At noon on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, a column of armed men marched up Dublin's Sackville Street, wheeled into the General Post Office, and turned out the customers. Minutes later Patrick Pearse, a poet and schoolmaster, stood between the pillars and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a thin, bemused crowd of holiday shoppers: "Irish men and Irish women: In the name of God and of the dead generations..." Seven men had signed it; within a fortnight all seven would be dead. Above the GPO rose two flags — a green banner reading Irish Republic, and the tricolour. The rebels numbered perhaps 1,200 that first day: Irish Volunteers, the socialist James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army, and the women of Cumann na mBan, seizing strongpoints around the city — the Four Courts, Jacob's biscuit factory, Boland's Mill under Éamon de Valera, the South Dublin Union, and St Stephen's Green, where trenches were dug in a public park overlooked on all sides by tall buildings, a textbook error corrected by a retreat to the College of Surgeons.
The rising was already a salvage operation. The plan had depended on a German arms shipment — 20,000 rifles aboard the Aud — which the Royal Navy intercepted; her captain scuttled her off Queenstown on 22 April. Roger Casement, landed from a German U-boat at Banna Strand in Kerry to warn the rising was under-supplied, was arrested within hours. Eoin MacNeill, nominal head of the Volunteers, discovered he had been deceived by the secret military council and placed a countermanding order in the Sunday newspapers cancelling all manoeuvres — which is why the rising began a day late, with a fraction of the intended force, and barely spread beyond Dublin.
Six days
Britain poured in reinforcements until some 16,000 troops faced the insurgents, and brought up artillery. The gunboat Helga steamed up the Liffey and shelled Liberty Hall; field guns set lower Sackville Street ablaze until the GPO's roof collapsed in flames. The rebels' single most effective action came at Mount Street Bridge, where a handful of Volunteers inflicted over 200 casualties on the raw Sherwood Foresters advancing in ranks from the boat at Kingstown. By Saturday 29 April, with the GPO evacuated and civilians dying in the crossfire, Pearse surrendered unconditionally to Brigadier-General Lowe — the message carried through the firing by nurse Elizabeth O'Farrell, whose presence at the surrender was famously reduced in one photograph to a pair of boots beside Pearse. The week had killed around 485 people, more than half of them civilians, including some forty children; the city centre lay in ruins. Dubliners were largely furious — at the rebels. Prisoners were jeered, spat at and pelted as they were marched to the docks, not least by women whose husbands' army pay fed their families.
The executions that reversed everything
Then General Sir John Maxwell set about manufacturing martyrs. Between 3 and 12 May, after secret courts martial, fourteen men were shot at Kilmainham Gaol, the executions dribbled out day after day: Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and the old Fenian Tom Clarke first; Joseph Plunkett, married to Grace Gifford in the prison chapel hours before facing the squad; Willie Pearse, shot in large part for being his brother's brother; and finally James Connolly, his ankle shattered by a bullet and gangrenous, carried on a stretcher and shot tied to a chair. Casement, the sixteenth, was hanged at Pentonville in August after a treason trial. De Valera's death sentence was commuted — his American birth complicated matters, and by then the government had grasped the damage; Constance Markievicz was spared on account of her sex, and in 1918 became the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament, though as an abstentionist she never took her seat. Public opinion swung with astonishing speed. Yeats caught it within months: "All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born." The press had branded it the "Sinn Féin rebellion", though that small party had not organised it; the label became a self-fulfilling prophecy when reorganised under de Valera, Sinn Féin swept the 1918 election, refused Westminster, and convened the First Dáil in January 1919 — the opening act of the War of Independence, the 1921 Treaty and the Irish Free State. The rising failed in six days; the response to it succeeded forever. Pearse had written that sacrifice might redeem a nation. Maxwell, methodically, proved him right.
Quiz nuggets
- The rising began at noon on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, with headquarters in Dublin's General Post Office.
- The Proclamation of the Irish Republic bore seven signatures; all seven signatories were executed.
- The gunboat Helga shelled Dublin from the Liffey; about 485 people died, more than half civilians.
- Fourteen men were shot at Kilmainham Gaol between 3 and 12 May 1916 — Connolly tied to a chair; Casement was hanged in August.
- Constance Markievicz, spared execution, became the first woman elected to Westminster in 1918 but never took her seat.