Naturally, Rotunda has the best birth of a nation show

THE battle for ownership of the Centenary of the 1916 Rising is in full flow. With only two weeks to go to the most important historic commemoration of the last 100 years, the 1916 Rising events are coming at us hot and heavy. We’ve already had the bar of chocolate with the Proclamation emblazoned on it. But although the ‘choclamation’ was controversial, overall people thought it was a good way of getting young people to read the seminal document in our nationhood.

This week one of the many craft breweries launched a new beer in memory of the Rising – called Children Of The Revolution – I haven’t imbibed it yet but, personally, I think the name is in bad taste.

And then there’s the slew of exhibitions opening daily – some of which are absolutely fascinating.

Proclaiming A Republic: The 1916 Rising is a free exhibition in the wonderful National Museum in Collins’s Barracks. It has without doubt the most extensive catalogue of 1916 artefacts on display.

The GPO Witness to History exhibition, due to open in a fortnight, is a wondrous, inclusive and sensitive experience right at the heart of where the Rising began in O’Connell Street.

The Sinn Féin-organised Revolution 1916 at the top of O’Connell Street is a massively advertised exhibition, even featuring on last week’s Late Late Show.

While Sinn Féin made it clear from the outset that this ‘original and authentic’ display would focus only on the rebels – which, of course, it is entitled to do – the result is deeply disappointing.

With tickets costing more than €20 online for weekends, it has been described by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams in the accompanying €10 brochure as the ‘people’s exhibition’. It is no such thing. How can the ‘original and authentic’ commemoration of the 1916 Rising describe itself as such while it ignores the majority of people killed in the conflict?

These are the civilians of Dublin’s inner city who perished in the crossfire as – in the words of one rebel – ‘it poured bullets’ within yards of the Ambassador theatre.

The fact that we now definitively know the full details of the children killed and have a list of the names of the remaining 222 innocent civilians on the wonderful Glasnevin Trust website, means that the list of all the people who died in that violent week of our history is now easily compiled.

The staff are enthusiastic but the exhibition, based in the former cold and damp Ambassador cinema, is dominated by a long series of difficult-to-read storyboards in darkened rooms which tell us little new about the rebellion that we have not already read in the wonderful series of books called 16 Lives and elsewhere.

The artefacts that are on display are badly captioned on handwritten scraps of paper. The main room in the building is dedicated to the 1981 hunger strikers – which is fair enough given that Sinn Féin is behind the project. But this is not mentioned in the extensive advertising campaign encouraging people to buy tickets.

Next door , the magnificent pillar room of the Rotunda hospital houses an exhibition called Birth Of The Nation. While it is modest in scale, it is accurate, fair, inclusive and free.