Hundreds gathered in Milltown Cemetery on Easter Monday to mark the 107th anniversary of the 1916 Rising.
Those gathered were addressed by former IRA volunteer John Crawley, Republican ex-Prisoner and author of ‘The Yank’, who delivered the main oration. It was also addressed by Republican ex-prisoner Pádraic MacCoitir who chaired the event, as well as Amy Rafferty of the Connolly Youth Movement who delivered a reading of the 1916 Proclamation.
The full text of John Crawley’s oration is carried below:
“It’s a great honour to be standing at the graveside of so many republicans who sacrificed their lives for the full freedom and independence of Ireland. I’m conscious that Belfast has been at the centre of republican activism and resistance going back to 1791 with the founding of the United Irishmen.
Just a few miles away, on Cave Hill overlooking this city, a republican leadership including Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell, Samuel Nielson, and Henry Joy McCracken pledged ‘never to desist until we had subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted our independence’.
Two hundred years later, a contemporary leadership who boasted they led the most dangerous and committed revolutionary force in Ireland and assured us they would lead us to the Republic were eventually co-opted to Britain’s analysis of the nature of the conflict and have internalised a British blueprint to resolve it. Far from leading us to the Republic, they ended up as stakeholders in a regional franchise of the Westminster Parliament.
One of the greatest crimes in the current political climate is to be perceived as opposing the British pacification strategy known as the Irish Peace Process. Few republicans oppose peace, but we are entitled, indeed duty bound, to be critical of a process that cannot lead to the objectives republicans fought for so long and sacrificed so much to achieve.
The Good Friday Agreement is a snare and a delusion. It entangles us in a web of terms and conditions regarding Irish unity that only Britain can interpret and adjudicate. It invites the delusion British legislation will pave the way to a national democracy within an All-Ireland republic. A political outcome Britain has strenuously rejected and sabotaged at every opportunity.
We must challenge the false narrative that the republican struggle was simply about ending partition. There was no partition in 1916 when the Irish Republic was proclaimed in arms. Neither was there partition when the United Irishmen was formed in 1791. Unity for the Protestant founders of Irish republicanism meant national unity across the sectarian divide. That’s what it should continue to represent. Not territorial unity in exchange for enduring internal divisions that can only act to Britain’s benefit.
The 1916 Proclamation called for us to be … ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’ The signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should not be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.
In contrast, those who support the Good Friday Agreement are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. That unionists will remain forever in Ireland but not of it. Wolfe Tone believed that British rule in Ireland was irreformable and that sectarianism could never be addressed by the system which promoted and maintained it. Republicans believe that still.
Irish unionists are pro-British, but they are not the British presence. The British presence is the presence of Britain’s jurisdictional claim to Ireland and the civil and military apparatus that gives that effect.
Ulster Unionists vow they will not be forced into a united Ireland. Yet, they lived in a united Ireland for hundreds of years. A united Ireland they were not forced into, but their ancestors forced themselves upon during the plantation of Ulster. An Ireland united in the sense that until the early 20th century England treated our country as one political unit. Unionists never had an issue with a united Ireland per se. The Orange Order is an all-Ireland institution. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches are all-Ireland ministries. And, of course, the Church of Ireland is not the Church of Northern Ireland. Their real objection is becoming subject to the majority decision-making of an Irish national electorate.
While no one suggests a British government withdrawal from the Six Counties would lead to a sudden unionist reappraisal of their identity, the fact remains the Union is existential to unionism. You cannot be a unionist without the Union, but you can be a nationalist without the Republic. That’s why unionists defend the Union with a vigour that few nationalists reciprocate for the Republic.
Ulster unionists and their allies believe that the doctrine of unionist exceptionalism not only grants them a veto over British constitutional decisions but pre-empts Irish decisions in any future united Ireland. Though 18% of the population of Ireland and only 2% of the population of the UK, unionists believe they have the right to say no to everything and everyone whenever it suits them. The logic of democracy doesn’t burden them. Britain ensures it doesn’t have to.
Just as unionists were awarded a veto on Irish unity in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act before the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks even began, there is a campaign to grant unionism a veto over the identity and symbols of a united Ireland before it is legislated for. These decisions should be left to the judgement of the Irish people as a whole, as they would be in any normal democracy. Unionism’s exceptional right to say no may include a veto over the Irish national flag and anthem and an insistence on re-joining the British Commonwealth. Far from breaking the connection with England, there are powerful and influential forces attempting to deconstruct the concept of Irish nationhood and lure the whole of Ireland more fully into a British orbit. On the 29th of March this year Lord David Frost, a former British diplomat and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office told a gathering in Lisbon that, ‘In time the Irish will be part of our British future’.
The Brits play the long game. They know Ireland has no shortage of weak and ambitious puppets keen to carve out political careers by partnering with Britain in consolidating and validating our country’s constitutional division. It won’t be long until you hear ‘this Shared Island’ become ‘these Shared Islands’.
Those who believe that unionists may be enticed into a united Ireland by discarding or eroding Irish national anthems, flags, and symbols, by chasing English royalty around Ireland, or by attending British war memorials forget that Ulster unionists chose to opt out of joining the 26-County state in 1922 when that state had substantially closer links with Britain than it does today. The Free State government had retracted its allegiance to the Irish Republic, set up a subordinate parliament in the name of the King, took an oath to be faithful to that King, was a member of the British Commonwealth, and was actively killing republicans. And yet, unionists wanted no part of it. Not then, not now, not ever.
There is no question that for many Ulster unionists, their communal identity is rooted in a paradigm of settler colonialism. Every 12th of July, they celebrate this imperial legacy and their pride at being descended from the English and Scottish planters sent to ethnically cleanse Ulster and tame and civilise the native Irish who remained. When pressed, their perception of themselves as a colonial garrison often outweighs any loyalty to London. An Irish national democracy rooted in non-sectarianism and civic equality holds no allure for this mindset. Recognising that is one thing; pandering to it by sabotaging Ireland’s republican heritage is another. Our struggle must focus on where the root cause of the problem lies – on the Union and not the unionists.
Britain’s claim to be in Ireland simply to protect the democratic wishes of Ulster unionists is a feeble alibi. Ireland was partitioned not to defend the rights of unionists but to deny the right of Ireland as a whole to national self-determination. England’s conquest of Ireland began centuries before the Ulster plantations. There was no Union and no unionists when England’s sword first cut its genocidal swathe through Ireland.
What was England’s excuse, then? It was, of course, naked imperial ambition combined with the strategic objective of preventing this large landmass on their western flank from being used as a potential base against them. Britain won no argument in Ireland. It achieved no legitimate mandate for its presence. In the words of Roger Casement, ‘conquest has no title.’
The campaign to defeat Irish republicanism, its philosophy, ethos, and symbols is all pervasive and cuts across the many layers of loyal nationalism, North and South. By loyal nationalists, I mean those disposed to perceive Irish national ambitions through the prism of British strategic interests. Those who concur with British government definitions of peace and democracy and join with Britain in declining to recognise Ireland as one democratic unit. Rather, they accept the constitutional legitimacy of partition and endorse Britain’s provincial assembly at Stormont, including its armed wing, the PSNI – a Crown Constabulary buttressed by the British army and MI5.
According to this mindset, the root cause of violence in Ireland is not the British occupation of our country but the republican aspiration to end it. Consequently, they hope to immunise the Irish people against the concept of an Irish Republic as defined by the 1916 Proclamation. To nurture a herd immunity against republican ideology.
Despite their best efforts, the Irish Republic, proclaimed in 1916 and democratically endorsed by the First Dáil in 1919, continues to carry immense moral authority with many Irish people.
Loyal nationalism attempts to develop institutions that Irish unionists inspired principally by plantation Protestantism will accept and the British government will endorse. To achieve this, they seek to create a polity unencumbered by the republican demands of national independence and of civic unity across the sectarian divide. These careerists will happily settle for a compromised authority, an accommodation with England falling substantially short of Irish national sovereignty.
In 1585 the Elizabethan planter Edmund Spencer wrote that (the Irishman) ‘…will in time quite learn to forget his Irish nation’. Today we hear what Tony Blair called the ‘decommissioned mindset’, proving him true. The decommissioned mindset knows that Britain rewards nationalists willing to treat Ireland as a malleable geographical fragment and punishes republicans who regard it as an indivisible nation. Robert Emmet did not request his epithet be withheld until his country had taken its place as two nations among the nations of the earth.
There is a saying that if you can’t do what counts, make what you can do count. Key elements of the Provisional leadership, unwilling or unable to make the personal sacrifices required to continue to pursue republican objectives, cynically jettisoned that struggle when thrown a lifeline by the British government. They were co-opted to Britain’s vision of a united Ireland that retains the sectarian dynamic and the resulting British/Irish cleavage in national loyalties into any new constitutional arrangements. The so-called ‘New’ Ireland or ‘United’ Ireland envisioned by the Good Friday Agreement is neither new nor united. It is predicated on all the old divisions. Thus, the political malignancy through which Britain historically manipulated and controlled Ireland will remain intact.
Pádraig Pearse said of Wolfe Tone,
‘He has spoken for all time, and his voice resounds throughout Ireland, calling to us from this grave when we wander astray following other voices that ring less true.’
Today, there are voices that ring less true, telling us that far from breaking the English connection, we must preserve aspects of it in any new constitutional arrangements. This includes an acknowledgment that the British royal family should play a continuing role in Ireland, providing an institutional point of reference for the loyalties of those citizens who cannot bring themselves to discard the symbolism of the British Crown, the entity which underwrote the twin pillars of plantation Protestantism – confiscation and sectarian supremacy.
Despite the willingness of loyal nationalism to buy into the British analysis of the nature of the conflict as a domestic dispute between tribal factions in which Britain had no selfish, strategic, or economic interest, it was England who injected the sectarian dynamic into Irish politics. England declared a Protestant kingdom where no Catholic could be head of state. It made Protestantism the test for loyalty and patronage. The British are in no position to lecture the Irish on the constitutional model of a united Ireland based on liberty, equality, non-sectarianism, and social justice.
Although well-versed in the reactionary, racist, and sectarian mindset of settler colonialism, we must never forget that it was Irish Protestants inspired not by the plantations but by the enlightenment who were the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. That political DNA still exists in many Irish Protestants and can even be found among some ‘small u’ unionists.
The voices that ring less true insist that Irish republican objectives will be ultimately achieved through British legislation. That sectarianism, inequality, and partition will be tackled by the government that created and harnessed them to achieve their imperial ends.
A republican voice must once again be heard. A collective voice that echoes the republican ideals of the United Irishmen and reminds us of what a united Ireland really means. A voice that rings true. A voice that remembers who we are and what we represent – the breaking of the connection with England and the establishment of an Irish national democracy within an All-Ireland republic.”
ENDS
