Editorial&Opinion: Traitors, martyrs or just brave men?
The Independent – United Kingdom; Apr 15, 2006
ROBERT FISK
More than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with
an Irish friend. She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a
healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped
around Padraig Pearse’s neck for the militarily hopeless but
politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916. But she displayed
an equally admirable suspicion of British – or “English” as she would
have put it – intentions towards Ireland, north and south. Her mother
once recalled for me a British military raid on their home in County
Carlow. “I was a little girl and one of the soldiers patted me on the
head and I told him: ‘You keep your hands off me.'”
But at Ypres one evening, beneath the great Menin Gate – upon which
are carved the names of 54,896 First World War British soldiers whose
bodies were never found – my Irish friend faced a real political
challenge. She had noted, among those thousands, the names of hundreds
of young Irishmen who had died in British uniform while their
countrymen at home were fighting and dying in battle against the same
British Army. She looked at one of the names. “Why in God’s name,” she
asked, “was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the
mud of Flanders?” And it was at this point that an elderly man
approached us and asked my Irish friend to sign the visitors’ book.
She looked at the British Army’s insignia on the memorial volume with
distaste. There was the British crown glimmering in the evening
light. And the Belgian firemen who nightly play the Last Post beneath
the gate were already taking position. There was not much time. But
my friend remembered the young man from Tralee. She thought about her
own small Catholic nation and its centuries of suffering and she
realised that the boy from Tralee had gone to fight – or so he thought
– for little Catholic Belgium. She decided to inscribe the British
Army’s book in the Irish language. Do thiortha beaga,” she wrote. “For
little countries.”
All this happened years before an economically powerful and
self-confident Irish Republic would face up to the sacrifice its
pre-independence soldiers made in British uniform’ the estimated
35,000 Irishmen who died in the 1914-18 war wildly outnumber the few
hundred who fought in the Easter Rising. The total of dead, wounded
and missing among Irish Protestants in the 36th (Ulster) Division on
the Somme and at Ypres came to 32,180. The same statistics among
soldiers of the 10th and 16th Irish Divisions – most of them Catholics
– amounted to 37,761.
My own father was to fight alongside the Irish on the Somme in 1918
although – a fact I used to keep quiet about when I was The Times’s
correspondent in Belfast in the early 1970s – he was originally sent
to Ireland in the aftermath of the Rising. I have a faded photograph
of Bill Fisk, then in the Cheshire Regiment, kissing the Blarney
Stone, and some pictures he took of the front gate of Victoria
Barracks – now Collins Barracks – in Cork, its stonework plastered
with ap-peals to Irishmen to join the British Army and fight for
Catholic Belgium and France. It was only when I was invited to give
the annual Bloody Sunday memorial lecture in Derry – the first Brit to
be asked to honour the memory of the 14 Catholics who were killed by
the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment in 1972 – that I talked
about my Dad’s fight against Sinn Fein (whom he always called the
“Shinners”). If Padraig Pearse had not raised the flag over the Dublin
Post office in Easter Week of 1916, I told my audience, Bill Fisk
might have been sent to die in the first Battle of the Somme three
months later – and his son Robert would not exist. So did I owe my
life to Pearse? I can already hear that most polemical, visceral,
poignant, absolutely infuriating, brilliant and doggedly insulting
Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers bursting into fits of sarcastic
laughter and carefully aimed fury at such a remark. Kevin was among
the fir st to hammer away at Ireland’s shameful refusal to acknowledge
the vast sacrifice of its sons in the 1914-18 cauldron. And Kevin it
has been, while foolishly taking the Turkish line of denial of the
Armenian genocide of 1915, who has repeatedly tried to hack down the
reputations of martyrs Pearse and James Connolly and John MacBride –
and Eamon de Valera, who escaped execution because of his American
passport – and present the Rising as not only a military disaster but
an unnecessary sacrifice of civilian life and the first example of
“green fascism”.
I don’t like the way the “fascist” label gets stuck on anyone we
dislike.
Lefties used to call policemen fascists. And now we have
“Islamofascism” which effectively binds Mussolini to one of the
world’s great religions. No wonder we could draw those outrageous
cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban.
But I’m still not at all sure how to regard the men of 1916. The very
best book on the Rising – George Dangerfield’s magnificent The
Damnable Question -proves that the “rebels” (as my father called them)
were very brave as well as very dismissive of their own and others’
lives. They were not to know the deviant way in which their “blood
sacrifice” – which was not exactly the first in Irish history – would
be adopted by later armed groups who sought their mandate in blood
shed before those 1916 British execution parties.
Had they not been so cruelly shot down as punishment for their armed
assault on British power, would they have been so honoured in the
long, dark, stagnant Ireland of the 1920s and 30s and then in the
terrible and much later years of the civil conflict in Northern
Ireland? Do you have to be a martyr to have honour?
I was much struck by this thought five years ago when I was searching
through the British National Archives at Kew for details of the
execution of a young Australian soldier in the British Army whom my
father was ordered to shoot at the end of the First World War. Bill
Fisk refused, so another officer performed the dirty deed. But there
in the documents of British military executions – routinely filed
under 1916 – were the names of Pearse and Connolly and McBride. The
exemplary punishment accorded to them and their comrades in Dublin
turned Irish public scorn to sympathy and admiration. But to the
Brits, it was just another act of military law, the shooting by firing
squad of traitors to the Crown – in just the same way as deserters,
army murderers and cowards were shot at dawn behind the trenches of
France. The martyrs of the Easter Rising suffered Western Front
punishment.
And now Ireland’s minister for defence tells us the military Easter
Rising pomp in Dublin this weekend symbolises the end of the war in
the North. Maybe.
But who will remember the boy from the Station House, Tralee?
The leaders of the Easter Rising suffered Western Front punishment