After a (partially successful) 35-year effort to take the gun out of Irish politics, Bertie Ahern wants to remilitarize Irish public life. At the annual conference (Ardfheis) of his political party, Fianna F�il, Taoiseach Ahern announced that a military parade would be reintroduced to mark the anniversary of the Easter 1916 rising. According to the Irish Times report:

A large-scale Easter military parade used to take place each year to commemorate 1916, but has not taken place since the year after the eruption of the Northern conflict in 1969. There was a small parade outside the GPO in 1991 to mark the Rising’s 75th anniversary.Mr Ahern emphasised Fianna F�il’s particular claim to be the true inheritors of the spirit of 1916.

While the Irish public is irate with an administration that seems incapable of spending state revenues responsibly and appalled that it is possible to die in an Irish hospital from an ulcer, the decision to focus on a diversion such as a military parade might seem bizarre. But it is always a good indicator of a flailing administration that challenging core issues are ignored in favour of superficialities. Unfortunately, Bertie’s decision to play De Gaulle and watch the nation’s armed forces trundle past the GPO (how long will that take? less than 10 minutes?) is far from being merely ludicrous. It’s widely reported that the decision to associate FF with the military legacy of 1916 is to keep Sinn F�in–which is encroaching on Ahern’s party’s fiefdoms in working-class Dublin and elsewhere–in its place by hammering home the point that Fianna F�il is the true inheritor of the mantle of Irish Republicanism, and owns the monopoly on armed force in the land. Aside from the profoundly disturbing aspect of a political party drawing on state resources to help it gain the upper hand in a electoral dogfight, the timing of such a move couldn’t be worse. Just as the IRA decides not only to lay down its arms but to agree to their destruction, along comes the Irish government–or rather a political faction pretending to represent the interests of the Irish state–to rub the IRA’s noses in its demilitarized status. Not that I care overly about the sensitivities of Sinn F�in political hacks, but is it the mark of a mature state that it needs to lord it over a paramilitary organization that has supposedly walked away from the gun? But aside from its emetic cynicism, this stunt totally fails to reflect the contemporary Irish psyche. A critic of the modern situation might suggest that a cavalcade of 05 Mercs and SUVs rather than a few armoured cars filling past the reviewing stands might be a more suitable demonstration. But thankfully this modern state, having abandoned the crabbed vision of ethnic purity and economic autarky famously espoused by Ahern’s predecessor, has little time for martial playacting. Let’s mark 1916, for sure, but let’s do it in a way that accurately reflects the ethos of this Republic. We don’t “do” marches–let’s leave that to the increasingly bewildered Orange Lodges. Instead–and this would really make people remember the men and women of 1916 with gratitude–what about sending every household in the country a commemorative gift voucher–featuring suitably stirring patriotic imagery–worth, say, 10 euro? A token gesture, in every sense of the word, but most people will surely prefer to shop than attend a vacuous military display. And it would undoubtedly cost less than, say, an abandoned hospital payroll system, or an electronic voting system that doesn’t work, or a national aquatic centre that leaks, or a…