Professor Willy Maley and post-graduate student Kirsty Luck have edited one among the more valuable productions commemorating the Irish Rising of 1916.
Scotland’s part in these events is frequently overlooked or air-brushed out of the narrative, but is nevertheless significant.
Some Scots, at least, know that one of its most frequently celebrated figures, James Connolly, was born in Edinburgh, and a few of these that he began his career as a social and political activist in this city.
Fewer still will have heard of Margaret Skinnider, courier and sniper with the Irish Citizen Army, seriously wounded toward the end of the fighting.
Skinnider hailed from Glasgow, Nora Connolly O’Brian from Edinburgh, and it was the latter who smuggled Connolly’s last statement from her father’s prison cell.
‘Scotland and the Easter Rising’ features contributions scholarly, literary and reflective on a highly significant event in Irish history that Scotland has been reluctant to acknowledge any part in, despite the evidence to the contrary assembled in this volume.
This was acknowledged by Professor Maley, who reminded us of Owen Dudley Edwards’ observation that James Connolly emerged from an egg somewhere in Ireland aged twenty-eight.
This sense of ‘Sinn Fein’ – that it was indeed ‘ourselves alone’ in Ireland that produced the 1916 Rising is surely but another instance of the necessary myth of exceptionalism that every country, consciously or unconsciously nurtures.
A certain revisionism is however, not only healthy but also essential, and Maley and Lusk offered us some of this in their brief expositions of their work for this book. While Professor Maley examined cross-cultural and cross-water connections between Irish and Scottish communities, Lusk looked at the frequently over-looked role of women, particularly as part of the Irish Citizen Army, assertive in its stand for equal rights as opposed to the patriarchal attitudes of the Irish Volunteers.
Both deserve the praise due, though not always given, to editors for melding the diverse and necessarily divergent contributions to ‘Scotland and the Easter Rising’ into a panopticon of thoughts and reflections on a topic which continues to occupy (some might say plague) Irish and Scottish minds.
Scotland and the Easter Rising: 1, Kirsty Luck and Willy Maley (eds) Luath Press 2016. £12.99
ISBN 978-1-010745-36-6