My view is that there was no need for anyone to be killed to attain Irish independence
By purely non violent methods, the Irish Parliamentary Party, so unjustly denigrated by Pearse in 1915 in his address at the O Donovan Rossa funeral, had got Home Rule on the statute book in September 1914. It was not going to be reversed.
Home Rule would have led on to whatever level of independence the Irish people wanted, and without the loss of life of the War of Independence and Civil War, which flowed directly from the 1916 Rebellion, and from its entirely foreseeable aftermath.
The O Donovan Rossa funeral was used by the IRB to glorify violent methods. That was wrong.
We can commemorate whatever we wish, but moral principles do not change, just because 100 years have passed.
The bitter and futile experience of the past 100 years should have taught us that political violence has and had no useful place in Irish politics, now, or 100 years ago.
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