100 years after Rising, Enda surveys chaos
RUBBLE, shattered frontages, desolation, ruin. All around, it’s what the Taoiseach saw as he toured the 1916 battlefield exhibition at Collins Barracks.
A shattered seat of administration in Ireland and a grimly determined populace. A big run on water after the angry flames had licked the pillars of the State.
And indeed, Enda Kenny looked like he could have done with the ministrations of another Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell. The general impression was that the Taoiseach himself seemed wrecked. Although he is not yet running up the white flag amid pummelled masonry.
A sign hung on the Dublin Savings Bank in a mounted photograph: ‘Will open when Law and Order is fully restored.’ They could have it on the gates of Leinster House a hundred years later.
The Taoiseach seemed preoccupied as he travelled the metaphorically barricaded streets,
Political Editor hearing reports on objects taken from the citizenry – such as a home-made bayonet fashioned from a garden shears. Ouch!
Mr Kenny seemed to scurry with particular haste past a display reading: ‘Courts Martial and Execution.’
He was shown Willie Pearse’s cut-throat razor, left into a shop for sharpening, but never collected. Later came a second cutthroat, this time belonging to Thomas Clarke, signatory to the Proclamation. Enda naturally picked up neither, but chose instead to display Pádraig Pearse’s unthreatening pince-nez spectacles to the photographers.
He asked polite questions of the attendant staff, who displayed their trophies from the restored calm. He took keenest interest in the hurley stick of Michael Collins. It could give someone quite a ‘wallop’, as he once described the rejection of the referendum to consign the Seanad to history.
There is new oblivion in prospect, along with all the imagery of the risen people. There stood a picture of a wall from killing-ground Kilmainham, and the firing squad of photographers wanted him up against it. He ducked, showing a nimble turn of foot. Just as he had defied the pinging, zinging questions from reporters minutes earlier.
He had his duty, he said. He referred to hearing from the meeting of his parliamentary party today – as it were, not the gunboat Helga, bringing volleys of ordnance to make the sniping of Alan Shatter and Tom Barry look like so much small-arms fire.
The Republic is in the crucible.