By John Spain

THE sun shone, the bands played, the soldiers (thousands of them) marched, the tanks growled past and the kids pointed in awe at the big guns being towed behind the weird military vehicles.

The 90th anniversary Easter Rising parade through the center of Dublin on Sunday, the annual military parade revived this year after a gap of over 30 years, was a huge success. An estimated 100,000 people turned out to view the spectacle.

Before the parade there was the ceremony. On the VIP stand opposite the GPO even some of the dignitaries had a tear in the eye and a catch in the throat as the Tricolor was lowered to half mast and the Proclamation was read aloud to the hushed crowd.

It was, everyone agreed, a great occasion. Even the fly over by Ireland’s mini airforce was something to be marveled at.

The scale of the parade was more impressive than expected with a few thousand troops marching past, their boots thundering on the tarmac, and the army’s best hardware on show.

Although the moments of commemoration before the parade began were moving, it was the parade itself that most people had come to enjoy. And they were not disappointed.

The mood was celebratory, a bit like St. Patrick’s Day without the rain and the leprechaun hats. It was less about history and more about having a great day out.

People in the crowd who were interviewed were unanimous in the view that reviving the annual military parade was the right thing to do. The recent violence was over. We should be proud to be Irish. We should celebrate our freedom and the foundation of the state.

Most people did not seem to be thinking too much about what the men of 1916 had got up to. They were more focused on the Ireland of today rather than the Ireland of 90 years ago.

They were enjoying the 1916 commemoration as a way of celebrating the great country we have become. Look how far we have come, they seemed to be saying, see how successful we are.

In the newspapers and on radio and TV, however, some commentators and historians were not so sure whether a military parade was the most appropriate way of celebrating today’s Ireland. And they were even less happy with the idea that the 1916 Rising itself was being given such huge prominence and significance when there was so much else going on in Ireland at the time.

Everyone agreed that reclaiming the military legacy of 1916 from Sinn Fein and the IRA (who had been allowed to take sole possession of it over the last 30 years) was a necessary move by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern.

The sight of a few thousand troops marching down O’Connell Street made it very clear to everyone that there is only one Oglaigh na hEireann (the official name of the Irish Army), even if the IRA stole the name for its volunteers to attempt to give them legitimacy.

It was important, everyone agreed, to expose the bogus claim by today’s IRA to be the successors of the men of 1916. It was important that the idealistic heroes of the past should not be sullied by association with today’s so-called Republicans. It was important that the good name of the men of 1916 should not be used to legitimize the murder, mayhem and criminality we have seen in the last 30 years.

So there was general support for Ahern’s decision to reclaim 1916. But the uncertainty about the wisdom of glorifying the actions of those who took part in the 1916 Rising remained in the air.

The problem is that the Rising in 1916 had no support from the Irish public at the time. If you say that the 1916 Rising was legitimate then how can you say that the Provo campaign of the last 30 years had no legitimacy because the vast majority of Irish people did not support it?

Listening to Ahern’s speeches over the weekend and watching his body language, it was clear that even he is not completely comfortable with this apparent contradiction.

He was a bit too vehement, a bit too insistent to be entirely plausible. He sounded like a man trying to convince himself.

In fact (as I explained in this column last week) the idea that the 1916 Rising was legitimate even though it had no popular support, cannot be used to legitimize the recent IRA campaign. The situations then and now (or indeed at anytime since independence was achieved and the Irish Free State was established) are not comparable.

What may — and it is only may — have been justifiable under colonial rule could never be justified once our state had come into being.

There is no argument that people here at the time did not support the Rising. The more interesting question is whether the actions of the men of 1916 were justified even then, and whether it might have been better for Ireland if the Rising had never taken place.

When Pearse came out on the street in front of the GPO 90 years ago to read the Proclamation, he was regarded by the passing Dubliners with amusement as another eccentric, just as the people of Dublin now hurry past the various cranks and nutters who distribute fliers and make speeches outside the GPO today.

In contrast to the reverence with which the crowds last Sunday listened to the solemn reading of the Proclamation, back in 1916 the people of Dublin were too busy shopping and getting on with their lives to stop to listen to Pearse. No one knew who he was or what he was ranting about, dressed in his funny uniform.

There was an air of unreality about what was happening back then, even when the shooting started, as if the whole thing was a kind of pageant. And that remained over the next few days as the Rising continued and curious Dubliners came into the city center to see the entertainment.

Looking back now, people tend to imagine that Pearse was addressing a nation of miserable, downtrodden people who were just waiting for another chance to rise up against their tyrannical oppressors. But nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact British rule in Ireland had settled down for years into a benign format which most people did not regard as particularly oppressive. Even the land question was being addressed as the old estates were broken up and redistributed under British legislation.

Dublin did have some of the worst slums in Europe, but the national economy was working reasonably well when compared with the rest of Europe, or even with Britain. Agriculture, business and commerce were all developing and there was a general air of well being in the country.

The idea that the Irish were living in a tyrannical state and were ready to join the men of 1916 to rebel and get democracy for themselves is also completely misguided. A few hundred people were involved initially in the 1916 Rising. At the same time tens of thousands of Irishmen were fighting with the British in World War I and they were volunteers, not conscripts.

The Irish, as you may know, elected MPs to the British Parliament in West-minster at the time. Far from being under-represented, there were more MPs per capita of the population here than there were in other parts of Britain.

And, of course, there was huge support for using existing structures to set up Home Rule in an Irish Parliament, something which the British were not opposing. In fact Home Rule for Ireland was already on the Westminster statute books and was only sidetracked because of the opposition of the Unionists.

Looking back now, it should be obvious to most people that Home Rule offered a better way forward, a more gradualist approach that could have kept the two parts of Ireland loosely connected in some kind of temporary dominion status and eventually resulted in the formation of a new Ireland that would have been enriched by the two traditions. Without the appalling violence of the past 30 years we might even have reached that point by now.

Home Rule faced real difficulty because of the fears of the Unionists, but it seems likely that it would have become a reality within a few decades. And if it had been structured correctly it might have been possible to achieve without any bloodshed.

And who knows where we might be today, when the younger Unionists, behind all the bluster, are very keen to follow the successful economic model of the south?

Instead what did we get? For most of the last 90 years since the Rising, Ireland was an economic disaster area and at least two million people emigrated to make a permanent life for themselves in Britain, the old enemy, and elsewhere.

Here at home, two sectarian states emerged, with much ethnic cleansing on both sides in the early days. In the North there was unbridled discrimination.

In the south, a narrow-minded miserable, isolationist state emerged with an ideology that limited and twisted the lives of generations. We had Dev’s ridiculous vision of a mythical Gaelic Ireland with colleens dancing at the crossroads and people leading spartan lives of rural simplicity and religious devotion.

While all this codology and hypocrisy was going on, of course, the emigrant ships were full.

That was the legacy of 1916, that and the creation of a precedent for violence that has bedeviled Ireland ever since. The Blood Sacrifice of the men of 1916 robbed Ireland of a democratically achieved freedom that constitutional nationalism at the time was well on the way to achieving.

There was no moral justification for the 1916 Rising, and the practical consequences have been a disaster over the years. We can celebrate 1916 because we know those involved were honorable men who meant well.

But we should all be aware by now that they were deluded dreamers, and that the mythical status the Rising now has obscures the much bigger picture that was Ireland at the time.

Last weekend was just a dress rehearsal for the centenary in 2016. By then, hopefully, we will have moved on from the Blood Sacrifice legacy and the commemoration will be a genuine national day of celebration like they have in many other countries.