“A Last Desperate Attempt To Save Irish Nationality From Obliteration”

I CAN’T QUITE put my finger on why this image caught my attention; not yet anyway. It’s a shot of the Irish Air-Corps doing a fly-by in PC-9 aircraft  over the Spire during the 91st Easter 1916 commemoration ceremony at the GPO on O’Connell Street yesterday.

It was a very low key affair with only a turn out of approximately 7000 folks watching the proceedings; possibly intentionally mind you because this event was not particularly well advertised in advance for some reason. Also confusing (to me anyway) is the idea that this  is held on Easter Sunday, when the event being commerated happened on Easter Monday on 24th April in 1916.

Still, that image there is haunting me for some reason this morning, and I don’t think it’s related to any September 11 references or current day events. I did some digging around on the ‘Net for an appropriate reference back to the Rising itself and ended up selected a single paragraph from a document entitled “The Significance Of 1916” by Garret Fitzgerald which was written back in 1966.

I believe this text still echoes strongly today in our modern lives, our fast paced soundbite driven world, our conveniently selective recall and politically correct amnesiac infested existence. This life we enjoy today – with all it’s good and bad points – didn’t just happen by default. It was paid for in blood and sacrifice and we should never forget that.

Take a few seconds out of your busy life to read this paragraph, and think about those who have gone before you to pave the way for freedoms we all enjoy today in Ireland.

The significance of 1916 will hardly be seen by the historians of the future to lie in any contribution by its leaders to our political or social thought -Connolly notwithstanding – but rather in their impact on the national ideal of freedom. The Rising of Easter Week was not an intellectual national ideal of freedom. The Rising of Easter Week was not an intellectual landmark but a political event of enormous emotional power. It was planned by men who feared that without a dramatic gesture of this kind the sense of national identity that had survived all the hazards of the centuries would flicker out ignominiously within their lifetime, leaving Ireland psychologically as well as legally, like Scotland, an integral part of the United Kingdom. They saw the Rising as a last desperate attempt to save Irish nationality from the obliteration that appeared to them to face it in the first years of the Great War. They were men who suddenly found themselves convinced of what up till then they had felt only subconsciously – that the final end of the Irish nation was at hand, unless they acted dramatically to call back the nation’s soul from the very shadow of death. For them, the alternatives were national extinction or, by a supreme effort on their part, the possibility of another lease of life for Irish nationality, out of which a free Ireland might somehow, some day, emerge.