An Extraordinarily Accurate Prediction

This passage is from an article that appeared in The Irish Press on 12th April 1966, in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was written by Charles McCarthy, the secretary of the Vocational Teachers' Organisation, and it's remarkably prescient:

"There was in the men on 1916 a sense of destiny. In these rather concrete and somewhat cynical times I imagine our organized commemoration this year, with its renewal of emotion and almost of sanctification, may well be followed by a period of more critical assessment, inevitable anyway as personal involvement gives way to history, and all the more inevitable as a reaction to romantic restatement.

"Both the messianic patriotism of Pearse and the socialistic patriotism of Connolly will come in for sharper intellectual examination than they have before; and both will be faulted, I have no doubt, very intelligently and quite validly. But while this will be appropriate to a lecture-room, we must remember that these were not lecture-room men..."

(Whenever someone ties a discourse or attitude or atmosphere to a particular setting, like a lecture room in this case, it gives me a thrill. I like the idea that reality shifts-- or at least, shimmers-- according to what space we're standing in.)

The reaction McCarthy was predicting was accelerated by the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland three years after he wrote. Of course, he couldn't have predicted that.

I'm always impressed when people can see past the atmosphere of the moment. For instance, St. John Paul II was by no means misled by his triumphant reception in Ireland in 1978. If you read the speeches he made on his tour, he could quite clearly see that secularism and materialism were on the rise in Ireland.