The Somme is a counter-balance to the Easter Rising? I think not

Why have unionists  so many jokes about Bobby Sands and the other hunger-strikers? Why are unionist commentators and disaffected republicans so keen to show the hunger-strikers as fools, tricked by Sinn Féin into continuing their strike when they could have stopped? That’s easy. It’s because anti-republicans are very keen to somehow undermine what, by any measure, was heroic self-sacrifice. The slow and agonizing deaths of the ten men showed the world that republicans were determined, in what they saw as their legitimate struggle, to reject the label of criminal. Is there any comparable self-sacrifice within the ranks of those opposed to republicans? No.

Well then, is there any historical event that has parallels with the hunger strikers of the 1980s? There is, and you’ve probably spotted it already – the Easter Rising. The record shows that Pearse, Connolly and the others knew that their insurrection would be crushed in the short term. Or to put it another way, they knew when they entered the GPO that they were going to die. Yet they freely continued, and their sacrifice lit a revolutionary flame throughout Ireland that resulted in independence for twenty-six of the thirty-two counties. The Easter Rising is the seminal event in the formation of what is now known as the Republic of Ireland. The signatories of the Proclamation couldn’t have known for sure that this would happen. But they sacrificed their lives in the hope that they would awaken a nation – a nation that, a few years earlier in 1911, cheered to the echo a visit by King George V. Unionists such as Arlene Foster, Jim Allister and Ian Paisley Jr consider the Easter Rising as a cowardly rebellion, stabbing Britain in the back when she was most vulnerable. But they’re less intelligent than I think they are if they don’t secretly realise that stab-in-the-back claims are outweighed by the selfless nobility of the signatories’ deaths.

Which brings us to the Decade of Centenaries. Had you heard that term used when you were studying History at school? Me neither. It’s called that because there are at least three events – the signing of the Covenant, the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme – that involved thousands of Irish people. There is a comparison to be made between the Covenant signing and the Easter Rising, although the signing of a commitment, even in your own blood, is a different matter from spilling your life-blood. There are similarities between the Somme and the Easter Rising, in that Irishmen fought and died in both. But the core difference is that one group fought in the interests of an empire and in the majority of cases died needlessly, their deaths failing to bring the limited Home Rule they’d been promised.

A few years back, I published a book called Whose Past Is It Anyway? – The Ulster Covenant, the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme. Interesting though it was (what did you expect, Virginia?), it fell into the trap of presenting events that are linked and comparable with events that are heroic. Those who insist on setting the Battle of the Somme as a counter-balance to the Easter Rising do so because they want to blur the edges of the Rising, to show it as simply another military event. It isn’t. The Easter Rising involved the self-sacrifice of Irishmen in the face of overwhelming odds, men of vision whose deaths lit a revolutionary flame. The Somme involved Irishmen who donned British uniforms and showed courage, but the majority of whom were duped and left stranded on the wrong side of history.