What should Britain feel about the Easter Rising? How about shame?

Tying the badly-wounded trade union leader James Connolly to a chair merely for the pleasure of killing him by firing squad was as disastrous a piece of public relations then as it sounds now

What a different history we could have had with our near neighbour (Getty Images)

The centenary of the Easter Rising, the insurrection by Irish republicans in Dublin 100 years ago is a secret history to most people on this side of the Irish Sea.

The Easter Rising was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The total loss of control in Dublin, even for just a week, was a wounding humiliation for Britain. If uppity Fenians could bring the second city of the Empire to its knees, nothing would ever be the same again.

Revisionist British history has it that, by the standards of the time, and taking into account we were midway through the First World War, their treatment was no worse than what should have been expected. But tying the badly-wounded trade union leader, James Connolly, to a chair in the yard outside Kilmainham Gaol, merely for the pleasure of killing him by firing squad, was as disastrous a piece of public relations then as it sounds now.

A free, independent 32-County Ireland could have been the UK’s staunchest ally throughout the 20^th Century. So much pain could have been avoided - and more radical demands headed off - had Britain kept its word and legislated for Home Rule during any of the various attempts at doing so. A specially-reserved contempt for the Irish meant their yearning for nationhood was unlikely to see a resentful British establishment relent and make an honourable peace.

Instead, we saw partition in 1922 and the creation of a sectarian state in Northern Ireland where naked religious hate against the Catholic nationalist minority was hardwired into the workings of government. The rest of Ireland was allowed to slip into civil war over the terms of Britain’s eventual, messy, part-withdrawal. British elites cared not a damn until events in the north spiralled out of control from the late 1960s onwards. The failure to heed calls for civil rights from the Catholic nationalist minority, bookended by the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 civil rights demonstrators by British soldiers in 1972, turbo-fuelled the Provisional IRA’s campaign.

From that point onwards we had ‘the troubles’; the ultimate political euphemism for what was in reality a secessionist civil war within the British state. The deaths of 3,600 people and countless tens of billions pumped into maintaining Northern Ireland’s wretched stalemate, seemed to stretch out forever, until the peace process was encouraged to bloom from the mid-1990s and political statecraft superseded dunder-headed militarism.

What a different history we could have had with our near neighbour. An independent Irish state, borne not from the bloodshed of the War of Independence from Britain, but by enlightened British self-interest, would, in all probability, have become a member of the Commonwealth. Instead of Irish neutrality during the Second World War, Irish soldiers might have taken up arms for Britain, as they had done so successfully for centuries before.

It took the state visit of Her Majesty the Queen in 2011 – the first such visit to Ireland in 90 years – for these self-inflicted wounds to begin to heal. The events commemorated this weekend stir long in the mind of the Irish as the seminal moment when their great patriots struck a blow for freedom. These events should be remembered here to, with a measure of shame and regret for our failure to do the decent thing.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut and a former Special Adviser at the Northern Ireland Office