Speech by the Minister of State at the Department of Justice and Equality and Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht with special responsibility for Equality, New Communities and Culture, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin TD
Is cúis mór bhróid dom a bheith anseo anocht ag seoladh dréacht-phlean Chomoradh Eiri Amach na Casca.
Tá scéalta na seachtaine sin tagtha anuas chugainn ó ghlúin go glúin.
Is cuimhin liom mo shean-mháthair féin ag insint na scéalta eagsula dom.
Tugann an deis comórtha seo seans dúinn na scéalta sin a chloisteáil agus a thuiscint nios soileire. Raiteas a bhi i Raiteas na Poblachta do muintir na hEireann ach do mhuintir an domhain uilig freisin.
Is le muintir na hÉireann an comóradh seo agus do mhuintir an domhain freisin.
The most memorable documents in history are sometimes the briefest: Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech contains 1,667 words; the Proclamation of the Irish Republic has 491.
Their brevity lends them a quiet dignity and eloquence.
And documents of quiet eloquence have profound impacts. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic shook an Empire and created a nation.
It belongs to all of us – old and newer Irish – it was written for all of us and the Rising belongs to all of us too. So does its commemoration.
This commemoration focuses not just on the leaders of the Rising, but on the ordinary people who lived and died at this extraordinary time in our history. It is a profoundly significant memory project and as the custodians of so much of that memory, our cultural institutions will be central to the hosting and accessibility of that memory project.
This commemoration affords us time to interrogate the past, based on hard evidence, examine the issues in a dignified way and, in communal reflection, seek to better understand the motive forces that propelled the emergence of an independent state.
That story is a complex one. Indeed, it is not one story. It is many. And they are layered and leavened with overlapping and often conflicting elements. In the political arena, in towns, villages and in families. My family was one of those. My great-grandfather, a tailor in the British Army – his son, my grand-uncle – a rebel in the Four Courts during Easter week 1916.
Our commemoration will endeavour to voice these stories, in a space removed from that time but with the aim of understanding that generation on its own terms, through the lens of their experiences, and respectful of all motives.
Justice must also be done to the cultural dynamics underpinning the revolution a century ago. On-site theatre is an incredibly effective way of increasing public accessibility to history. In 2015, the National Archives and National Museum are recreating the Barracks of 1915 at Collins Barracks with Irish soldiers training to go to Gallipoli, where many of them died quickly and brutally.
There are plans advancing too for the live theatre approach at Richmond Barracks in 2016. One of the only original buildings to survive there is where the 1916 Court Martials took place. It will be powerful to capture the experience of the young Irish soldiers, also at the Barracks at that time waiting to go to the Western Front, where many would be killed at the Somme.
Almost 100 years ago Irishmen and Irish women North and South took up arms in many uniforms. The question of our island being part of an empire was one question that many sought answers to. They took that question apart in the trenches of the Western Front, at the Somme and in the rubble of Sackville Street, here in the GPO and Moore St.
Our memory project in the Decade of Commemorations will remember all of them.
The expertise of our cultural institutions and the advice of the historians who comprise the government’s expert advisory group will be central to our commemorations as will the vibrancy and imagination of our young people. It has been said that the leaders of 1916 were a generation arguing with the Ireland of their parents.
Every generation should do the same. We will be challenging our young people through our partners in education and the community sector to imagine a Proclamation for their Generation. To build on the values proclaimed almost a century ago, and to stretch far to contemplate an Ireland not achieved by their parents, but which may be achieved by others.
In that respect, I want to acknowledge the presence here this evening of five young people from Dublin City Comhairle na n-Og.
Sometimes, it takes 100 years to understand what happened a century ago. This generation was not born into what Hugo Hamilton describes as the irony between empires. Nor did not grow up in the silent spaces between nations and between languages, between what happened in history and what we understand of it now.
We have opened up our history now. And on this island we have opened up to each other. We need to keep it that way. And our commemoration must reinforce that openness.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
Ends.
