Commemorative and funeral marches by non-State actors wearing uniforms are polarising, ridiculous and ultimately unrepublican
Republicans participate in an unofficial commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin city centre: Bertie Ahern stated forcefully in his speech on Sunday the need now is for republicans to show respect for the unionist people and their traditions. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
But what do we mean when we say that all citizens owe a duty of loyalty to the State established by the Constitution – our “sovereign, independent, democratic state” as it is described in article 5? There are nonetheless people who regard the State as illegitimate. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the State is not the republic proclaimed outside the GPO on Easter Monday 1916. They adhere to an ideology that the independent Irish State established in the form of Saorstát Éireann in December 1922 was an illegitimate entity based on a betrayal of the republic proclaimed in 1916.
That belief and ideology has never been discarded. It justified in the eyes of the provisional movement the prolonged campaign of terrorist violence aimed among other things at the subversion of the Irish state. When we recall that Sinn Féin in 1917, while ratifying the 1916 republic, still accepted that the external form of an independent Irish state once established might not be a republic, and when the First Dáil used the term Saorstát Éireann to describe the state of which it was the parliament in its formal declaration of independence in 1919, it is hard to see how the independent Irish State is not now entitled to the loyalty demanded by article 9.
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