DENIS DONOGHUE
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and
equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pur–
sue the happiness and prosperi ty of the whole nation and of all its
parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious
of the djfferences carefully fostered by an alien government, which
have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
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Pearse knew, as everyone should have known since 1886, that the minori–
ty he referred to would not acquiesce in a Republic of the entire island of
Ireland, any more than it had acquiesced in Home Rule, but he hoped–
as Hyde did, and de Valera at least for some years-that Unionists would
come to recognize that they were Irish rather than British, and subside
into an Irish republic, if such a thing were to be brought about.
Meanwhile the Proclamation summoned the Irish race not only to
believe in a transfigured history but to take part in an insurgent politics.
Pearse did not have an elaborate political philosophy, but his thinking
seems to have been compatible with the tendentious politics enunciated
fifteen years later by Carl Schmitt. The state, according to Schmitt, is "the
political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit." In
its literal sense and its historical appearance, "the state is a specific entity
of a people." Derrida has phrased it in slightly different terms: the state is
"the particular modality of the mode of existence of the people
(Volk)."
More to the point of Schmitt's theory, "the specific political distinction to
which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend
and enemy."
It
follows that the political does not exist without the figure
of the enemy and the determined possibility of an actual war. The state is
the tel eological "end" of the poli tical, and it is necessarily characterized by
the designation of friend and enemy. In this spirit, Pearse turned Yeats's
cultural nationalism of difference-between Ireland and England-into a
politics of friendship and hostility. We are friends with our Unionist
brothers and sisters in the North, but England-at least for the moment–
IS
our enemy.
It
is still in dispute whether the Home Rule Bill that passed in
Westminster in 1914 but was suspended for the duration of the war would
have led, in the fullness of a few more years, to the complete independence
of Ireland. I have heard persuasive arguments on both sides of the question,
without being quite persuaded to either view. I cannot regret that Pearse
and his companions acted as they did and when they did, without anything
resembling a mandate. Revolutions hardly ever have a mandate. What
Pearse had-what he justly claimed-was the authority of understanding
Irish history and tradition as a long travail issuing by force of logic and
