The commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916 is turning out to be an ideologically fraught affair. The Irish government of Bertie Ahern decided on a full military parade: the intention was simple and limited — to pre-empt any attempt Sinn Fein might make to exploit and take over the patriotic ‘moment’. So far, so good. But then the President of the Republic, Mary McAleese, weighed in with an original and controversial speech at a Cork conference. The Rising, it appeared, was required to smash the ‘glass ceiling’ for Catholics in Ireland: in fact the peculiarity of the Rising is that it was in large measure a revolt against those Catholics who had already gone through the glass ceiling. The result was an intensification rather than a relaxation of traditional animosities and a renewed cult of the gun — not yet extinguished, as the recent brutal murder of Denis Donaldson reminds us. The Irish Foreign Minister, Dermot Ahern, insisted that we ‘can no longer have two histories, separate and in conflict’. But everything about the 90th anniversary celebrations confirmed such an opposition. Ulster Unionists of all shades turned down their invitation to attend the commemoration in Dublin —why should they respect a violent assault on the symbols and political arrangements which they held dear? The mob violence in Dublin which met the ‘Love Ulster’ march of victims of the ‘Troubles’ in February seemed to suggest that, for all the talk about pluralism and tolerance, Ireland was stuck in the same old place: two histories, separate and in conflict.

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