Labour Party 1916 Commemorations: NICC proposals, 2015
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Minister of State for New Communities, Culture & Equality, has invited proposals for Labour’s 1916 commemorations.
Like the Rising and its Proclamation, our commemoration should be forward-looking, pluralist and internationalist.
Two political movements carried out the Rising: the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Labour movement. The former contributed a section of the
Volunteers, the latter contributed its Citizen Army. The Labour movement also contributed leadership (James Connolly) and policy (in the Proclamation).
The Sinn Féin Party, from which Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and modern Sinn Féin are descended, did not participate in the Rising.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood is now defunct. While it has a unique responsibility for our 1916 heritage, Labour should not and does not claim
exclusive ownership of the Rising. The Rising does not now belong to any particular party.
The Rising was a pivotal event for Ireland. It was a key incident in a pivotal decade for the world. Its causes can be traced back to the 1912 Ulster rebellion,
in conjunction with the cataclysmic Great War whose consequences are still working themselves out in contemporary warfare around the globe.
The 1916 Rising was preceded by an Indian rebellion against the Empire in Singapore in 1915, organised by India’s Ghadar Party which was allied to the
Irish Republican Brotherhood. There were many subsequent revolutions by people around the world in reaction to the criminal violence and slaughter of the
Great War.
Though the Irish Rising failed in its immediate objectives, it marked a decisive break in Irish participation in the epic wave of violence consuming the world,
setting us on a path towards a constructive, peaceful, diplomatic role in international relations.
This is the international context of the Rising. To take the Rising out of its international or Great War context is to ignore the elephant in the room.
By a decision of the Irish political leadership in 1914, Ireland was a contracting party to the Great War and, despite its subsequent withdrawal of consent to
this violence, it remains a party to the crime.
Ireland was not invaded, attacked or threatened by any of the countries we attacked and invaded in the Great War. Neither was Britain. To the extent that
Ireland freely participated in the Great War it shares in the Great War guilt. Expressing remorse and making amends for these violent crimes should be a
central focus for the international aspect of our 1916 Commemorations.
The Irish political leadership had no electoral mandate to commit this country to its Great War violence. Neither had the British government of Asquith,
which, in 1910, was elected as the peace party. Its five-year electoral mandate expired in 1915, and in 1916 the government had no constitutional authority
to govern Britain. (Its authority to govern Ireland was, like all preceding British governments, based on force, not consent.)
What was the physical scale of the unprovoked aggressive violence to which the Irish leadership committed this country in 1914? Crude estimates can be
made. Assuming one-for-one ratios, we killed about fifty thousand Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Turks, crippled a comparable number for life, and
drove many further thousands insane.
Where did all this political violence come from? Following the killing of the prospective head of state of Austria-Hungary by agents of Serbia, yet another
Balkan war started in July 1914.
In early August 1914, though it was not threatened, attacked or invaded, and though it had kept out of the preceding Balkan wars, Russia moved its armies
for an attack on Austria-Hungary and Germany; thus converting this particular Balkan war into a major European war between the big powers of continental
Europe. But that did not make it a World War.
At the same time, in early August 1914,and without informing the cabinet (not to mention the Parliament), a cabal within the British cabinet mobilised the
British navy for war against Germany. The British government had won the 1910 election on a peace programme of neutrality in any European conflict.
The methods by which this was turned on its head by the 1914 British warmongers make Tony Blair’s 2003 “dodgy dossier” on Iraq look like a paragon of
honesty and fair dealing.
Just like 2003, in 1914 Britain was not invaded, attacked or threatened. Its decision to attack a successful commercial competitor brought in Britain’s
worldwide Empire, including Ireland; thus converting European war into World War.
We unsuccessfully attempted to invade Turkey. As the accomplice of Britain and France we invaded and occupied neutral Greece in 1915. The violent
results of our invasion of Mesopotamia persist to this day in the Middle East tragedy. Our Great War involved the routine mass murder of hundreds of
thousands of women, children, the sick and the elderly by starvation blockade.
Our Great War guilt is mitigated by the withdrawal of consent signalled by the Rising, by the peaceful campaign of civil disobedience which followed it,
and by the government’s violent campaign of repression, military rule, and imprisonment to put down the peaceful resistance of our unarmed,
defenceless population. By its General Strike of April 1918 the Labour movement took the lead in passive resistance to government violence.
This undeclared war on Ireland by the unelected British government motivated the people to elect a government of their own at the first opportunity, a
government which was prepared to do what was necessary to defend the population from the war of suppression being waged against it, and to bring to an
end the cycle of violence and terror, culminating in the Great War, in which we had been enmeshed against our will for centuries.
The criminal origins and conduct of the Great War were recorded meticulously by James Connolly, who, a couple of years earlier, as leader of the Belfast
delegation to Clonmel, had founded the Irish Labour Party. He was in no doubt about where responsibility lay.
In Larkin’s newspaper, The Irish Worker (29 August 1914), Connolly characterised the war as “the war of a pirate upon the German nation … [Britain]
determined that since Germany could not be beaten in fair competition industrially, she must be beaten unfairly by organising a military and naval
conspiracy against her”.
For the two remaining years of his life Connolly ceaselessly exposed Great War hypocrisy and criminality. In 1916, in his own newspaper
The Workers Republic, he quoted the following: “The individual German receives more from society. He is better protected in his daily life.
The gains of civilization are more widely distributed than they are with us” [ - ‘us’ being the British, Americans and French, not to mention the Russians].
This was written by Frederic C. Howe, an Anglophile American official who later served President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles conference.
Connolly’s stance on the Great War, and in the Rising, was what his life was about - the advancement of the social interest, in peace and war. That is
implied in the Proclamation’s reference to “our gallant allies in Europe”, which Connolly printed in Liberty Hall.
Like any sane person, before the Great War he sought to persuade workers of all nationalities, in the cause of international working class solidarity, to
refuse to serve their overlords by engaging in the imminent slaughter. These efforts failed. Connolly subsequently paid with his own life for the failure of
international working class solidarity; the British cabinet which ordered his execution as a prisoner of war in 1916 included Arthur Henderson, himself a
founder of the British Labour Party.
How should the Irish Labour Party commemorate these tragic events in the pivotal centenary year of 2016?
The events of year 1916, and their antecedents and outcomes, did not involve only Ireland and Britain; did not involve only those of Christian religion;
did not involve only the peoples of the north-west perimeter of Europe; did not involve only Pearse, Connolly, Carson, Redmond, Herbert Asquith and
David Lloyd George.
Maybe some people still believe, in 2015 as in 1916, that we had good reason to kill Mesopotamians, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Turks, Bulgarians,
Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Africans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus. Like Connolly, the Labour Party should strive to express the
real truth of this.
If the Labour Party today is to be worthy of its founder and traditions it should avoid any narrow or exclusive focus. It should resolutely challenge those who
would seek to exploit the centenaries in order to whitewash the monumental criminal violence of the decade, along with the carve-up of the spoils in Versailles,
Sèvres, the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot.
Through personal experience James Connolly was deeply acquainted with Britain, Ireland, America and Europe. Even if we disagree with some details of
Connolly’s understanding of what was going on, any mature approach to the centenary must engage with worldwide friends and worldwide foes, with
“gallant allies” and “colonial oppressors”, without discrimination and without animosity.
We embraced this criminal war in 1914. We must not now shirk our share of responsibility for its terrible consequences which still afflict the world. In 2016
we should, like Connolly, use every opportunity and resource to expose the machinations of warmongers, and to promote a just, thoughtful, diplomatic
approach to conflict in the world.
As custodians of the legacy of 1916, the Labour Party has a unique - though not exclusive - responsibility for it. Representatives of all the countries and
peoples involved in the tragic events of that era should be sought out and welcomed to our party’s commemorations. None should be excluded.
Shared understanding should be sought between former antagonists.
Most of all, we should express pride in what our founder James Connolly sought to achieve.