The Easter Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na Cásca) was a militarily unsuccessful rebellion staged in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday in April 1916. Nevertheless, despite its military failure, it can be judged as being a significant stepping-stone in the eventual creation of the Irish Republic.
The rebellion was the most significant since the rising of 1798 (lead by the father of Irish Republicanism, Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen). It was an attempt by militant republicans to violently force independence from the United Kingdom. The Irish Republican revolutionary attempt occurred from April 24 to April 30, 1916, in which a part of the Irish Volunteers led by school teacher and barrister Pádraig Pearse and the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly seized key locations in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic independent of Britain. The Rising was suppressed and its leaders executed.
The event is seen as a key turning point on the road to Irish independence, as it marked a split between physical-force republicanism and mainstream non-violent nationalism represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond. Redmond, through democratic parliamentary politics had won an initial stage of Irish self-government within the United Kingdom, granted through the Third Home Rule Act 1914. This Act, limited by the fact that it partitioned Ireland into Northern Ireland and "Southern Ireland", was placed on the statute books in September 1914, but suspended for the duration of World War I. It ultimately became enacted under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920.
However, by then Irish nationalism was dominated by militant Republican politics that had been espoused by the Easter 1916 rebels. Surviving officers of the uprising (including Eamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Michael Collins) went on to organise the Irish War of Independence from 1919-1921 which resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and independence for 26 of Ireland's 32 counties. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising are venerated in the Irish Republican tradition as martyrs and as founders of the Irish Republic.
Planning the Rising
While the Easter Rising was for the most part carried out by the Irish Volunteers, it was planned by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Shortly after the outbreak of World War I on August 4, 1914, the Supreme Council of the IRB met and, under the old dictum that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity", decided to take action sometime before the conclusion of the war. To this end, the IRB's treasurer, Tom Clarke formed a Military Committee to plan the rising, initially consisting of Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett, with himself and Sean MacDermott added shortly thereafter. All of these were members of both the IRB, and (with the exception of Clarke) the Irish Volunteers. Since its inception in 1913, they had surreptitiously hijacked the Volunteers, and had fellow IRB members elevated to officer rank whenever possible, hence by 1916 a large portion of Volunteer leadership were devoted republicans in favor of physical force. A notable exception was the founder and Chief-of-Staff Eoin MacNeill, who was determined to use the Volunteers as a bargaining tool with Britain following World War I, and who was certainly opposed to any rebellion that stood little chance of success. Nevertheless, the IRB hoped to either win him over to their side (through deceit if necessary) or bypass his command altogether. They had little success with either plan.
The plan encountered its first major hurdle when James Connolly, head of the Irish Citizen Army, a group of armed socialist labor union men, completely unaware of the IRB's plans, threatened to initiate a rebellion on their own if other parties refused to act. As the ICA was barely 200 strong, any action they might take would result in a fiasco, and spoil the chance of a potentially successful rising by the Volunteers. Thus the IRB leaders met with Connolly and convinced him to join forces with them. They agreed to act together the following Easter.
In an effort to thwart informers, and, indeed, the Volunteers' own leader, early in April Pearse issued orders for 3 days of "parades and manoeuvres" by the Volunteers for Easter Sunday (which he had the authority to do, as Director of Organization). The idea was that the true republicans with the organization (particularly IRB members) would know exactly what this meant, while men such as MacNeill and the British authorities in Dublin Castle would take it at face value. Of course this was too much to hope for, and MacNeill soon got wind of what was afoot and threatened to "do everything possible short of phoning Dublin Castle" to prevent the rising. Although he was briefly convinced to go along with some sort of action when MacDermott revealed to him that a shipment of German arms was about to land in County Kerry, planned by the IRB in conjunction with Sir Roger Casement (who ironically had just landed in Ireland in an effort to stop the rising), the following day MacNeill reverted to his original position when he found out the shipment was scuttled. With the aid of his cohorts of like mind, notably Bulmer Hobson and The O'Rahilly, he issued a countermand to all Volunteers, canceling all actions for Sunday. This only succeeded in putting the rising off for a day, although it greatly reduced the number of men who turned out.
[edit]
The Rising
The plan, largely devised by Plunkett (and apparently very similar to a plan worked out independently by Connolly), was to seize strategic buildings throughout Dublin in order to cordon off the city, and resist the inevitable attack by the British army. If successful, the plan would have left the rebels holding a compact area of central Dublin, roughly bounded by the canals and the circular roads. However, this would have required more men than the 1250 or so who were actually mobilized. As a result, the rebels left several key points within the city, notably Dublin Castle and Trinity College, in British hands, meaning that their own forces were separated from each other. This in effect doomed the rebel positions to be isolated and taken one after the other.
The Volunteer's Dublin division had been organized into 4 battalions, each under a commandant who the IRB made sure were loyal to them. A makeshift 5th battalion was put together from parts of the others, and with the aid of the ICA. This was the battalion of the headquarters at the General Post Office, and included the President and Commander-in-Chief, Pearse, the commander of the Dublin division, Connolly, as well as Clarke, MacDermott, Plunkett, and a young captain named Michael Collins. Meanwhile the 1st battalion under Commandant Ned Daly seized the Four Courts and areas to the northwest, the 2nd battalion under Thomas MacDonagh established itself at Jacob's Biscuit Factory, south of city center, in the east Commandant Eamon de Valera commanded the 3rd battalion at Boland's Bakery, and Ceannt's 4th battalion took the workhouse known as the South Dublin Union to the southwest. Members of the ICA also commandeered St. Stephen's Green and Dublin's City Hall. The breakdown of law and order that accompanied the rebellion was marked by widespread looting, as Dublin's slum population ransacked the city's shops. Ideological tensions came to the fore when a Volunteer officer gave an order to shoot looters, only to be angrily countermanded by James Connolly.
As MacNeill's countermand basically prevented all areas outside of Dublin from rising, the command of all active rebels fell under Connolly, who some say had the best tactical mind of the group. After being badly wounded, Connolly was still able to command by having himself moved around on a bed. (Although he had the dubious achievement of insisting that a capitalist government would never use artillery against their own property. It took the British less than 48 hours to prove him wrong.) The British commander, General Lowe, worked slowly, unsure of how many he was up against, and with only 1200 troops in the city. Lowe declared martial law and the British forces put their efforts into securing the approaches to Dublin Castle and isolating the headquarters at the GPO. Their main firepower was provided by the gunboat Helga and field artillery summoned from their garrison at Athlone, positioned on the northside of the city at Prussia street, Phibsborough and Cabra road. These guns shelled large parts of the city throughout the week and burned much of it down. (The first building shelled was Liberty Hall, which ironically had been abandoned since the beginning of the Rising.) Interestingly the Helga's guns had to stop firing as the elevation necessary to fire over the railway bridge meant that her shells were endangering the Vice-regal Lodge in Phoenix Park, (Helga was later Given to the Government of the Irish Free State and was the first ship in its Navy)
Reinforcements were rushed to Dublin from England, along with a new commander, General Maxwell. Outnumbering the rebels with approximately 16,000 British troops and 1000 RIC (the Volunteers are estimated at about 1000 and the ICA at under 250), they bypassed many of the defences, and isolated others to the extent that by the end of the week the only order they were able to receive was the order to surrender. The headquarters itself saw little real action. The heaviest fighting occurred at the rebel held positions around the Grand Canal, which the British seemed to think they had to take to bring up troops who had landed in Dún Laoghaire port. The rebels held only a few of the bridges across the canal and the British might have availed themselves of any of the others and isolated the positions. In particular, the Sherwood Foresters regiment were repeatedly caught in a cross-fire trying to cross the canal at Mount Street. Here a mere twelve volunteers were able to severely disrupt the British advance, killing or wounding 240 men. The rebel position at the South Dublin Union, further west along the canal, also inflicted heavy losses on British troops trying to advance towards Dublin Castle. Cathal Brugha, a rebel officer distinguished himself in this action and was badly wounded. Shell fire and shortage of ammunition eventually forced the rebels to abandon these positions before the end of the week. The rebel position at St Stephen's Green, held by the Citizen Army under Michael Mallin, was made untenable after the British placed snipers and machine guns in the surrounding buildings. As a result, Mallin's men retreated to the Royal College of Surgeons building, where they held out until they received orders to surrender.
The volunteers' headquarters' most noteworthy moment was when Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic to a largely indifferent crowd outside the GPO. After that the rebels barricaded themselves within the post office and were soon shelled from afar, unable to return effective fire, until they were forced to abandon their headquarters when their position became untenable. On Saturday, April 29, from the new headquarters on Moore Street, after realizing that all that could be achieved was further death, Pearse issued an order for all companies to surrender.
The rebels had little public support at the time, and were largely blamed for hundreds of people being killed and wounded, (mostly civilians caught in the crossfire). The total casualties for the weeks fighting came to over 1200. Sixty four rebel volunteers were killed and 16 more were executed after the Rising. The British Army suffered 140 killed and 318 wounded. The police (RIC and DMP, suffered 17 deaths. At least 220 civilians were killed and 600 wounded. There may have been further civilian casualties which were never reported to the authorities. The only leader of the rising to die in the course of the hostilities themselves was The O'Rahilly.
Some 3430 suspects were arrested and 15 leaders (including all seven signatories of the independence proclamation) were executed (May 3–12). Among them was the already mortally wounded Connolly, shot while tied to a chair because he was unable to stand. At the time the executions were demanded in motions passed in Irish local authorities and by many newspapers, including the Irish Independent in an editorial. A total of 1480 people were interned after the Rising. Prisoners being transported to internment camps in Wales were jeered and spat upon by angry Dubliners.
[edit]
The Rising outside Dublin
Irish Volunteer units turned out for the Rising in several places outside of Dublin, but due to Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order, most of them returned home without fighting. Several companies were mobilised in Tyrone and 132 men on the Falls Road in Belfast. Liam Mellows led an abortive attack on Police station in Galway which was soon abandoned. Sean MacEntee and Louth Volunteers killed a policeman and a prison guard. In county Wexford, the Volunteers took over Enniscorthy from Tuesday until Friday, before symbolically surrendering to the British Army at Vinegar Hill - site of a famous battle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Around 1000 Volunteers mustered in Cork on Easter Sunday, but they dispersed after receiving contradictory orders from Dublin. Only at Ashbourne in Meath was there real fighting, when Volunteers ambushed a police patrol, killing 8 and wounding 15.
[edit]
Infiltrating Sinn Féin
The executions marked the beginning in a change in Irish opinion, much of which had until now seen the rebels as irresponsible adventurists whose actions were likely to harm the nationalist cause. As freed detainees reorganised the Republican forces, nationalist sentiment slowly began to swing behind the hitherto small monarchist Sinn Féin party, ironically not itself involved in the uprising, but which the British government and Irish media wrongly blamed for being behind the Rising. The surviving Rising leaders, under Eamon de Valera, infiltrated Sinn Féin and deposed its previous monarchist leadership under Arthur Griffith, who had founded the party in 1905 to campaign for an Anglo-Irish dual monarchy. Sinn Féin and the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond fought a series of inconclusive battles, with each winning by-elections, until the Conscription Crisis of 1918 (when Britain tried to force conscription on Ireland) swung public opinion behind Sinn Féin.
"What if the British had been lenient to the Irish rebel leaders?" is a question that still lends itself to lively debate 1.
[edit]
1918 General Election
The general elections to the British Parliament in December 1918 resulted in a Sinn Féin landslide in Ireland (many seats were uncontested), most of whose MPs gathered in Dublin to proclaim the Irish Republic (January 21, 1919) under the President of Dáil Éireann, Eamon de Valera, who had escaped execution in 1916 through luck. (His physical location away from the other prisoners prevented his immediate execution, while his American citizenship led to a delay while the legal situation was clarified. By the time a decision was taken to execute him, and his name had risen to the top of the executions list, all executions had been halted.)
[edit]
Legacy of the Rising
Critics of the Rising have pointed to the fact that the Rising is generally seen as having been doomed to military defeat from the outset, and to have been understood as such by at least some of its leaders. Such critics have therefore seen in it elements of a "blood sacrifice" in line with some of the romantically-inclined Pearse's writings. Though the violent precursor to Irish statehood, it did nothing to reassure Irish unionists nor alleviate the demand to partition Ulster.
Nationalist views of the Rising have stressed the role of the Rising in stimulating latent sentiment towards Irish independence. On this view the momentous events of 1918-22 are directly attributable to the revitalisation of the nationalist consciousness as a result of the Rising and its immediate aftermath.
The theory has also been mooted that the Rising would have given the Irish Republic a role in a peace conference following an anticipated German victory in the First World War.
Historians generally date Irish independence (for the 26 counties) from 1 April 1922 (transfer of executive power under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed between Irish delegates and the British government after the Anglo-Irish War, forming the Irish Free State) and 6 December 1922 (transfer of legislative power) rather than from the 1916 Rising. The Irish Free State existed until 1937 when Bunreacht na hÉireann (the Irish constitution) was introduced, renaming the country "Ireland". At this stage Ireland was a Republic in everything but name. In 1949 the Oireachtas declared Ireland to be a Republic.
[edit]
Socialism and the Easter Rising
The Easter Rising has sometimes been described as the first socialist revolution in Europe. Whether or not such a statement is true is debatable. Of the leaders, only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Although the others nominally accepted the notion of a socialist state in order to convince Connolly to join them, their dedication to this concept is highly questionable at best. Political and cultural revolutions were much more important in their minds than economic revolution. Certainly men like Pearse were resigned to the notion that the rising would be a military failure, and thus any promises pertaining to its aftermath were inconsequential. Connolly clearly was skeptical of his colleagues' sincerity on the subject, and was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic. Furthermore, Eamonn De Valera , the most prominent surviving leader of the rising and a dominant figure in Irish politics for nearly half a century, could hardly be described as Socialist. Many years later, the Soviet Union would be the first and only country to recognise the Irish Republic, later abolished under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly, rounded on communists who had derided the Easter Rising for involving bourgeois elements. He contended that communists would have to unite with other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order, a point he went on to prove the following year during the Russian Revolution.
[edit]
Men executed for their role in the Easter Rising
Patrick Pearse
Thomas J. Clarke
Thomas MacDonagh
Joseph Mary Plunkett
Edward (Ned) Daly
William Pearse
Michael O'Hanrahan
John MacBride
Eamonn Ceannt
Michael Mallin
Cornelius Colbert
Sean Heuston
Sean MacDermott
James Connolly
Thomas Kent
Roger Casement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Uprising
The rebellion was the most significant since the rising of 1798 (lead by the father of Irish Republicanism, Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen). It was an attempt by militant republicans to violently force independence from the United Kingdom. The Irish Republican revolutionary attempt occurred from April 24 to April 30, 1916, in which a part of the Irish Volunteers led by school teacher and barrister Pádraig Pearse and the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly seized key locations in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic independent of Britain. The Rising was suppressed and its leaders executed.
The event is seen as a key turning point on the road to Irish independence, as it marked a split between physical-force republicanism and mainstream non-violent nationalism represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond. Redmond, through democratic parliamentary politics had won an initial stage of Irish self-government within the United Kingdom, granted through the Third Home Rule Act 1914. This Act, limited by the fact that it partitioned Ireland into Northern Ireland and "Southern Ireland", was placed on the statute books in September 1914, but suspended for the duration of World War I. It ultimately became enacted under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920.
However, by then Irish nationalism was dominated by militant Republican politics that had been espoused by the Easter 1916 rebels. Surviving officers of the uprising (including Eamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Michael Collins) went on to organise the Irish War of Independence from 1919-1921 which resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and independence for 26 of Ireland's 32 counties. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising are venerated in the Irish Republican tradition as martyrs and as founders of the Irish Republic.
Planning the Rising
While the Easter Rising was for the most part carried out by the Irish Volunteers, it was planned by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Shortly after the outbreak of World War I on August 4, 1914, the Supreme Council of the IRB met and, under the old dictum that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity", decided to take action sometime before the conclusion of the war. To this end, the IRB's treasurer, Tom Clarke formed a Military Committee to plan the rising, initially consisting of Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett, with himself and Sean MacDermott added shortly thereafter. All of these were members of both the IRB, and (with the exception of Clarke) the Irish Volunteers. Since its inception in 1913, they had surreptitiously hijacked the Volunteers, and had fellow IRB members elevated to officer rank whenever possible, hence by 1916 a large portion of Volunteer leadership were devoted republicans in favor of physical force. A notable exception was the founder and Chief-of-Staff Eoin MacNeill, who was determined to use the Volunteers as a bargaining tool with Britain following World War I, and who was certainly opposed to any rebellion that stood little chance of success. Nevertheless, the IRB hoped to either win him over to their side (through deceit if necessary) or bypass his command altogether. They had little success with either plan.
The plan encountered its first major hurdle when James Connolly, head of the Irish Citizen Army, a group of armed socialist labor union men, completely unaware of the IRB's plans, threatened to initiate a rebellion on their own if other parties refused to act. As the ICA was barely 200 strong, any action they might take would result in a fiasco, and spoil the chance of a potentially successful rising by the Volunteers. Thus the IRB leaders met with Connolly and convinced him to join forces with them. They agreed to act together the following Easter.
In an effort to thwart informers, and, indeed, the Volunteers' own leader, early in April Pearse issued orders for 3 days of "parades and manoeuvres" by the Volunteers for Easter Sunday (which he had the authority to do, as Director of Organization). The idea was that the true republicans with the organization (particularly IRB members) would know exactly what this meant, while men such as MacNeill and the British authorities in Dublin Castle would take it at face value. Of course this was too much to hope for, and MacNeill soon got wind of what was afoot and threatened to "do everything possible short of phoning Dublin Castle" to prevent the rising. Although he was briefly convinced to go along with some sort of action when MacDermott revealed to him that a shipment of German arms was about to land in County Kerry, planned by the IRB in conjunction with Sir Roger Casement (who ironically had just landed in Ireland in an effort to stop the rising), the following day MacNeill reverted to his original position when he found out the shipment was scuttled. With the aid of his cohorts of like mind, notably Bulmer Hobson and The O'Rahilly, he issued a countermand to all Volunteers, canceling all actions for Sunday. This only succeeded in putting the rising off for a day, although it greatly reduced the number of men who turned out.
[edit]
The Rising
The plan, largely devised by Plunkett (and apparently very similar to a plan worked out independently by Connolly), was to seize strategic buildings throughout Dublin in order to cordon off the city, and resist the inevitable attack by the British army. If successful, the plan would have left the rebels holding a compact area of central Dublin, roughly bounded by the canals and the circular roads. However, this would have required more men than the 1250 or so who were actually mobilized. As a result, the rebels left several key points within the city, notably Dublin Castle and Trinity College, in British hands, meaning that their own forces were separated from each other. This in effect doomed the rebel positions to be isolated and taken one after the other.
The Volunteer's Dublin division had been organized into 4 battalions, each under a commandant who the IRB made sure were loyal to them. A makeshift 5th battalion was put together from parts of the others, and with the aid of the ICA. This was the battalion of the headquarters at the General Post Office, and included the President and Commander-in-Chief, Pearse, the commander of the Dublin division, Connolly, as well as Clarke, MacDermott, Plunkett, and a young captain named Michael Collins. Meanwhile the 1st battalion under Commandant Ned Daly seized the Four Courts and areas to the northwest, the 2nd battalion under Thomas MacDonagh established itself at Jacob's Biscuit Factory, south of city center, in the east Commandant Eamon de Valera commanded the 3rd battalion at Boland's Bakery, and Ceannt's 4th battalion took the workhouse known as the South Dublin Union to the southwest. Members of the ICA also commandeered St. Stephen's Green and Dublin's City Hall. The breakdown of law and order that accompanied the rebellion was marked by widespread looting, as Dublin's slum population ransacked the city's shops. Ideological tensions came to the fore when a Volunteer officer gave an order to shoot looters, only to be angrily countermanded by James Connolly.
As MacNeill's countermand basically prevented all areas outside of Dublin from rising, the command of all active rebels fell under Connolly, who some say had the best tactical mind of the group. After being badly wounded, Connolly was still able to command by having himself moved around on a bed. (Although he had the dubious achievement of insisting that a capitalist government would never use artillery against their own property. It took the British less than 48 hours to prove him wrong.) The British commander, General Lowe, worked slowly, unsure of how many he was up against, and with only 1200 troops in the city. Lowe declared martial law and the British forces put their efforts into securing the approaches to Dublin Castle and isolating the headquarters at the GPO. Their main firepower was provided by the gunboat Helga and field artillery summoned from their garrison at Athlone, positioned on the northside of the city at Prussia street, Phibsborough and Cabra road. These guns shelled large parts of the city throughout the week and burned much of it down. (The first building shelled was Liberty Hall, which ironically had been abandoned since the beginning of the Rising.) Interestingly the Helga's guns had to stop firing as the elevation necessary to fire over the railway bridge meant that her shells were endangering the Vice-regal Lodge in Phoenix Park, (Helga was later Given to the Government of the Irish Free State and was the first ship in its Navy)
Reinforcements were rushed to Dublin from England, along with a new commander, General Maxwell. Outnumbering the rebels with approximately 16,000 British troops and 1000 RIC (the Volunteers are estimated at about 1000 and the ICA at under 250), they bypassed many of the defences, and isolated others to the extent that by the end of the week the only order they were able to receive was the order to surrender. The headquarters itself saw little real action. The heaviest fighting occurred at the rebel held positions around the Grand Canal, which the British seemed to think they had to take to bring up troops who had landed in Dún Laoghaire port. The rebels held only a few of the bridges across the canal and the British might have availed themselves of any of the others and isolated the positions. In particular, the Sherwood Foresters regiment were repeatedly caught in a cross-fire trying to cross the canal at Mount Street. Here a mere twelve volunteers were able to severely disrupt the British advance, killing or wounding 240 men. The rebel position at the South Dublin Union, further west along the canal, also inflicted heavy losses on British troops trying to advance towards Dublin Castle. Cathal Brugha, a rebel officer distinguished himself in this action and was badly wounded. Shell fire and shortage of ammunition eventually forced the rebels to abandon these positions before the end of the week. The rebel position at St Stephen's Green, held by the Citizen Army under Michael Mallin, was made untenable after the British placed snipers and machine guns in the surrounding buildings. As a result, Mallin's men retreated to the Royal College of Surgeons building, where they held out until they received orders to surrender.
The volunteers' headquarters' most noteworthy moment was when Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic to a largely indifferent crowd outside the GPO. After that the rebels barricaded themselves within the post office and were soon shelled from afar, unable to return effective fire, until they were forced to abandon their headquarters when their position became untenable. On Saturday, April 29, from the new headquarters on Moore Street, after realizing that all that could be achieved was further death, Pearse issued an order for all companies to surrender.
The rebels had little public support at the time, and were largely blamed for hundreds of people being killed and wounded, (mostly civilians caught in the crossfire). The total casualties for the weeks fighting came to over 1200. Sixty four rebel volunteers were killed and 16 more were executed after the Rising. The British Army suffered 140 killed and 318 wounded. The police (RIC and DMP, suffered 17 deaths. At least 220 civilians were killed and 600 wounded. There may have been further civilian casualties which were never reported to the authorities. The only leader of the rising to die in the course of the hostilities themselves was The O'Rahilly.
Some 3430 suspects were arrested and 15 leaders (including all seven signatories of the independence proclamation) were executed (May 3–12). Among them was the already mortally wounded Connolly, shot while tied to a chair because he was unable to stand. At the time the executions were demanded in motions passed in Irish local authorities and by many newspapers, including the Irish Independent in an editorial. A total of 1480 people were interned after the Rising. Prisoners being transported to internment camps in Wales were jeered and spat upon by angry Dubliners.
[edit]
The Rising outside Dublin
Irish Volunteer units turned out for the Rising in several places outside of Dublin, but due to Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order, most of them returned home without fighting. Several companies were mobilised in Tyrone and 132 men on the Falls Road in Belfast. Liam Mellows led an abortive attack on Police station in Galway which was soon abandoned. Sean MacEntee and Louth Volunteers killed a policeman and a prison guard. In county Wexford, the Volunteers took over Enniscorthy from Tuesday until Friday, before symbolically surrendering to the British Army at Vinegar Hill - site of a famous battle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Around 1000 Volunteers mustered in Cork on Easter Sunday, but they dispersed after receiving contradictory orders from Dublin. Only at Ashbourne in Meath was there real fighting, when Volunteers ambushed a police patrol, killing 8 and wounding 15.
[edit]
Infiltrating Sinn Féin
The executions marked the beginning in a change in Irish opinion, much of which had until now seen the rebels as irresponsible adventurists whose actions were likely to harm the nationalist cause. As freed detainees reorganised the Republican forces, nationalist sentiment slowly began to swing behind the hitherto small monarchist Sinn Féin party, ironically not itself involved in the uprising, but which the British government and Irish media wrongly blamed for being behind the Rising. The surviving Rising leaders, under Eamon de Valera, infiltrated Sinn Féin and deposed its previous monarchist leadership under Arthur Griffith, who had founded the party in 1905 to campaign for an Anglo-Irish dual monarchy. Sinn Féin and the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond fought a series of inconclusive battles, with each winning by-elections, until the Conscription Crisis of 1918 (when Britain tried to force conscription on Ireland) swung public opinion behind Sinn Féin.
"What if the British had been lenient to the Irish rebel leaders?" is a question that still lends itself to lively debate 1.
[edit]
1918 General Election
The general elections to the British Parliament in December 1918 resulted in a Sinn Féin landslide in Ireland (many seats were uncontested), most of whose MPs gathered in Dublin to proclaim the Irish Republic (January 21, 1919) under the President of Dáil Éireann, Eamon de Valera, who had escaped execution in 1916 through luck. (His physical location away from the other prisoners prevented his immediate execution, while his American citizenship led to a delay while the legal situation was clarified. By the time a decision was taken to execute him, and his name had risen to the top of the executions list, all executions had been halted.)
[edit]
Legacy of the Rising
Critics of the Rising have pointed to the fact that the Rising is generally seen as having been doomed to military defeat from the outset, and to have been understood as such by at least some of its leaders. Such critics have therefore seen in it elements of a "blood sacrifice" in line with some of the romantically-inclined Pearse's writings. Though the violent precursor to Irish statehood, it did nothing to reassure Irish unionists nor alleviate the demand to partition Ulster.
Nationalist views of the Rising have stressed the role of the Rising in stimulating latent sentiment towards Irish independence. On this view the momentous events of 1918-22 are directly attributable to the revitalisation of the nationalist consciousness as a result of the Rising and its immediate aftermath.
The theory has also been mooted that the Rising would have given the Irish Republic a role in a peace conference following an anticipated German victory in the First World War.
Historians generally date Irish independence (for the 26 counties) from 1 April 1922 (transfer of executive power under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed between Irish delegates and the British government after the Anglo-Irish War, forming the Irish Free State) and 6 December 1922 (transfer of legislative power) rather than from the 1916 Rising. The Irish Free State existed until 1937 when Bunreacht na hÉireann (the Irish constitution) was introduced, renaming the country "Ireland". At this stage Ireland was a Republic in everything but name. In 1949 the Oireachtas declared Ireland to be a Republic.
[edit]
Socialism and the Easter Rising
The Easter Rising has sometimes been described as the first socialist revolution in Europe. Whether or not such a statement is true is debatable. Of the leaders, only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Although the others nominally accepted the notion of a socialist state in order to convince Connolly to join them, their dedication to this concept is highly questionable at best. Political and cultural revolutions were much more important in their minds than economic revolution. Certainly men like Pearse were resigned to the notion that the rising would be a military failure, and thus any promises pertaining to its aftermath were inconsequential. Connolly clearly was skeptical of his colleagues' sincerity on the subject, and was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic. Furthermore, Eamonn De Valera , the most prominent surviving leader of the rising and a dominant figure in Irish politics for nearly half a century, could hardly be described as Socialist. Many years later, the Soviet Union would be the first and only country to recognise the Irish Republic, later abolished under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly, rounded on communists who had derided the Easter Rising for involving bourgeois elements. He contended that communists would have to unite with other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order, a point he went on to prove the following year during the Russian Revolution.
[edit]
Men executed for their role in the Easter Rising
Patrick Pearse
Thomas J. Clarke
Thomas MacDonagh
Joseph Mary Plunkett
Edward (Ned) Daly
William Pearse
Michael O'Hanrahan
John MacBride
Eamonn Ceannt
Michael Mallin
Cornelius Colbert
Sean Heuston
Sean MacDermott
James Connolly
Thomas Kent
Roger Casement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Uprising
