Popular romantic depictions of the Easter Rising may owe more to retrospective justification than historical accuracy.

The timing seemed a bit late but last Friday saw an opinion piece by Kevin Myers in the Belfast Telegraph on the topic of Easter Rising celebrations. Criticising the preferred Irish narrative of the Rising and highlighting the double-standards of authors labouring over those Myers asks "What is there to celebrate about the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent people in the streets of Dublin?" What, indeed?

It seems almost inconvenient to the chosen narrative of the Irish national creation myth to ask questions like: "Who gave Volunteer Garry Holohan the right to very deliberately and fatally shoot a teenage boy named Playfair during a raid at the Phoenix Park magazine?" He points out that only one of the 'volunteers' had ever even sought election, and he was "roundly defeated" by the electorate in his quest for a council seat (yes, you heard right, Ireland did indeed have elections before they ceded from the UK).

He's just as critical of the objectives of the leaders of the rebellion as he is of their methods though, blaming them for the decades of economic stagnation that were a feature of the South up to the late 70s.

"It was only when we undid the isolationist consequences of the rising that we began to create a country which could give its children jobs at home rather than one-way tickets on the mailboat to the very land against which the rising had been fought.

The Celtic Tiger - an open economy, with free movement of capital, and with the immigration of hundreds of thousands of foreigners - is the very antithesis of what Pearse and Connolly had wanted. One sought a totalitarian Marxist state, the other a protected Gaelic paradise... ."

Given that there was going to be some kind of home rule most likely within a decade anyway (it eventually came 5 years after the rising), what exactly is there to celebrate?