The Easter Rising As History

Many thanks to the person who scanned and forwarded this to the Archive. As it notes:

This is based on a paper read from C. Desmond Greaves at a meeting organised by the History Group at Marx House on Saturday, April 23rd 1966.

It further notes that the History Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain is open to all members interested in history.

The introduction states:

A Jubilee coincides with the fifty year limit and is not therefore an ideal time for assessing an event historically. Official papers, for what they are worth, have yet to be fully opened. Eye-witnesses and participants are still alive, and protected by the law of libel. Old men and their families can have strong vested interests in past events. And of course in the general sense these past events are enshrined in surviving relationships which are part of the structure of living politics.

This paper does not therefore offer the impossible, the mature assessment of 1916 in all aspects, but attempts to outline a basis for the criticism of the ‚’official‚’ historical assessment of 1916 which has been presented in the press over the past few weeks.

And presciently he writes:

One thing is now clear. The Irish question is not dead. Britain still has, as she always had, an Irish policy. And it is well to bear in mind what that now is, and to note recent changes. Broadly speaking it can be defined as ‚’integration within integration‚’; the economic and political consolidation of these islands under the hegemony of British monopoly-capitalism as an aspect of the consolidation (through E.E.C. or other means)of neo-colonialist Europe.

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