PAUL GALLAGHER AND THE EASTER RISING by Donal Kennedy

I’ve just discovered comments by Paul Gallagher reported in the Irish Times of the 17th May and I decided to check his CV before commenting.

He’s a relatively young man, born in 1955, and the CV is impressive. He is a former Fianna Fáil Attorney General, a Senior Counsel, a Bencher of the Kings’s Inns, a Graduate of University College Dublin and of Cambridge University, has degrees in Law, History and Economics and has attended Bilderberg Group meetings. One of his many areas of expertise is on the law of defamation. And he has three sons, even younger than himself!  So I’ll be even more circumspect than usual.

Mr Gallagher reportedly holds that the 1916 Rising had no legitimacy whatever, as it had no prior sanction from the Irish electorate. He described the insurgent leaders as a a”self-absorbed group of brave idealists who never represented anybody, except for James  Connolly, who had served briefly on Dublin’s city council.”It’s my understanding that Connolly once stood for the Corporation, or Council, but was defeated by P.J.McCall, a Wexford,man of some learning, who wrote “Kelly the Boy from Killane”, “”Boulavogue” , “Follow Me Up To Carlow” and other such seditious ballads, not often heard in the Kings’ Inns, Cambridge, amongst the Bilderberg Group or Castleknock College.James Connolly, far from being self-absorbed,was a veteran of social, and socialist action both sides of the Irish Sea and both sides of the Atlantic with comrades from many lands, speaking various languages and worshipping at various meeting places. He was a   syndicalist, believing in industrial action, not armed revolt, until the outbreak of the wars on Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire changed the context. Changed it utterly.   James Connolly was also a devoted husband and     father.

Patrick Pearse was primarily an advanced educationalist favouring the democratisation of local government and Home Rule which would allow for the development of education and culture. The revolting antiHome  Rulers, including  F.E.Smitha lawyer on the make coveting the “Glittering Prizes” of office – the Attorney Generalship of England, and the Lord Chancellor’s Woolsack, moved Pearse towards armed insurgency. Thomas MacDonagh was, like Connolly, a devoted family man, who was unusual for his time because he pushed his children in their prams. He was kindness and gentleness itself, writing an encouraging postcard, in Irish, to his goddaughter Eileen, my aunt,then aged 9 (in 1904) when she started learning the language. He, and my grandfather were co-founders in 1909 of the Association of Secondary Teachers, a Union which lifted their profession out of poverty, eventually.

The British Government had no mandate to declare war on Germany and Austria in August 1914, although, behind Parliament’s back, the Committee of Imperial Defence had been planning to crush Germany for the previous decade. The Official Secrets Act, various espionage bodies, the Territorial Army, the Baden Powell “Be Prepared” Boys were in place and the Entente Cordiale with France had been cemented under the guise of whoring expeditions of King Henry VII. T.E..Lawrence and Maurice Hankey, one posing  as a scholar, the other as a Naval Officer on a courtesy visit to Constantinople, spied out Arab regions and the Dardanelles with a view to attacking them.   John Redmond’s Irish Party had no mandate for war on people’s who had never harmed nor insulted the Irish, on behalf of a power which had crushed the Irish. Redmond himself as far back as 1886 had publicly described the manifest destiny of Irishmen as the shock troops of the British Army and had repeated that hope for them in a speech in London on St Patrick’s Day 1913. In 1913 he also told C P Scott of the Manchester Guardian that he was against Irish women getting the franchise. Apparently they were to sit demurely at home sewing socks for soldiers.

A General Election was due in the UK in 1915 as the last one had been held in 1910.  But it was not held, and the Cabinet included men who had threatened to overthrow the Government established after the 1910 Election. So in 1916 there was a very rum Government with no mandate whatsoever. The War had been prepared dishonestly and lies were the currency of Government “information.” THE TIMES had exulted how the shooting by the Germans of Nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium had “been worth an army corps” to the British, as tens of thousands of chivalrous men had flocked to their Colours. The Church of England included the Nurse in its Calendar of Saints. In October 2015, a century after the shooting, Dame Stella Rimmington former head of MI5 revealed that Cavell was indeed a spy, and that the Germans were justified in shooting her.   The 1916 leaders, far from being self-absorbed idealists were hardheaded realists and the Irish electorate quickly grasped that truth.