Irish History

1916 Easter Rebellion

Labor Organized

During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, the workers of Ireland, including those in Dublin and Belfast, were organized by James Connolly and James Larkin. In Dublin, in August 1913, Larkin directed a tramworkers' strike, during which a public meeting of strikers was brutally attacked by police and three people killed. A federation of 400 Dublin employers refused employment to members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. British and continental trade unions and groups sent funds and food to relieve the distress of the 24,000 workers unemployed.

At the time, housing conditions in Dublin were the worst in Europe and there were in the city 21,000 families each living in only one room. The strike ended in failure, but a workers' militia known as the Irish Citizen Army was formed under James Connolly's command which was to play an historic role in the struggle for Irish freedom.

Gaelic League,
Gaelic Athletic Association
and Literary Revival

Cultural organizations which were to have an impact in the coming revolutionary struggle were the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884 and the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 to promoted the Irish language which had declined after the Great Famine of 1845-51. In 1841, Ireland had over 8,175,000 people, most of whom spoke Irish as their everyday language. By 1851 the figure should have been 9,000,000, but had dropped to 6,500,000 because between 1846 and 1851 two and one half million people had either perished during the British managed famine or had emigrated. Once the emigration to America and other parts of the English speaking world began, it never stopped -- to this day.

The Gaelic League's championing the Irish language and the literary revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries cannot be underestimated as catalysts of revolutionary struggle. The outpouring of nationalistic literature reached an emotional crescendo with the presentation of W. B. Yeats' play Cathleen Ni Houlihan [a.k.a., "Mother Ireland"].

The Irish Volunteers

In 1912, an Irish Home Rule bill was put forward but was predictably reacted to with outrage by pro-British Loyalists in the north and political pragmatics in the British parliament who saw the issue as little more than a way to gain and secure political power.

In 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force, a quasi-legal army, was founded and heavily armed with no resistance from the British government. When ordered north to break up the illegal and provocative activities of the Ulster Volunteers, the British army refused, its officers threatening mutiny.

Later in the year, the Irish Volunteers were formed by Eoin MacNeill in reaction to events in the north "to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland without distinction of creed, class or politics."

This time the British government did not look on so passively. Yet some arms, inadequate at best, with the help of Irish American supporters and others, were procured and the Irish Volunteers began to organize and train.

Soon WWI was raging on the continent and the ordinary people of Ireland were confused and divided.

Irish Republican Brotherhood and Sinn Féin

As John Redmond was pulling together what was left of the constitutional Irish Party of John Parnell around the issue of Home Rule, which was very much in limbo due to the reaction of unionists in the north and British politicians playing for time and leverage, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the direct descendants of the revolutionary Fenians, were regrouping and arming in secret for armed struggle.

At this time, Republican political activists were also being organized by Arthur Griffiths, who founded the newspaper, The United Irishmen, using the name of Wolfe Tone's organization which had stage an armed insurrection a century earlier. Disenchanted with Redmond's party and totally distrusting British home rule promises, Griffiths, who formed Sinn Féin in 1905, began to push his party into the political vacuum.

"Life Springs from Death"

In 1915, the body of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rosa, an unrepentant Fenian who had emerged unbroken from the nearly insufferable torments of years in British prisons, was returned to Ireland from exile in America for burial. A massive, martyr's funeral was held.

Padraig Pearce. poet, schoolmaster, high ranking member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and a leader in the Irish Volunteers, gave an impassioned eulogy that to this day is seared into Irish minds:

"... Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations... The Defenders of this Realm ... think they have pacified Ireland... the fools, the fools, fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

The speech and the reaction it received was to be a turning point for those seeking to establish the revolutionary fervor necessary to galvanize the spirits of those who were soon to challenge in arms the might of the British army.

The Rising of Easter 1916

It was a leisurely Easter Monday, a bank holiday, and the people in the streets paid little notice as scantily armed units of Volunteers and Citizen Army deployed to take on an empire.

For several months there had been dissension among the ranks of the Volunteers under its founder Eoin MacNeill, who was content to not commit the forces unless the British tried to disarm them or conscript them into the British army for duty on the continent.

The more militant, Republican coalition was lead primarily by Padraig Pearse, of the Irish Volunteers and IRB, and the leader of the Irish labor movement James Connolly, who also lead the Irish Citizen Army.

MacNeill was persuaded at first to go along with nationwide "maneuvers" on Easter Monday, which was in reality to be the call for an armed rising against British rule. But when a German freighter was caught by a British naval patrol and scuttled itself with twenty thousand riffles destined for the Volunteers, and Roger Casement, who had negotiated the deal with the Germans, was captured, MacNeill issued a countermanding directive calling off any action.

Despite the MacNeill counter order, the decision was made to carry on. Only fifteen hundred men mustered at Liberty Hall, Dublin, that morning. Only half were armed. The rest of the country was effectively demobilized.

From Liberty Hall the men that showed up deployed and established predetermined positions throughout the city. One group attacked the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park; another actually entered an unguarded Dublin Castle, but instead of occupying the symbol of British rule, withdrew to a biscuit factory nearby. Other units established strategic positions about the city. Countess Markiewisc took the College of Surgeons on College Green, Edward Daly seized the Four Courts, filled with British army records, and Eamon de Velera commanded five undermanned companies of Volunteers at Boland's Flour Mill which bisected a key routes from the port to the south onto the city.

Pearse and Connolly, with full knowledge that they were engaged in a suicide mission, marched up the main street, Sackville Street to the British and O'Connell Street to the Irish, halted in front of the General Post Office and barricaded themselves in. They sent back to Liberty Hall for a flag which arrived in a brown paper bag, a green flag with the golden harp and the words in Irish "The Irish Republic" and a second flag that had never been seen before: a tricolor of green, white and orange. They flew together over the GPO as Pearse read a proclamation to a bewildered and somewhat indifferent crowd that had gathered outside:

"Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom...

"We declare the right of the people to Ireland to the ownership of Ireland..."

The Irish Republican Army

The Citizens' Army, the Volunteers, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood now united and became the Irish Republican Army with Padraig Pearse as President of the the "Provisional Government."

A detachment of British Lancers confidently charged down Sackville Street to break up the incipient revolt, but were repelled by a fusillade of rebel gunfire.

The insurgents fought with typical Irish determination and gallantry, attacked by British soldiers using heavy artillery and outnumbering them 20 to 1. Cut off from all possible support from units from the countryside, they held out for almost a week until their food and ammunition ran out, the GPO burning down around them. The other rebel outposts fought bravely as British troops encircled them. Dublin itself was in flames and over 3,000 people died. Pearse issued a surrender order to save further civilian suffering and deaths.

The leaders knew their rising was bound to fail, but they were prepared to batter their lives against the possibility of their dreams of a united Irish republic coming true after their personal sacrifice in blood.

The leaders were given quick secret military trials. Beginning Wednesday, May 3, and continuing through Friday, May 13, they were shot dead at a rate of one to four per day in Stonebreakers Yard, Kilmainham Jail. Nearly all of them were scholars with early education by the Christian Brothers, some were musicians, some poets, and hardly a military man among them. Pearse said of himself and Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunket at the start of the rising, "If we do nothing else we shall rid Ireland of three bad poets." They met their ends without regret, each making a last statement of defiance, even joy, as they faced their deaths.

James Connolly, severely wounded at the GPO, was the last of the 16 to be executed. He was carried out to be shot tied to a chair. The British imposed martial law and hundreds of captured rebels were imprisoned in England.

Roger Casement was hanged in England on August 3, long after any danger of insurrection was gone.

By these sixteen brutal executions the British had accomplished what the rebels themselves could not have accomplished; they enraged a lethargic Irish people against their historic oppressors. A great fire of patriotism was set ablaze that would carry the Irish people through the coming years of widespread suffering and open, armed rebellion.