Scotland's part in the Easter Rising

Reactions then and since to the Rising have been more complex than nationalist lore might suggest. At the time, the insurrection attracted considerable antagonism from sections of the Dublin population. Also, a key part of the plan was the development of a close rapprochement with the Germans, "our gallant allies", who promised to deliver arms and other munitions to the insurgents. Emissaries from Ireland had travelled to Berlin in 1915 to discuss the idea of landing a German expeditionary force on the west coast of Ireland. Yet, in 1916, over 200,000 Irishmen were fighting under the British flag against the German enemy in France and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the actions of the insurgents did not go down well with their families at home. 1916, it has to be remembered, was not only the year of the Rising but of the terrible carnage at the Battle of the Somme.

Then, after the Rising, the British authorities committed a grave error of historic proportions. Regarding those who had taken part in the insurrection as traitors to the state at a time of grave national peril, the death penalty was confirmed on several of the leaders. Fifteen of those who had planned and led the Rising were executed by firing squad, including the only Scot in their ranks, the charismatic socialist and trade union leader, James Connolly from Edinburgh, who was shot while tied to a chair as he had suffered a shattered ankle in the fighting. Almost overnight the formerly condemned and even derided 'rainbow seekers' of the Rising became national martyrs who had given their lives in blood sacrifice for Ireland. In the immortal words of W.B.Yeats, "a terrible beauty is born". It was not long before the dead came to be seen as the founding fathers of the Irish state.

2016 will see these events commemorated both in Ireland and among the Irish diaspora on a scale never before conceived. The Irish government has provided several million euros to support a year-long series of exhibitions, public events, conferences, lectures and films in an ambitious programme of commemoration.

Ireland has clearly moved on from the years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, when the government discontinued its annual commemorative parade in the early 1970s and in 1976 took the unprecedented step of proscribing a ceremony outside the General Post Office in Dublin, the iconic military headquarters of the Rising. One prominent government minister at the time even declared that the violence of 1916 was essentially little different from the violence then being seen daily on the streets of Belfast and Derry. But the history of Easter 1916 is still contested. In 2014, the intervention by the former Taoiseach, John Bruton, caused a fierce reaction when he argued that the Rising was not justified as Ireland could have achieved freedom through Home Rule legislation in Parliament rather than by war and bloodshed.

Scotland was one of the key destinations where the Irish settled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore fitting that Scotland and the Easter Rising should be published during the centenary year. The editors have assembled a large team of twenty-seven contributors, scholars, writers, journalists and broadcasters, among them Billy Kay, James Kelman, Owen Dudley Edwards, Niall Gallagher, Peter Geoghegan, Shaun Kavanagh, Alan Bissett and Ian Bell. The chapters are short, often more like extended commentaries than full-blown discussions. Virtually all of them are written from committed left of centre nationalist perspectives which are favourable to the Rising and its legacy. Alternative views are notable by their absence and the contributors come very close to implicitly agreeing on an unintended collective orthodoxy.

The contents of the book are as wide-ranging and eclectic in coverage as the mix of authors suggests. There is rightly much focus throughout on the only Scot who played a leading role in the Rising. In 2010 he, James Connolly, was declared fourth in a list of Ireland's greatest historical figures, just ahead of Bono of U2, in large part because of his significant role in 1916. He headed the Irish Citizen Army, an armed socialist trade union of men and women, which joined with elements of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to plan and prosecute the uprising. Also discussed is Margaret Skinnider, a young schoolteacher from Coatbridge, who was the only female volunteer wounded in the action.

The impact of the events of Easter 1916 on Scotland in general remains under-researched but is of considerable importance in the history of this country. By the time of the Rising, there were perhaps over 220,000 first-generation Irish immigrants in Scotland, more per head of the national population than in England and Wales. Most were Catholic but around a quarter were Protestants from Ulster. The two were certain to take up deeply opposing positions to the events which were unfolding across the Irish Sea in 1916 and afterwards.

At first, however, even the Catholic Irish were hostile. Dundee, for instance, had the largest proportion of Irish-born inhabitants of any city in Britain at the time. The official leadership of the community initially denounced the Rising in forthright terms as a crazy exploit, "mad, motiveless and meaningless", and called for law and order to be reestablished in Dublin. Attitudes began to change radically, however, after news of the judicial executions became public.

Increasingly, sympathy among the Catholic Irish in Scotland went to Sinn Fein, the militant separatist party, especially when the British authorities began to use the hated Black and Tan militias to brutally enforce the law in Ireland. By 1920, there were 80 Sinn Fein clubs in Scotland and an estimated 4,000 IRA volunteers training in Glasgow alone. When the military struggle against British rule began in Ireland, Scotland became a vital source of money, gelignite and explosives for the cause.

Predictably, however, a backlash was soon triggered in Protestant and Unionist Scotland. The virulent anti-Irish campaigns of the inter-war period, symbolised by the Church of Scotland’s notorious publication The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality (1923), can in part be attributed as reaction to what happened in Ireland between 1916 and 1921. That bitter legacy of sectarian hatred has declined dramatically in recent years but has not yet entirely disappeared.

The governments of several countries where the Irish settled in the past are planning public commemorations of the Easter Rising. It will be interesting to see whether any official events are organised in Scotland where so many of the immigrant Irish made their homes and where their descendants make up a significant proportion of the population of the modern nation in 2016.

Scotland and the Easter Rising, Fresh Perspectives on 1916, edited by Kirsty Lusk and Willy Maley, Luath Press, £12.99

Review by T.M. Devine