There is no consensus among Ireland’s historians about whether the events of 1916-23 constitute a revolution, or how the revolution should be regarded.

Fianna Fáil, for a long time the most successful political party in the republic, pushed a narrative that used the 1916 Rising to legitimize the contemporary state. Its telling is narrow and nationalist, tying leader Pádraig Pearse and his contemporaries to the conservative Catholicism of the twentieth century.

Their rivals among the Irish bourgeoisie, Fine Gael, contain many partisans of the Home Rule movement’s constitutional nationalism. Less critical of British rule in Ireland, they tend to downplay or even discredit the 1916 Rising as a tragic misadventure.