The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

As Lytton Strachey remarked of the Victorian era, writing the history of the Irish revolution is inhibited by the fact that we know too much about it. As the centenary of the 1916 Rising approaches, an avalanche of books, articles and television programmes is bearing inexorably down; even the re-enactments have begun, with Dublin’s city centre taken over last Easter Monday by jolly crowds in period dress, celebrating ‘the Road to the Rising’. No one got shot, no buildings were blown up, and no shops were looted, but it was the thought that counted, and everyone had a good time. As Arthur Koestler wrote long ago in a classic article on ‘The Political Libido’, commemoration is all about self-identification, and every US citizen has to feel as personally proud of the War of Independence as if he or she had fought in it.

Though today’s Irish citizens are equally proprietorial about their revolution, its history presents a less clear-cut picture.