1916: The Honour and the Folly

Abstract

1916: The Honour and the Folly Edmond Grace SJ In Ken Burns’s recent documentary series The Vietnam War, one of the interviewees, John Musgrave, describes the first time he saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. He felt a deep sense of gratitude and thought, ‘This is going to save lives. This is going to save lives’.1 Himself a Vietnam veteran, he had long since come to the view that the war had been a mistake and a tragedy, and that the silence surrounding it had been cruel. Many thousands of those who had served had taken their own lives and he himself had come close to doing so. Now the silence had been broken and the survivors of Vietnam could stand up with honour and acknowledge their fallen comrades. Nguyen Ngoc, a former political officer in the North Vietnamese Army, was another of Burns’s interviewees. During the war he had written poems and slogans for the cause, which makes his concluding statement to the camera all the more remarkable: ‘Now in Vietnam we are starting to rethink the war, to ask questions. Was the war necessary to achieve justice? Was it right?’2 These two veterans, fighting on opposite sides, were addressing questions which we in Ireland, one century after the foundation of the state, have never really faced in our own case. Was violence the best way to achieve what we have of Irish freedom? Was it right? Many would find a clear – and negative – answer to this question in relation to the Provisional IRA, but the Provisional strategy was itself based on a model from which all other nationalist parties have emerged. All Irish nationalists look to the 1916 Proclamation as the founding document of their tradition. But have we ever compared it to other similar documents, including the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, for the light they might throw on our situation? The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, despite the name, is no model of democracy, but it might nevertheless have something to teach us about reconciliation. The present essay will explore three questions. Firstly, was recourse to violence in the struggle for Irish nationhood inspired by an honourable impulse? Secondly, has recourse to arms helped or hindered the reconciliation of a deeply and enduringly divided population? Thirdly, how does the 1916 Proclamation compare with other similar documents? Studies • volume 109 • number 435 276 Honour On 11 May 1857, there was a slaughter of Christians in Delhi, India. Europeans who had converted to Islam and Hinduism were spared. Indian Christians were sought out and killed.3 This moment marked the beginning of the bloodiest uprising the British Empire would ever face, with casualties more than three times those of the American War of Independence, in a much shorter period of time. One historian of the period refers to ‘the Victorian Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857 down on … their own heads’.4 Revd Midgely John Jennings, chaplain to the Christians of Delhi, spoke of the British Empire as ‘one of the mysterious ways of God’s providence’ through which India would be converted to Christianity– by force if necessary.5 The same attitude was at work among those who governed Ireland ten years previously and it would provoke a similar reaction of deep rage. Charles Trevelyan, based in London, was the most senior British official overseeing Famine relief efforts in Ireland. He was of the view that God had sent the Famine as a calamity ‘to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated … the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish perverse and turbulent character of the people’.6 This attitude towards the suffering in Ireland was not universal, but it was certainly considered a respectable position to hold. The then Home Secretary felt free, in relation to the Famine, to write to the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, in the following terms: ‘These are solemn warnings … they proclaim a voice not to be mistaken, that “doubtless there is a God, who judgeth the Earth...