On Easter Monday 1966 THE IRISH TIMES, then Edited by the excellent Douglas Gageby, reported that 900 insurgent veterans of the 1916 Rising had gathered at the GPO the previous day.
Less than 2,000 Insurgents were believed to have been involved in 1916.So approximately 50% of the Insurgents were alive and gathered round the GPO half a century after the Rising to celebrate it with their fellow citizens.
Even if less than 50% of their non-insurgent compatriots survived the 50 years, those survivors will have far outnumbered the insurgent survivors.
During those fifty years everyone had had time to reflect on the Rising and they had many opinions. Every Irish Government from 1919 onwards was heavily loaded with insurgent veterans. W T Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera had each been sentenced to death by British Courts Martial for their parts in Easter Week, and whatever their later differences those parts were not held against them by the voters.
In 1966 people who remembered Ireland before, during and after the Rising were proud to celebrate its Golden Jubilee. It was a time for ringing bells and holding their heads high. They had yet to be instructed by those then in short trousers or diapers that they should be wringing their hands and hanging their heads in shame.
Oh Happy Day!
Ah, revisionists!
Oh happy days for blood thirsty republicans! Other events included the blowing up of Nelson’s Column in Dublin, rioting in Belfast from republicans and a plea from Ruari O’Bradaigh for the youth of Ireland to join violent armed gangs. Let the bells ring! Let eyes remain shut tight!
Strange how when the ‘Iron Curtain’ came down the Western (including Irish) media exulted in the pulling down by Poles, Hungarians and east Germans, of pompous monuments to erstwhile tyrants/heroes (delete as appropriate ) and praised the resurgent iconiclasts. Likewise after the fall of Sadam Hussein.Yet when the Irish retain monuments, statues and streetnames that honour tyrants, expropriators, traitors, colloborators, leeches exploiters and war criminals, paeons of praise are sung by the usual suspects to our “maturity”. Nelson was an odious and bloodthirsty pirate, Sultan of slaughter and war criminal whose war crimes at Naples were condemned even by his biographer, Robert Southey Poet Laureate. Yet the gibbering scribes of our ‘national’ press continue to wax nostalgic and deplore the demise of this phallic symbol of occupation from the main street of our capital city.