EASTER Tuesday 1916 and the British counter-offensive is underway, with the Shelbourne Hotel occupied by the army and martial law imposed. The rebels were doomed - though not their cause.

That rebellion is now part of history, and after 110 years it is well outside our living memory; but it remains a potent force in the lives of nationalists today - a reference point for the unfulfilled ambition to see Ireland united and an independent nation.

There’s a similar point of reference for unionists. Just a few months after the Rising, the Somme happened. The wanton destruction of a generation of young Ulster men had ramifications far beyond the killing fields of France; though, lest we forget, countless nationalists lost their lives there too.

Yes, 1916 was one of those years. As the hymn says: “Change and decay in all around I see.”

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Sadly, 2026 is shaping up to be one of those years too, though the killing fields are in the Middle East.

Scratch the surface of our politics today, and you will see it is defined by 1916: by pride in fighting men, and by survivors’ guilt; by the feeling we owe a debt to idealists who laid down their lives for our causes; in the continuing unionist conviction that the Rising was a betrayal in the midst of an existential conflict; and the raging sense of injustice among nationalists over the summary execution of the Rising’s leaders.

Easter 1916 and the Somme may not be topics of everyday discourse. But they are there, between the lines. And if northerners are good at anything, it is in being able to read between the lines.

‘Hiding in plain sight’ is a good phrase to describe it. We look at, but don’t see, the paintings on gable walls; we listen to the music of rebel songs and loyalist ballads, but don’t hear the words; the voices of the dead are there in the subtext of stories we tell.

There is another thing relevant to our politics and this season, and that is the notion of blood sacrifice – embedded in our consciousness and an elemental part of the religion most of us were brought up in, no matter what denomination.

It is more explicit in the nationalist tradition. “I see his blood upon the rose,” wrote Joseph Mary Plunkett; in The Rebel, Pádraig Pearse’s eponymous hero has “spoken with God on the top of His holy hill”.

But you only have to follow the rattle of the Lambeg drum on the way to a Church service – Drumcree perhaps – to see that loyalism has signed up God too.

There are those who see a form of blasphemy in the actions of people who ascribe Christian values to causes which are fundamentally secular, divisive and unchristian. And Church leaders emphasise their common ground in calls for peace and reconciliation. I have no doubt about their sincerity.

But we have to face the fact that a belief system which – certainly since the middle ages – has rooted itself in the notion of ‘blood sacrifice’ as the way to eternal salvation, which has deployed the greatest artists throughout history to promote an image of Christ crucified, and which has sanctified the principle of ‘holy war’, must take its fair share of the blame for the state we are in.

I know enough theology (though I stand to be corrected) to accept that the pivotal moment at Easter for believers is the resurrection, not the crucifixion.

But in the history of Christian art – identified as a propaganda tool by the Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th century – the figure of Christ resurrected barely gets a look-in.

For all the fuss about Easter Sunday and its message of salvation, walk into any Catholic church and you will be able to follow Jesus’s journey to Calvary in the Stations of the Cross. Hanging over the high altar will be the image of a man dying the most excruciating death, blood laid on thickly. No wonder so many of us are traumatised.

An underlying belief system which prizes ‘blood sacrifice’, and our failure to exorcise this particular ghost from our past, is one of the reasons why peace has not yet turned into reconciliation.

Almost 30 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (what is it about Easter and our history?), it determines the way we shape our lives – where we live; who we are educated alongside; and still too often, who we marry and how we bring up our children.

Nothing will change until we do the seemingly impossible and fully disentangle politics and religion, and until we finally allow the dead of 1916 – republican and loyalist alike – to rest in peace.

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