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Today we celebrate and commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising and we do so with pride. To refuse to commemorate this historic event because it might be taken, as justifying the campaign of death and destruction of the Provisional IRA is to further boost that organisation’s continuing attempts to justify their claim to be the inheritors of the ideals of the men who fought in 1916.

The Provisional IRA campaign of the past 20 years, with such horrific happenings as human bombs and no warning explosions in crowded streets would not, could not, be supported by the men and women of 1916. There is no justification today for the continuation of that campaign and it should stop now.

The leaders of 1916 were motivated by the ideal of an independent Ireland, independent from British colonial rule, independence to run our own affairs in an Irish Ireland. They were idealistic in believing that the uprising would succeed and the tragic irony is that it was their deaths by firing squad which led the nation to support their cause.

There are those who say than an independent Ireland would have come about by peaceful means if the 1916 Rising had never happened and this is possibly true. How it might have come about and what kind of nation, we would have today is a matter of speculation. What we do know is that the Rising of 1916 led directly, and swiftly to Irish independence. The leaders of 1916 who died in that great event would be as disappointed as many are in Ireland today that it did not lead to a 32 county Republic, but this is the challenge for this, and future generations, something to be achieved by peaceful means.