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desire in revolution. The fact that previous revolutions failed only made it
more urgent that this latest one succeed. It is difficult to deny to Pearse the
right to his own understanding, which was so much more plausible than
anyone else's. Some students of Easter Week have wondered how the
Rising would have turned out if it had been led by Connolly rather than
by Pearse: would Ireland have turned toward European Socialism for its
identity? I doubt it. Socialism, indeed Marxism in any of its forms, needs,
if it is to have a chance of thriving, an industrial society, and the whole
concatenation of factories and trade unions. Ireland has never had an
Industrial Revolution, except for a brief period in Belfast and the Lagan
Valley. Connolly understood this, and committed himself-as Constance
Markiewicz and other feminist leaders did-to the separatist movement
under Pearse's leadership. But I feel some misgiving when I reflect that
one of the main consequences of Pearse's being the leader of the Rising
was the identification of Nationalism and Catholicism, after more than a
hundred years in which most of the leaders of Nationalism were
Protestants. The continuity of Pearse, Cosgrave, and de Valera meant that,
in practice, Irish politics would be deduced-to the scandal of many
Catholics, let me say-from Roman Catholic theology, a procedure from
which the institutions of both Church and State have inevitably suffered,
as in the debacle of the Mother and Child scheme of 1951.
Pearse could not have foreseen the consequences of the Easter
Rising-the assembly of the first Dail Eireann in January 1919; the
(British) Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which established Northern
Ireland and retained it as part of the United Kingdom; the Articles of
Agreement between Bri tain and Ireland in 1921; the ratification of those
articles by Dail Eireann in 1922; the constitution of the same year; the civil
war; the victory of de Valera's Fianna Fail party in 1932; the new
Constitution of 1937; and the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1948,
an entity recognized by the United Kingdom in 1949. It is sometimes
maintained by disaffected nationalists that this sequence of events has
merely extended British colonial rule in Ireland under the guise of inde–
pendence. Such critics point out that Ireland has adopted most of its
administrative institutions from the United Kingdom and has not radical–
ly changed the disposition of power and wealth among the social classes.
Yeats anticipated this expression of disappointment:
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
"Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone."
