“Repaying a Debt of Gratitude”: Foreign Minority Nationalists and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966

For militant nationlists in the minority regions of Western Europe the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 exercised a powerful and enduring influence. Not only had the insurrection itself provided dramatic inspiration to an entire generation of such nationalists in the years before the Second World War, but its veneration in various nationalist literatures had also installed Irish figures such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in equally (and sometimes more) exalted positions as indigenous heroes.¹ In Brittany, for example, a young Fańch Debauvais excitedly daubed the walls of his native Rennes with the words “Vive l’Irlande!”during the Rising,² and his colleague OlierMordrel would later write of how the idea of staging their own gallant last stand, as at the General Post Office in Dublin, stirred the passions of Breton nationalists: “A thousand times we went to sleep dreaming of being in combat at the Hôtel des Postes in Rennes, transformed into a blockhaus, and we slept happily.”³ These two nationalist leaders later devoted an entire issue of their journal Breiz Atao (Brittany Forever) to a celebration of the Rising, and Lun Fask (Easter Monday) remains a key date in the calendar of radical Breton separatists. (See figure 1.)⁴

Yet the inspirational example of the Rising was not confined to Celtic Brittany. Basques in the 1930s adopted Easter Sunday as their Aberri Eguna (Fatherland Day), which was selected to venerate the twin inspirations of devout Catholicism and the sacrifice of Irish rebels.⁵ In equally devout Flanders, Fr. Jules Callewaert, a Flemish nationalist and priest, lauded Sinn Féin as “good Catholics and heroes without equal,” and praised Ireland as “a civilisational model of self-sacrifice and as an ideal Catholicism.”⁶ Despite the predominant Protestantism of the Welsh and the Scots, the celebration of that week of insurrection in Dublin also exercised a unique allure for Celtic movements in the United Kingdom. The Irish rebels of Easter 1916 had taught kindred Celtic peoples, in the words of Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) leader Gwynfor Evans (himself a pacifist), that “their subjection to England and France was neither inevitable nor permanent.”⁷

It is not surprising, then, that nationalists from these minority regions would aim to attend the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Rising to be held in Dublin at Easter 1966, with the intention of honoring in some way the example of 1916. Indeed, there are many and varied reports testifying to the presence of foreign nationalists in these commemorations—not only representatives of constitutionalist parties but also members of militant organizations modeled in great measure on the IRA. Free Wales Army (FWA) leaders Julian Cayo Evans and Dennis Coslett, for example, reportedly carried “the Red Dragon flag during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Easter Rising in Dublin.”⁸ According

Figure 1.

Easter Rising commemorative issue of Breiz Atao (Brittany Forever), May 1935. “Easter Monday 1916! Nineteen years ago, the Irish saved their country by shedding their blood for it.” Photograph by author from material at Trinity College, Dublin.

to sundry reports, their “troops” in the city in April 1966 could be numbered in the “scores,”⁹ at eighty,¹⁰ forty,¹¹ or only between six and seven;¹² they were sighted while marching in the official parade past the GPO, in the separate republican march from the Custom House to Glasnevin cemetery, or in some mutant combination of the two. Likewise, militants of the so-called Scottish Liberation Army (SLA) were said to have accompanied the Welshmen, with the Scots numbering anywhere up to thirty participants,¹³ and this was just one contingent in a larger mass that reportedly included “the Breton Liberation movement . . ., the Flemish, the Vec Mannin [sic] (Manx Independence movement),¹⁴ Irish Americans, Cornish republicans . . ., French Canadians . . ., [and] even a bunch of Glasgow Celtic football supporters.”¹⁵ The “celebration of 1966” was therefore, according to such excited pan-Celticist commentators as Roger Faligot, not simply a purely Irish national...