"A Terrible Beauty Is Born"

Ninety-five years ago this day, Irish rebels took to the streets of Dublin in the Easter Rising of 1916. Against insurmountable odds, the insurrection was doomed to fail militarily, yet it was destined to change the fate of Ireland as a nation. Padraic Pearse foremost among the leaders knew that the times had called at last for the fire of sacrifice. James Connolly's Citizen Army provided the tinder, the capture of Roger Casement, the spark. Who else among the mass of men knew that all was about to "change utterly"? Who knew?

The hapless fanatics who had drilled in the streets and hills for weeks before the Rising had been scorned by their fellow citizens as hopeless dreamers. Then, after the British began shelling the city center in response to the Rising, the rebels had disrupted the course of the daily routine in Dublin. How were people to get to work? How were they to carry on with their lives? What price would they all now pay for this foolish insurrection? What price, indeed?

The rest is written in the blood of history that tells of how the British executed most of the leaders of the Rising, shooting them against a wall in the yard of Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol, propping up in a chair the wounded James Connolly so they could riddle him with bullets. Then with thoughtless arrogance, how they dumped into mass graves the corpses, thereby desecrating the graves of Irishmen and making martyrs of them all.

In the ninety-five years that have come and gone since then, the poet Yeats has said it best, all is "changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born." Years of guerrilla warfare by the Irish Republican Army followed under the banner of Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone." From 1920-22, the Irish were subjected to the hated reprisals of the Black and Tans, but in 1921, Ireland negotiated a degree of independence for twenty-six of its counties as the Irish Free State, at the cost of relegating to the British the six most Protestant counties of the northern part of the island, what became known as Northern Ireland. A cruel and bitter civil war over that treaty ensued, with the pro-treaty forces eventually winning out. In 1949 Ireland declared the Republic of Ireland, severing all political ties between Britain and the twenty-six counties. Northern Ireland remains under British rule to this day.

As Ireland now looks forward to the centennial of the Easter Rising in five more years, it is with a glance both backward and forward, with a nod to the hopes and promise of 1916, and a yearning for the eventual economic independence and reunification of all Ireland through peaceful means that are surely their destiny.