1916 Revisited one more time
Declan Lynch The Irish Revolution (RTE1)
THERE’S an odd thing that happens when you’re looking at a documentary such as The Irish Revolution. You find yourself wanting to pause it here and there, to make a point of order, or just to add your own observations, but you tend to get lost in the moment and you just let it go.
It’s been like this since 2016 really, with this and with other such centenary works — at this stage they all seem to be blurring into one, as if there’s a version with which we are all comfortable, a feeling with which everyone can connect.
Early doors in this sumptuous production, the significance of the Irish Revolution is stated thus: “In years to come, Ireland’s example will inspire people the world over to stand, and break the shackles of empire.”
Now there is a lovely, lyrical flow to that line, suggesting that it wasn’t just specific countries that were inspired, but that it was happening “the world over”. And it lifts your heart for a moment so that you don’t want it to stop, and for the narrator to add: “It would also inspire generations of some of the worst people in Ireland to come together in a rabidly nationalist death-cult, which is still with us indeed, claiming continuity from the events of 1916.”
I mean, that would not be a merely pedantic point to make. It is factually, morally, and historically true, and if you’re going to go with us “breaking the shackles of empire”, it follows that you have to give serious consideration to mentioning some of the other things, and people, that have been broken — and are being broken as we speak, “the world over”, by the delirious energies of nationalism.
And yet if you were to ask me to write that script, and I came to that part, I don’t know if I’d have the audacity to spoil the vibe with that feel-bad line — yes I know that this is a prestigious project, based on the glorious Atlas of the Irish Revolution, but there are still some things that tend not to make it into these productions.
You’ve got to go with the flow, you don’t want to be interrupting all this fine history with… other history. Which is probably why some historians and other interested parties live in dread of all these celebrations and commemorations and the effect that they might have on the vulnerable — which in Ireland, is just about everyone.
We just love immersing ourselves in the grandeur of these works, gazing back at “those faded faces, those fierce moustachioed men”. We don’t want to be annoying ourselves with awkward interjections — when it comes to breaking the shackles of the empire, we are very settled in our ways.
Indeed this was probably the first time I really noticed something that’s been there in all such productions, this sense that several of the main players of the revolution were, shall we say, a bit on the posh side. That this was quite a bourgeois revolution.
Which may help to explain how easily many of them answered the call to become the ruling class of their new Ireland — now that would be a fascinating documentary, exploring the issue of class as a powerful influence in our affairs, more powerful than all but the purest of revolutionary fervour.
Since we know so much now, about 1916 and the years which came just after that — know them off by heart — could we not just skip forward to the part where these surviving rebels of 1916, having indeed broken the shackles of the British empire, are in the process of selling us down the river to another empire, the one in Rome?
How did they do that? How did they come through all that madness with the Brits only to consign us to the tender mercies of authoritarian Catholicism? If Pearse had lived, rather than de Valera, would he have done any better? And if 1916 “inspired people the world over”, did the eventual handover of supreme power to Archbishop McQuaid not take the good out of it?
I guess we will never know.