Rome became a bad-analogy factory. Owing to its narrow and shallow grasp of world history, the culture leans on Rome to explain the 21st-century political condition (parallels with the Eurasian steppe and the Chinese dynasties are, by comparison, rarely drawn). Intentional or accidental, bad history is corrupting.

Donald Trump is a demagogue in the “honest to god” classical model, one hysterical New Yorker journalist suggested in 2016. Except he isn’t. The swivel-eyed leaders of imperial Rome at least took inflation seriously, for example. I am sceptical of the explanatory benefits of historical parallels at the best of times, but I dread hearing this particular one because it has never led anyone to an insightful conclusion.

It feels too obvious to remind the New Yorker that a president acting in an age of a competing superpower in China, supranational organisations like the EU, and cyberwarfare is a different beast to an emperor of a unipolar world. “Liberation day” cannot be parsed through the lens of the latter.

Sharper minds than mine have warned about the dangers of over-indexing the importance of contemporary events (Yeats did not receive this memo). But I wonder if the inverse – overstating the relevance of the past – is worse. To suggest that without the Easter Rising of 1916 there is no modern Ireland is to argue that unpopular violence committed with messianic zeal will necessarily be justified by a 21st-century liberal haven at the end of it all. Call it foolish, dangerous, deluded – whatever. I’d prefer to be a bit more prosaic: it’s wrong.

[See also: The West is bored to death]