The century since 1916 has been a long sean-nós of lament. Our obsession with the chances we missed must now be buried with O’Leary

ON FRIDAY afternoon, in Dublin Castle, three flags were run up the poles in the courtyard, replicas of those handmade by rebels and hoisted along O’Connell Street at the start of the Rising on Easter Monday 1916.

The first was the Starry Plough, the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, chosen by James Connolly to signify that an Ireland free of British rule would control its own destiny ‘from the plough to the stars’. Tellingly, it fluttered over a hotel called the Imperial.

The other flags flew on top of the GPO that week – one bearing the words ‘Irish Republic’, the second the tricolour. The latter, embodying the wish that the Catholic nationalist (green) and Protestant unionist (orange) traditions could be reconciled in peace, first appeared around 1830 and came to greater prominence, widely displayed here alongside the French tricolour in the wake of the 1848 Paris revolution that ended the Orléans monarchy and led to the Second Republic.

So, in all three flags, there was symbolism aplenty, a declaration of intent that reflected the panoply of ambitions – workers’ rights, conciliation between conflicting religions and ideologies, the commitment to the ideals of a republic – the insurrectionists held for the future of the self-governing country they longed to create.

At the Dublin Castle event, the names of the 78 active combatants who died in the Rising, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, were read aloud in alphabetical order without reference to seniority. And so, alongside the well known leaders, we heard less familiar names, all of whom made the ultimate sacrifice for an idealistic cause.

Their aspirations were spelled out unambiguously in the Proclamation itself, read on the steps of the GPO. It declared the right of the people to the ownership of Ireland, it guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens, the universal right to vote for women as well as for men, and to cherish all the children of the nation equally.

These were lofty ideals, in many cases way ahead of the thinking in other countries. Inherent in them was the prospect of a classless society, a commitment to modernity, a genuine thirst for change not just in who governed but also in how they were elected and how they should serve us.

Even the idea of the immediate introduction of universal suffrage was relatively radical. Although some countries had conceded it in the late 19th century, it often was limited in scope, and it took until 1920 for women in the United States to get the vote and until 1928 for all British women over 21 to be allowed go to the polls, ten years after restricted rights, confined to women over 30 who owned property, were granted.

So the Proclamation was, in many ways, a more expansive document than perhaps we acknowledge today, idealistic bordering on romantic, and exuding the unmistakable tang of social democracy.

Now, here we are, with the centenary celebrations under way and a general election looming and it is as good a time as any to look back, as well as forward, and to ask ourselves if we have defended the ideals of the Proclamation and built on them – or squandered them.

And the sorry conclusion is that while much of the change envisioned finally came to pass, it took a great deal longer than anyone might have imagined. Mired in insularity driven by a fear of communism and secularism, the new Free State erected the barricades around its borders and its early years were built on a profoundly starry-eyed vision of Irishness.

In a famous (or infamous, depending on your view) broadcast on St Patrick’s Day 1943, titled On Language And The Irish Nation, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera put an ascetic shape on this misty, regressive vision of who we were. We were to be satisfied with frugal comfort, an oxymoron if ever there was one, in a land dotted with cosy homesteads. Sturdy children would romp in the fields, and athletic youths would contest traditional games. Happy maidens would laugh (Dev never said they were ‘comely’ or they would dance at the crossroads, incidentally, but the image still is ludicrous).

Of course, the sturdy children, athletic youths and giggly girls mostly had to leave their cosy homesteads and head to the cities, or abroad, to find work – and, if the maidens found themselves pregnant before marriage, their fate was a great deal darker.

And so we endured decades of torpor in pursuit of this vision that was profoundly illiberal and largely engineered in tandem with the Church. Only in the Sixties did anything start to change, though it arguably took until the Seventies for real social transformation to accelerate, and ensuing years brought greater rights for working women and lone parents, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, divorce and, last year, marriage equality.

OF course, the greatest failure of the Rising, the wicked fairy at the birth of Sleeping Beauty, was partition. The single greatest ideal of the Rising – a free, united Ireland – died on a table in No.10 Downing Street on December 6 1921 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Ireland did not immediately become a republic, but a Free State with dominion status in what then was the British Commonwealth, and not all of Ireland was included. Though such a concession arguably was the only option, it led to the Civil War, a conflict that informed life on the island up to the close of the last century.

In politics, playing the green card matters little nowadays (if the bubble years proved anything, it was that a lot of people worried only about a gold card) but while the economy, and the application and effects of austerity, will dominate the general election, the rise of Sinn Féin is due not only to that party’s activism at local level but also to its remaining commitment to a 32-county Ireland, an ideal to which other parties pay little more than lip service.

And, in the rise of Independents, we are faced with the prospect of another ragtag revolution, not by the sans-culottes but by the sans-cravates, the earnest men without ties who rail at everything. And so, in a centenary year of commemoration, there is a fatal flaw. We are doing what we always do in the sentimental way that is our hallmark, our default, genetic, irrepressible predisposition to dwell on the past and, more often than not, its failures.

Our first century has been a long sean-nós of lament, a keening at the wake of the Romantic Ireland that rests alongside O’Leary in the grave. What we need to acknowledge is that it never existed. Erskine Childers wrote of the riddle of the sands: the question we should ask of ourselves this year is why that’s where we keep our heads. We remain obsessed with the chances we missed (the present Government has spent its entire five-year term blaming the previous one for, well, everything), instead of looking to imaginative ways to effect genuine change, to introduce comfort that actually is comfortable instead of frugal, to guarantee the sturdy children (and they’re certainly that nowadays, to the point of obesity) genuinely are cherished equally, and to ensure the athletic youths can play their GAA in their home parishes and not under the baking sun of Sydney or Dubai.

Will it happen? Let’s just say that even a maiden might laugh at the very notion.