George Kerevan: Our political freedom will learn from the violent lessons of the Easter Rising

And no wonder. The exhibition covers the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, which led inexorably to Irish independence in 1922. The 26 counties which now form the Republic of Ireland are the only part of the United Kingdom state to have seceded from the Union in living memory – something Westminster prefers to forget.

The Easter Rising exhibition at Westminster says a lot about Britain’s official attitude to the Easter Rising. The Rising is too important an historical event to ignore entirely, but it is still too radioactive politically for the British establishment – even a century on – to examine too deeply. So at Westminster there only is a small glass case with a few iconic papers, secreted away in an obscure nook and cranny of the Palace of Westminster.

Of course, the Irish themselves have found it difficult to come to terms with the violence of the Easter Rising. I’m old enough to remember the 50th anniversary which was a muted affair, as many involved in the events and subsequent War of Independence and Irish Civil War were still around. That year, dissident IRA veterans blew up Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street, one of the few Dublin landmarks not scarred by the Rising. In many ways, that was a tocsin sounding for the Troubles about to open again in the North.

The 100th anniversary of the Rising has provided sufficient distance for people in the Republic of Ireland to begin to treat the Rising as history rather than politics. This time round, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin for the official parade to mark the anniversary – the biggest military parade in the young nation’s history and significant because the legitimacy of that army was long contested internally. Even here, I’m a bit cautious about the significance of the official celebrations. Much of it smacks of the much-weakened Irish establishment seizing on the anniversary of the Rising to create a new myth of national unity in the aftermath of the Eurozone disaster. Connolly dying for the Euro and the big banks is a new twist on an old story.

On Sunday, as traditional, the evocative words of the Proclamation of Independence were read again – first pronounced on the steps of the General Post Office by Patrick Pearse onApril 24, 1916. Lately some have dismissed the Proclamation as romantic fluff. But the Proclamation makes a clear commitment to full suffrage for Irish women, as well as men, at a time when the UK state still denied the vote to females (including my grandmothers). In that regard, we can see the Dublin uprising not as Celtic moonshine but in the context of the wave of direct action – by trades unionists, suffragettes and anti-war protesters – that gripped the entire anti-democratic UK state in the first decades of the 20th century.

Yet even I – as someone committed to Scottish independence and the end of an oligarchic British state that is still, at best, semi-democratic – find it difficult to come to terms with the Rising. Armed insurrection inside the confines of a modern bourgeois state, with its vast apparatus of repression, is not an act to be embarked on likely, even if justified – as the anti-Assad democrats have found in Syria. Who would have thought a British government led by public school-educated sophisticates would order navy ships to bombard Georgian downtown Dublin, or sanction incendiary shells to be directed at centres with a large “British” civilian population? As a result, the majority of those killed in the Rising were civilian bystanders.

It is certain that – if perpetrated today – the violent and illegal repression unleashed by the British state against the native Irish population during the subsequent War of Independence (1919-21) would lead to British politicians being charged before the International Criminal Tribunal, much like Radovan Karadžic. Which may explain why the guilty consciences of the British political and parliamentary elite can manage only a tiny exhibition about the Easter Rising, confined to one glass case at the Lords end of the Palace of Westminster.

Why did the Irish fight for national autonomy turn violent? The tinder was set on fire in the late 19th century when successive Westminster governments failed to give Ireland Home Rule within the UK, despite the electoral success of the Irish Parliamentary Party from the 1880s onwards. The reason for this constitutional dog-in-the-manger attitude is important to grasp as it mirrors the current situation in Britain. Simply put: reform in any one area, no matter how justified and logical, led to demands for change in other parts of the British state. In the end, giving ground anywhere threatened the whole anti-democratic edifice of the British state.

Certainly, the ruling British elite made tactical concessions to various reform movements during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These included the creation of the Scottish Office and votes for women in local elections. But as late as the First World War, 40 per cent of adult British males were denied the vote because they had no property, because working class male suffrage threatened to bring socialism. That means around a million of the Brits killed or wounded in the Great War did so while not being able to vote. The British ruling class were only saved from some sort of existential political crisis by the outbreak of the Great War itself, which fortuitously converted mass popular discontent into patriotic fervour.

So we should not see the Easter Rising in isolation. It was one belated element in this great wave of resistance to the anti-democratic, Imperialist Edwardian state. Unfortunately, by the time the Rising took place in 1916, the Pankhursts had derailed the Suffragette movement by supporting the war effort, while massive police repression and arrests had broken trade union resistance to conscription. It was left to a group of Irish men and women, including Edinburgh-born James Connolly, to hurl themselves against history. The lesson is that sometimes history bends.

I’m happy that the movement for national freedom in Scotland has steadfastly avoided violence. We want to build new institutions, not tear them down. And we want to create a nation without the social scars that marked Ireland for several generations after independence. We also want to live in a constructive relationship with our English neighbours.

But the British ruling elite is once again in a panic, believing that Scottish independence or quitting the EU will destroy its fragile political and economic hold. However, with its ruling parties fragmenting, the British establishment has never been so weak. Where we differ from Ireland in 1916 is that Scotland already has a democratic parliament with unparalleled support – something the Westminster parties lack. When it comes, the Scottish Proclamation of Independence will be met with music and flowers, not the sound of machine guns and shelling.

The National View: Thankfully we don’t need martyrs in our march towards independence