February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
After all, it began the struggle that eventually won for a major part of the country a degree of autonomy, and then independence, that the nation had not enjoyed in centuries. It brought together briefly all the major forces of cultural, social and political change then unsettling the country. It was led by poets and well as soldiers and revolutionaries. It contained republicans, nationalists, and socialists. In a way, it was a capsule of the form that many future rebellions against imperial power would take over the coming decades as the 20th century unwound into one of the most violent, yet politically progressive that the world has ever seen.
It is too easy to forget the broader significance of the 1916 Rising. It was not restricted to a narrow Irish agenda, though its main aim was to achieve Irish independence. Its scope would have included the right of Irish women to vote — no small thing in a period when every European state was still denying them that right. One of its leaders, James Connolly, went far beyond the confines of any nationalist agenda to envision a brotherhood of man united in economic justice and equality.
That is, 1916 was an incipient revolution, whose aims were painted on a broad canvass. It spelled the beginning of the end of the old imperialism, and the emergence of a new vision for mankind.