I’ve never written about 1966. . But that year made such a lasting impression on Ireland’s leading intellectual, Fintan O’Toole, that, when commissioned to write an informed reflection on the 1916 Rising he replied with his recollections of its Golden Jubilee when he was but a lad of eight summers.
O’Toole had made no study of the Rising, its leaders, its participants, context, purpose and consequences, when given his assignment, and apparently felt no necessity to do so.
So he mimicked the pub regular in the John Betjeman poem who “talked of Marx and nuclear fission with all a Rustic’s Intuition” But, God between us and all harm!, he appears to have been a mentor to later “experts.”
I was living and working in London in 1966 and bought THE DAILY TELEGRAPH every day and the SUNDAY TIMES frequently. The middle-aged men I worked with had mostly served in the Second World War, and those two or three years older than me had done National Service in the British forces. Both the TELEGRAPH and THE SUNDAY TIMES carried pieces on the Irish Jubilee and interviews with veterans which had nothing but good to say about both. RTE TV’s serial on the Rising, scripted by Hugh Leonard, was shown on British TV and my English colleagues expressed admiration for the “rebels”. The SUNDAY TIMES Colour Magazine had a cover showing veteran Maurice Collins, an old IRB man involved in the planning of the Rising, standing in Kilmainham Jail by the wall where the leaders had been shot. As I child I knew Maurice and other veterans, as well as veterans of the World Wars, but they were at peace and not given to boasting.
The Dublin Newspapers in 1966 were not critical of the 1916 Insurgents, nor of the elected Republican Government and its Ministries and the Republican Army and agencies which defended them and the citizens who established them after 1918. Veteran Insurgents led the Government and were prominent in the Opposition parties, and were active in the media. The bitterness of the Civil War of 1922-23 was largely buried and unheard of by most of my generation. Those of us with an interest in history were happy to honour anyone who had thrown a stone for Ireland.
Today all is changed, changed utterly, and blackguards in THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE SPECTATOR and other papers which in 1966 saluted Ireland’s heroes and heroines vie in condemning them.
In Ireland university professors, political columnists, religious correspondents, public (state-owned) and private TV and radio pundits, ex-ambassadors and serving ones combine in the same squalid business. Many of them are neither stupid nor ignorant. But I think one political correspondent, on the board of a learned religious journal, and one religious correspondent, display ignorance and stupidity to the extent that I believe neither could differentiate between Extreme Unction and the Cure d’Ars
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