In response to Paul T Horgan: BBC uses the Easter Rising to talk up paramilitary violence, Stephen T wrote:
Dubliners pelted the captured rebels with rotten fruit because of the damage done to their city. They became heroes only when we executed them. It’s was probably inevitable, but if we’d had the sense to just put them in prison, Irish politics might have been a whole lot less violent. I like Ireland and the Irish, but their birth of a nation mythology doesn’t mention the thousands of Protestant ‘traitors’ driven out of the south. The eighty Irishmen executed by the Irish Government after the Civil War are also rarely mentioned.
But credit to the Irish Government for a vastly more restrained and balanced remembrance than the militaristic one that marked the fiftieth anniversary in 1966. It’s now possible in Ireland to have distinctly mixed feelings about these rebels.
