Hiberno-Fascism.("1916: The Easter Rising")(Book Review)

1916: The Easter Rising, by Tim Pat Coogan (Cassell, 192 pp., $29.95)

The Easter Rising of 1916 is the central event in 20th-century Irish history. At noon on April 24 of that year, Easter Monday, a small group of violent separatists seized some key points in the city of Dublin and proclaimed a republic independent of Britain. After a week of bitter fighting the insurrection was put down. Most of its leaders were executed following brief courts-martial. Much of the city center had been destroyed by British shelling; 450 people had been killed and 2,614 wounded.

Though a military failure, the Easter Rising -- more precisely, the British reaction to it -- strengthened and, in the minds of many Irishmen, legitimized what Tim Pat Coogan delicately refers to as "the physical force tradition" in Irish Republicanism. That tradition might more accurately be called Irish fascism, with the Easter Rising as its beer-hall putsch. The consequences of the Rising, at any rate, were wholly malign. First came the Anglo-Irish "war" of 1919-21, in which the IRA (as the violent separatists were now called), under the command of Michael Collins, a veteran of the Rising, set about systematically murdering policemen and other "collaborators." The British authorities responded with clumsiness and occasional savagery. Partition and Home Rule followed, under terms that had been available in 1914, and would have been implemented but for the outbreak of the world war. Nothing had been gained by all the carnage, except a great deal of bitterness on both sides.

Dissatisfied with those terms, a dogmatic faction of Republicans then launched a civil war that sputtered on for a year till the majority of Irish people, sick of political violence, permitted their Free State government to end it with a ferocity equal to anything the British had employed. Adherents of "the physical force tradition" -- those of them who survived the Irish firing squads -- fled to America, Ulster, and Britain, to await better times. Those times duly arrived in the 1960s, with the Ulster "civil rights" campaign as a front for revivifying that odious tradition, and with the international terrorist movement for fellowship and support.

You might think that, having spawned so much misery and bloodshed to no good purpose, the Easter Rising would be regarded by Irish people with embarrassment or shame. Not a bit of it. The Rising was seen, even by the participants, as a grand romantic gesture, a blood sacrifice for the ancient soul of Ireland; and so it has been preserved in folk memory and the educational system of the Irish Republic. The Rising is a totem, one of the foundation myths of modern Ireland, and none may call it the poisonous folly that it undoubtedly was.

Tim Pat Coogan is certainly not about to do so. A "green-diaper baby" whose father worked as an assassin under Michael Collins's command (a fact the author related with pride in his 1991 biography of Collins), Coogan has made a very nice living for himself by writing about Irish history from the Hiberno-fascist point of view. Ireland herself being a small market, he targets his books at the more gullible segments of the Irish diaspora, especially those descended from the losing side in the Irish civil war.

Coogan's account of the Rising therefore follows a predictable line. British policy was devious and malicious. The insurrectionists were gallant and soulful. (Coogan dwells lovingly on the sinister fantasist Patrick Pearse, and even includes one of his atrocious poems.) Constitutional nationalists were naive and ineffectual. Ulster Unionists . . . well, let us be thankful for small mercies: Breaking ranks with Republican ...