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In March 1966 the taoiseach, Seán Lemass, received a letter from an elderly patient in a Dublin nursing home which implored him to withdraw all preparations for the commemoration of the Easter Rising before it was too late: I know that you will have serious trouble if this piece of showing the flag goes on . . . It seems to be impossible to rule this very small island and I know your task is difficult but it seems to me . . . that there is going to be very serious trouble if these celebrations go on.1 In retrospect many would agree that these concerns were well founded.Although the beginning of the conflict in Northern Ireland is often dated to 5 October 1968 – when police and civil rights marchers clashed in Derry and two days of serious rioting followed – faultlines had been emerging in the years before.The first victim of the Troubles, John Scullion, was shot by loyalists on 11 June 1966.2 While the commemoration of the Easter Rising did not cause the conflict in Northern Ireland, it has been seen by unionist politicians as central to the build-up of tension and the subsequent breakdown of order. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising has been remembered as a moment of unrestrained triumphalism which fuelled divisions between unionists and nationalists. Indeed there exists in Ireland a dual memory through which 1966 has become as mythical and misunderstood as 1916. David Trimble has written that ‘1916 had a particular legacy for the North, as the 50th anniversary of the rebellion started the destabilisation of Ulster’.3 For Trimble, the ‘orgy of self-congratulation’ that accompanied the commemoration had a devastating impact on the position of moderate politics in Northern Ireland.4 Terence O’Neill, who was prime Introduction 1 minister of Northern Ireland in 1966, described it as ‘not a very easy year’.5 In his autobiography O’Neill expressed his frustration at Catholics in Belfast who had ‘insist[ed] on celebrating the Dublin rebellion ’ and recorded, ‘It was 1966 which made 1968 inevitable and was bound to put the whole future of Northern Ireland in the melting pot.’6 The summer of 1966 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. In the months previously, the Ulster Volunteer Force had been resurrected and Conor Cruise O’Brien later argued that the 1966 commemorations favoured a recrudescence of IRA violence and that the nationalist and unionist commemorations in the North, clashing with those of the Rising in the South, also favoured the revival of armed Protestant extremism.7 South of the border the view of those who were young in 1966 has helped to sustain the idea that the jubilee was an occasion of unthinking nationalism which had corrosive if less dramatic consequences in the Republic of Ireland.The poet Michael O’Loughlin has argued that ‘it is almost possible to speak of a generation of 66’ which shared the characteristics of a total alienation from the state, a cynicism with regard to national institutions and an unspoken assumption that everything emanating from official sources was a lie.8 For this generation the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising is remembered as a moment of betrayal by the Irish state during which the Easter Rising was elevated to the centrepiece of the national story, only to be abandoned in official circles a few years later when it was no longer politically convenient.9 Certainly the anniversary in 1966 marked the most elaborate commemoration of Easter Week to date. It was also the first commemoration to be broadcast on the recently established Irish television network Telefís Éireann, and at a point when Ireland was intensely aware of its image in the outside world. The acts of remembrance therefore contained an acute self-awareness which came from the size of the perceived audience. Self-awareness is not the same as self-reflection and there was little or no consideration given to the impact of the commemoration on politics in Northern Ireland, despite efforts at rapprochement between political leaders there and in the Republic in the mid-1960s. Greater thought was given to the way in which the commemoration would be viewed abroad and the possibility that it might be seen as anti-English. Nevertheless, the government in the Republic of Ireland felt entitled to commemorate the Rising and, indeed, believed that it had a responsibility to mark the fiftieth anniversary as a landmark event. 2 Introduction [3.148.102...

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