The Guardian newspaper, a couple of weeks ago, carried a number of essays by Irish writers on the Easter Rising.

I think Glenn Patterson's reflects my own view; if only I could have put it so beautifully:

"As a rule, I am wary of small numbers of men and women taking up arms in the name of the People, especially when they start invoking God. Yet I like Ireland. I feel at home in every part of it, south as well as north. I like the people, lower case: those born here and the increasing numbers who choose to live here. The thought that any part of what I like might have been brought into being by the women and men who rose on Easter Monday a century ago is, to say the least, paradoxical.

I am reminded of Sherwood Anderson's "The Book of the Grotesque" (I live in Belfast: it's never far from my mind), which describes a world full of beautiful truths to live by and the paradox whereby a person snatching up one of those truths and trying to make it his own becomes a grotesque, and the truth so embraced a falsehood.

There is much that is beautiful in the language of the 1916 Proclamation, and much that is grotesque in what it has been used (and is still being used by some) to justify, although even within Ireland it certainly doesn't have a monopoly on that. We seriously fucked up over the Rising's golden jubilee, or "they" did (I was four, it's one of the last things of which I can truly say I am absolved): the celebrations in the south and, more lethally, the overreaction in the north. I hope this time round all who wish to remember remember, and are allowed to remember, with dignity and magnanimity.

Then maybe once this and the other forthcoming centenaries are over – the clocks have been definitively reset, from 1916 to 2016 (or 2023) – we could all try squeezing our truths a little less tight."

They can all be read here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/26/easter-rising-100-years-on-a-terrible-beauty-is-born

Best wishes,
Harry