ECHOES OF THE DUBLIN RISING

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31125, 30 July 1966, Page 4

ECHOES OF THE DUBLIN RISING

Six Days to Shake an Empire. By Charles Duff. Dent. 296 pp. Bibliography and Index.

Several new accounts of Anglo-Irish relations have appeared this year, the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin. This one attempts three things—a concise narrative history of Ireland from the first English contact to the present day, a more detailed account of the Easter Rising, and an examination of the effects of the Irish experience on the British Empire. In the first two tasks Mr Duff succeeds ably; in the third not so well. This is unfortunate because Ireland did provide an important example, first for India and Egypt, and through them for the nationalist revival in the African and Asian colonial empires, and it is from this theme that “Six Days” takes its title.

Ireland was England’s first colony, and after the 13 colonies of the United States the first to achieve independence. English military conquest in Ireland began with Henry II in 1170. It ended with the Treaty of 1921, except in the six northern counties where some Irishmen might argue it still continues. All the Irish heroes find a place In Mr Duff’s book, from Brian Boru to Michael Collins. But, as the author points out, there is much, particularly in the later period, which we still do not know.

There is no complete account of the Easter Rising, nor of the guerrilla war which followed, nor of the civil war which followed that. Casement’s diaries, locked in the Home Office for 100 years, remind us in their mystery that Ireland’s martyrs have often been England’s traitors, and visa versa.

Mr Duff has a personal interest in the Easter Rising for as a young Irishman and a volunteer in the British Army, he was shot at by the rebels, because of his uniform, while home on leave from France. Now, from the tone of his book he regrets that he was not in the Dublin Post Office with Pearse and Connolly. Some of Mr Duff’s conclusions challenge accepted accounts. The old quarrel of Citizen Army versus Volunteer Army gets a new airing. Mr Duff supports the minority view that the tiny Citizen Army, the socialist militia, was the most important force on the rebels’ side; that it was their leader, Connolly, who inspired the garrison in the Post Office, while Padriac Pearse played only a subordinate role. Unfortunately Mr Duff offers no new evidence. The I.CA. played its part, as did Connolly, but it was only a part commensurate with its size—about 200 men out of the 1200 who defied the British for six days. In spite of Dublin’s continued strife with Ulster, Mr Duff sounds a note of hope

for the future. He sees in the Ecumenical movement a sign that the religious extremism dividing Irishmen will lessen. The Anglo-Irish free trade agreement of 1965 was the first time in history that London and Dublin had negotiated on a basis of friendship and equality. Anglo-Irish relations have a way of taking unexpected turns. Each has played a major part in the history of the other and must continue to do so, though Irish involvement will increasingly match British detachment as time passes. Perhaps unintentionally, Mr Duff’s book expresses the irony of Anglo-Irish relations in its format Written by an Irish barrister who once fought for England, published in England, in English, it defends the uniqueness of the Irish, their language, culture and history. And on the dustjacket there appears a photograph of the green and gold Irish republican flag from the 1916 rising, reproduced, so we are told in a note, “by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum.”