Article by Stephen Collins – Studies Irish Review
John Redmond died in March 1918, a political failure and a broken man. In the years that followed his death the tolerant values of parliamentary politics that he stood for were, temporarily, pushed aside in a bloody tide of revolutionary violence. While an independent Irish state was established on sound democratic principles, after a vicious civil war, Redmond’s memory was systematically buried and his contribution to the independence movement ignored.
The 1916 leaders, who had effectively rebelled against him, and not simply against the British Government, became the icons of the new state. Their cult of blood sacrifice was adopted as the national myth even though the Free State quickly developed into a functioning parliamentary democracy that owed very little to the revolutionary values of 1916.