The Easter Rising

By 1916 Home Rule was on the statute book but suspended, and many feared it would never come, or would come without Ulster. Inside the Irish Volunteers, a secret group, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, planned a rising while Britain was at war, hoping for German help. Its military council, including the teacher and poet Patrick Pearse, the trade union leader James Connolly with his Irish Citizen Army, and the veteran Fenian Tom Clarke, kept the plan hidden even from the Volunteers’ own chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill.^•

The week

The plan went wrong before it began. A German arms shipment was intercepted, and Roger Casement was arrested after landing in Kerry. MacNeill published a countermanding order cancelling the “manoeuvres” planned for Easter Sunday. The military council went ahead a day later, on Easter Monday, 24 April, with far fewer men than hoped, perhaps 1,200 to 1,600 in Dublin and only scattered action elsewhere.^•

The rebels seized the General Post Office on Sackville (now O’Connell) Street and other buildings around the city, and Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the GPO. It promised a republic that would guarantee “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens” and “cherish all the children of the nation equally”, and it was addressed to “Irishmen and Irishwomen”, unusually for the time. Women, such as Constance Markievicz and the members of Cumann na mBan, took part in the fighting.^•

British reinforcements poured in, artillery and a gunboat shelled the city centre, and much of Sackville Street burned. On Saturday 29 April Pearse surrendered to prevent further civilian deaths. The Glasnevin Trust’s count records 485 people killed, more than half of them civilians, many caught in crossfire; British forces and police and the rebels made up the rest.^•

The executions

At first many Dubliners were hostile to the rebels, who had brought destruction to their city while many of their sons were at the front. Then, between 3 and 12 May, after secret courts-martial, the British military executed fifteen men, fourteen of them in Kilmainham Gaol, including the wounded Connolly, who was shot tied to a chair. Casement was hanged in London in August. More than 3,000 people were arrested and about 1,800 interned in Britain, many in Frongoch camp in Wales, which became a “university of revolution”.^•

The executions turned the leaders into martyrs and swung opinion towards the separatists. W. B. Yeats captured the shift in his poem “Easter, 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” In the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin, now the political home of the 1916 survivors, won 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats and swept away the old Home Rule party.^•

Remembering 1916

The Rising became the state’s foundation myth, and its fiftieth anniversary in 1966 was celebrated on a grand scale. During the Troubles, when the Provisional IRA claimed the same legacy, the Irish state grew uneasy with commemorating it, and historians argued over its legitimacy. The centenary in 2016 was broader and more reflective, remembering civilians and British soldiers alongside the rebels.^•

Why it matters today