Remembering Easter

"We are here", writes Terry Eagleton in his recent Hope Without Optimism, "to make trouble on behalf of those who can no longer make trouble themselves, namely the dead". Receiving his political formation through expatriate Irish republicanism, and now resident in the country, Eagleton's Irishness goes some way towards explaining the importance of narrative, history, and our relationship to each in his political thought. For the history of Ireland's still incomplete liberation from imperialism, and by extension of Britain's relationship to its last colony, is one in which the past looms large. Debates about the politics of the southern state, about partition, and about identities in the north are framed historically. The dead are silent participants, in their name claims are made, past injustices are redressed, and present-day senses of political self are established and reinforced. If you want confirmation of Benjamin's claim that people are driven to revolt by the image of enslaved ancestors, not liberated grandchildren, you need merely to glance across the Irish sea.

As with Benjamin's original quotation, Ireland's revolts are understood in terms of sacrifice (he also speaks, in terms which sit uncomfortably with his acquired status as the acceptable face of Marxism for English Literature syllabuses, of the 'hatred' of the labouring classes). The Easter Rising, which took place on Easter Monday a hundred years ago features heavily in the roll of those who laid down their lives for Ireland. Not by any means enjoying universal support at the time, the bloody manner in which the rising was put down, and its leaders executed, won support for the republican cause, and ultimately therefore played an important role in the movement for independence. It would be difficult to come up with a better example of a seemingly futile fight, born out of desperation, anger, and conviction having effects beyond reasonable expectation: it was hope in action, history spreading out from it, like ripples from a solitary stone hitting the water. There can be little surprise that this action from the underside of history, an episode that truly warrants the overused word 'heroic', has had its memory disputed through the subsequent years of civil war and partition, nor that its fallen are honoured to this day as martyrs. They certainly deserve more than the mechanised patriotic piety of politicians who have presided over an austerity regime as harsh in its consequences as any in Europe since 2008. What they deserve is the future.

Honouring those who died in rebellion against their rulers is always a risky business for those who hold power at the present moment. Reminding the presently powerless that their forebears responded to their situation by erecting barricades has the potential to backfire. History, though, cannot be altogether avoided, and all states are built on the bones of past ruling classes. For those states whose native bloodletting lies in the recent past, or whose existence remains contested, the question of original violence is a particularly treacherous one to negotiate. The past is too live to be consigned to a museum or smothered in nostalgia. It retains a power, at once a potential means to win the assent of the governed to state power, and also a convenant that power can be accused of betraying. If Fine Gale and Fianna Fáil politicians joined a military whose continuity with the rebel forces in 1916 is far from obvious in honouring the Rising's leaders yesterday, they would have done well to glance nervously over their shoulder at the representatives of the electorally ascendant Sinn Féin. The professional ideologists known as broadsheet journalists are well aware of this subversive power of memory, which is one reason they have been at the forefront of 1916 revision in recent months. A more recent convert to the cause is Bob Geldof, who without any apparent intended theological irony chose Easter to dismiss the idea that there are some causes worth dying for.

If the memory of the past is unstable, and so a site of present struggle, this is in part because the past itself was shot through with division and contradiction. The migraine-inducing wailing of Dolores O'Riordan, 'it's the same as its been since 1916/ in your head (in your head) they're still fighting' has a truth to it unintended by the author: they are still fighting. The irreconcilable differences, present in kernel within the Irish republicanism of the early 20th century, the fissures of class, politics, visions for Ireland and for the world, were fought out through the civil war, relived through the tragedy of partition, and continue to echo at the present time, the theme being picked up in many cases by people who do not recognise its origin. The tradition of past generations certainly does weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Much as in the case of actual nightmares, however, the solution has to be to redeem the trauma that gave rise to it. In the case of Ireland this would involve identifying the genuinely emancipatory strands in republicanism and claiming them, whilst identifying the forces capable of realising them in an Ireland that is divided and capitalist.

James Connolly has deservedly been quoted with a regularity bordering on the monotonous:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

These are words that these days are as likely to be found on t-shirts or beer mats as in political discussion, but if any lines have been vindicated by subsequent history they are these. Connolly's socialist republicanism was one for which freedom from imperialism was inseparable from the liberation of working people from exploitation, and was by its very nature internationalist. Strikingly, it was a politics to which the emancipation of women was integral:

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland that female worker has hitherto exhibited, in her martyrdom, an almost damnable patience. She has toiled on the farms from her earliest childhood, attaining usually to the age of ripe womanhood without ever being vouchsafed the right to claim as her own a single penny of the money earned by her labour, and knowing that all her toil and privation would not earn her that right to the farm which would go without question to the most worthless member of the family, if that member chanced to be the eldest son.

To put matters mildly, Connolly's clear-sighted awareness of the oppression of women, unusual for a male leftist of the period, was not an obvious feature of subsequent Irish politics. More generally, his socialist republicanism met with opposition at the time from both the British state and within the republican movement. Its clearest immediate heirs fought in the anti-Treaty forces in the civil war; many of them went on to fight for the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It has precious little in common with the precious romanticism for which the legacy of the rising has been appropriated.

A politics of the oppressed acting in their own interests, this is the best honour we can do the dead of 1916, because to the extent that we undermine those who oppress and stunt humanity, wherever in the world we do it, we retrospectively delegitimise those who did so in the past. In that sense, at least, the Easter Rising can still be won.