State needs to grasp the nettle of 1916 darcy

Westmeath man Bartle’s leading role in Sinn Féin’s national centenary plans

On September 20, 2014, a hundred years elapsed since Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond sparked a split in the Irish Volunteers, by calling on them to join the British Army and fight in Europe to secure Irish Home Rule.

It also marked the start of Fore man Bartle D’Arcy’s first week as Sinn Féin’s National Programme Co-ordinator for Centenaries Commemorations – a dream appointment, he admits, in which he has the luxury of combining his love of history with his extensive experience in tourism and event management.

Bartle, who started out working in the hotel business, went on to become manager of Belvedere House, Gardens and Park, Mullingar, and chairman of Houses, Castles and Gardens of Ireland, co-ordinating events in 90 historic buildings across Ireland. After leaving Belvedere, he started his own business, Directing Tourism, and collaborated with Gathering Ireland director Jim Miley on various projects.

Two months on from starting at Sinn Féin headquarters on Dublin’s 44 Parnell Square – the historic first headquarters of the Irish Volunteers – the Mountnugent native finds himself organising a commemorations programme to complement a state, one which, in his eyes, “doesn’t exist”.

This reality, he argues, was exposed by the government’s widely criticised launch of its own 1916 commemorations programme, and its ‘Ireland Inspires 2016’ video, described recently by UCD historian Diarmaid Ferriter as “embarrassing, unhistorical s**t”.

“‘Ireland Conspires’ comes to mind,” Bartle joked. “We knew they were launching it, and we knew that they didn’t have anything to launch.

“We knew that two weeks beforehand, Fáilte Ireland’s John Concannon was drafted into the Taoiseach’s department on secondment for two years, and what you got was basically a rehash of the St Patrick’s Day ‘Ireland Inspires’ from a year ago which, strangely enough, included Bono, Bob Geldof and Queen Elizabeth II, but omitted any references to the Easter Rising, or the executed leaders.

“They were also omitted from the Taoiseach’s launch speech, which said lots about parliamentarians – Daniel O’Connell, John Redmond and the like, who have their own achievements – but nothing about the revolutionaries.

“The irony,” Bartle laughed, referring to the loud and vociferous water charges protest going on outside the GPO during the launch, “was that the closest they got to recognition of the Easter Rising was the sight of a group of leaders under siege in the GPO, having to leave through a side door!”

Bartle – whose wife, Una, is a Sinn Féin county councillor – maintains that the government has “no interest” in putting together a proper, broad-based and educative commemorations programme, and is now content to “follow the Gathering model”.

The ‘Ireland Inspires’ video, he argues for example, runs a timeline starting at 1916, and far from highlighting the Rising, shows an image of the Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

“This tells you a lot about the way the state wants you to remember this period of history,” he said. “On April 24, 1916, Ernest Shackleton was rescuing himself on Elephant Island in Antarctica, where he was in the business of claiming territory for the British Empire. On the same day, we had people fighting and dying for freedom from that empire in Dublin. But they’re left out.”

After a tidal wave of online opprobrium, the ‘Ireland Inspires 2016’ video was quickly pulled from all official websites, though it was initially defended by arts minister, Heather Humphreys.

“There’s a major lack of thought and preparation at work here,” Bartle added.

“My job, I suppose, is to do my bit to make sure the events of 1913-23 are correctly remembered. So as national programme co-ordinator, I’m going from county to county trying to set up broad-based 1916 committees, and we’re looking for local historians and community groups to come on board.

“We can’t be afraid of 1916. If you start denying where you come from, it’s very serious because you won’t know where you’re going.”

One of the most engrossing battles Bartle has immersed himself in while working out of 44 Parnell Square is the campaign to secure a national monument for Moore Street – one of Europe’s last remaining, intact urban battlefields, and the site of the Rising leaders’ last stand.

“One of my objectives is to broaden the scope of education about the nationalist narrative,” Bartle explained. “You have tourists coming here who know nothing about the revolutionary history of Dublin.

“The government has announced some capital projects in conjunction with the commemorations. You have the Richmond Barracks project, the planned GPO exhibition, the Military Archives projects, which are all very good. But then you have plans for a tenement housing museum. People don’t want to come to Dublin to see an exhibition about bad housing. A national monument on Moore Street is what’s needed.

“Dublin has a certain character, and it’s important that Moore Street doesn’t fall victim to a property developer who wants to turn it into a shopping centre. Otherwise you’ll be telling visitors to the city, ‘here’s where the O’Rahilly fell on the way into TK Maxx’, or ‘here’s where Pearse signed the surrender outside Claire’s Accessories’.

“You have people in America planning to come to Ireland for these commemorations in their droves; the AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians], the exiled children, people with proud Irish traditions. They’re not going to be interested in coming to see this, or some state parade with an Air Corps flyover, where nobody gets to see anything.

“It’ll be like the Lockout commemoration – where everyone was locked out except the state dignitaries!”

Bartle is planning an “inclusive” commemoration programme, which looks at all aspects of the 1913-23 struggle; all ideas, personalities and organisations; all sides, British and Irish; all faiths; all events, from the Home Rule Crisis and the Battle of the Somme, to the 1916 executions, the convening of the First Dáil and the War of Independence; and all counties – Westmeath included.

Tyrrellspass was, of course, the site of a standoff between the RIC and an Irish Volunteer squad led by Tomás Malone, and the midlands was central to the Volunteers’ overall but ultimately unrealised military strategy. Meanwhile the county’s independent nationalist MP, Laurence Ginnell – who later became a Sinn Féin TD – was a close friend of the 1916 rebels and played a major role in advocating on their behalf.

“There’s an obvious connection to Westmeath with Ginnell,” said Bartle, who visited Ginnell’s grave in Delvin on Friday morning. “We would take inspiration from Ginnell’s activities in the House of Commons, in making the case of the executions known.

“When General Sir John Maxwell came to Ireland to suppress the Rising, he had two things to do: put martial law in place, and issue an order for a lime pit to be dug for 100 bodies. And he would have filled that lime pit had Ginnell not stood up in the House of Commons to draw [British Prime Minister] Asquith’s attention to it.

“That’s why Asquith had to come to Ireland, with all the talk of blood seeping out from behind a closed door; executions in private, executions without trial. Nobody knew what was happening.”

While arguing that the term ‘Sinn Féin’ was a byword for the revolutionary fervour which gave breath to the Rising, Bartle insists that no one political party, Sinn Féin included, deserves to monopolise the commemorations.

“We’re not taking 1916 and running away with the ball; it belongs to the people,” he continued. “The state should oversee things, but nothing has been co-ordinated. Leadership is needed, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to lead.”

The state and the present government, Bartle believes, are driven by an ideology of fear and loathing for 1916. Fear, specifically, of the Proclamation, and the possibility that people will feel that its principles have not been followed through. Loathing, in that some – like former Taoiseach John Bruton – prefer to laud the parliamentarian ahead of the revolutionary, while others (wrongly, Bartle contends) believe that the recent past precludes us from celebrating extra-parliamentary politics and armed rebellion.

“Instead, the state needs to grasp the nettle of 1916, and they’ll find out that there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he concluded.