John Bruton denigrates men and women of 1916, says Gerry Adams

EX-TAOISEACH JOHN BRUTON is “on a crusade to revive Redmondism in Irish politics and to denigrate the men and women who gave us the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the 1916 Rising”, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams writes in Thursday’s Irish Examiner.

Former Fine Gael leader John Bruton argues that the Easter Rising and the subsequent Tan War were “completely unnecessary” because Britain had put Home Rule on the statute book although not enacted.

Urging the Fine Gael/Labour Government to commemorate the centenary of the passage into law of the Home Rule Bill on 18 September 1914, Bruton claimed:

“Ireland could have achieved better results, for all the people of the island, if it had continued to follow the successful non-violent parliamentary Home Rule path and had not embarked on the path of physical violence initiated by the IRB and the Irish Citizen Army in Easter Week of 1916.

“Sinn Féin and the IRA should have used the Home Rule Act as a peaceful stepping stone to dominion status and full independence in the same way as the Treaty of 1921 was so used, but only after so much blood had been shed.”

But republican leader Gerry Adams retorts that the former Taoiseach does no service to the memory of the Irish dead of World War One by denigrating the men and women of 1916, who gave us the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

He said that although Home Rule was on the statute books, it provided for an extremely limited form of devolution for Ireland, “within the UK and British Empire” and faced “unrelenting opposition” from the British opposition Conservative and Unionist Party as well as leading members of the British landed aristocracy and senior military figures.

They “avidly supported threats of civil war” if Home Rule was implemented, Gerry Adams says.

“This culminated in the arming of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the anti-Home Rule mutiny by British army officers at the Curragh

“Under that pressure, the Liberal Government and John Redmond agreed in principle that Ireland should be partitioned rather than have north-east Ulster included under Home Rule.”

Gerry Adams adds:

“In September 1914, with the war just weeks old, the Liberal Government pulled one of the greatest strokes ever attempted by a British government. It enacted the Home Rule Bill but suspended it until the end of the war when an amending bill would be passed to provide for partition.

“In return for this, John Redmond pledged the lives of tens of thousands of young Irishmen to the British war effort and embarked on a recruiting campaign for the army.

“Roger Casement described Home Rule ‘on the statute book’ as ‘a promissory note payable only after death’.”

And James Connolly, the Sinn Féin leader notes, called it “a carefully-staged pantomime to fool nationalist Ireland” and said that, in return, Redmond’s party would “send forth more thousands of Irish men and boys to manure with their corpses the soil of a foreign country”.

In excess of 30,000 Irishmen perished in the First World War.

•  The full article in the Irish Examiner can be read here.