Traitors, martyrs or just brave men?
By Robert Fisk
Gulf Times, Qatar
April 19 2006
LONDON: 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 World War I 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 appeals
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 first 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 World War I. 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 last weekend symbolised the end of the war in
the North. Maybe. But who will remember the boy from the Station House,
Tralee? – The Independent.