IT might have been wiser for Tom Hartley to have sounded out unionist and loyalist parties before issuing a public invitation to them to support a programme of events to commemorate the Easter Rising.
He must have known that the responses would, at best, have been lukewarm or, as was the case, downright hostile. So surely it would have made sense to have had a few words in a few ears and gauged the lay of the land?
As it happens I have no problem with his observation, “But we do think it is important for us from early on in this process to say, ‘Look, we want this to be a period of hospitality, of bringing people in and getting other people’s views and dealing with difficult views of 2016.’
We have no difficulty with that.” But that’s what he should have been saying to potential invitees in the run up to the launch of the programme: not after he had thrown the invitation into the public domain.
The Rising matters to republicans. It reminds them of failure and of unfinished business. It reminds them of revolutionary courage. The coming centenary reminds them, too, that Ireland remains divided.
Of course they’ll want to celebrate and commemorate their heroes and martyrs. Of course they’ll want to persuade people that the intended outcome of the Rising remains a work in progress. Of course they’ll want to lay claim to be the spiritual and political heirs of those executed afterwards by the British.
But they also need to come to terms with the fact that many unionists still regard the Rising as an act of betrayal and political opportunism. So how could they be involved in anything that looks like a celebration of such an event?
Again, it would have made sense for Hartley to have sat down with representatives of unionism and asked them if it would be possible to agree on some sort of platform - academic or political - in which the historical aspects of the period could have been discussed.
And there is at least one question today’s unionists could have been asked to consider. How far would their predecessors, in what became Northern Ireland, have been prepared to go to resist the Government of Ireland Act in 1914 if the World War hadn’t led to its suspension and eventual replacement by the 1920 Act?
It was quite clear that Carson and elements of the Conservative Party were prepared to deploy the UVF if necessary, as well as encouraging potential mutiny in the army. In other words, they were clearly willing to use military and paramilitary means to defend and promote their cause.
The War bought them time and changed their circumstances and they eventually got the partition that gave them much more security than the Amending Bill of July 1914, which provided for the “temporary exclusion of Ulster” from the workings of the future Act.
But in the eyes of many republicans, both in 1914 and down through the decades, unionists got their way because of the threat of violence. So it was hardly surprising that an element of republicanism believed that a Rising was justified.
And yet there was an element of madness to it as well. The British were never going to back down at that point and the republicans didn’t have the manpower or organization to force them to do so.
Also, even if the Rising had been a success they would have been plunged into a long and very bloody civil war with unionism in both its political and paramilitary manifestations. At best the result would have been a Pyrrhic victory, so why not wait until the war was over and come back to the negotiating table with a clean pair of hands?
So yes, there are a lot of questions and ‘what ifs’ which deserve to be considered in the remaining few months before the centenary. That whole Home Rule Crisis period from the mid-1880s to 1920 is worth discussing because both unionists and republicans did things and condoned actions which were, on the face of it, profoundly stupid and unambiguously threatening.
We are still living with the actions, consequences and competing perceptions of that period. No one, unionist, republican or British state emerges with a clear conscience.
I think Hartley’s cack-handedness has killed off the opportunity for serious debate before Easter 2016. That’s a pity. We need that debate.
We need as much evidence and information as we can gather. We need to move beyond the ‘my historical narrative versus your historical narrative’ approach and put myth and propaganda aside in favour of truth.
