Last
year, during the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising that led to
Irish independence, the writer Colm Toibin pointed to the fatal mistake
the British made when putting down the rebellion. It was not just the
swift execution of the movement’s leaders, which historians often point
to as a defining moment, but the burial of their bodies in quicklime
without coffins.
“Anyone Irish will understand that whatever you do, don’t do that,” he said, adding that it “mattered in Ireland in a way that it might not have mattered in some other country.”