Courtney McGrailThe bare bones of the 1916 story can be simply told. Unionist opposition to the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 led to the signing of the Ulster Covenant by almost half a million unionists and the January 1913 formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), willing, if necessary, to take up arms against the Crown to remain part of a United Kingdom governed wholly from London.
The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was formed that September to protect striking workers in Dublin’s ‘Lockout’. In November 1913, the publication of Eoin MacNeill’s ‘The North Began’ in the Gaelic League’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis led Bulmer Hobson of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to persuade MacNeill to chair a committee to coordinate the formation of another militia to balance the unionist army.
The Irish Volunteer Force (IVF) was established on November 25 where the Garden of Remembrance currently stands. Supposedly intended to counterbalance the UVF and pressurise London into implementing home rule, its command structure was infiltrated from the start by hardline republicans with rather different aims. March 1914’s ‘Curragh Mutiny’ saw British officers threatening to resign rather than act against the unionist militia, and as the Home Rule bill was passed in May 1914, Ireland stood in danger of civil war.
Great War
The outbreak of the Great War appeared to solve that problem. Home rule’s introduction was postponed until the guns would fall silent in Europe, and with the unionist militia and all bar 10,000 nationalist Volunteers joining the British army, the IRB believed the time was ripe to rise against Britain.
Plans were made over the following months and in August 1915 the barrister-turned-teacher Patrick Pearse, an erstwhile home ruler who had been sworn into the IRB after gradually losing faith in the likelihood of home rule being implemented, pointed to a coming rebellion in a stirring funeral oration for the IRB’s Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.
ICA head James Connolly joined the IRB military council in January 1916, and although plans for German assistance ultimately came to nothing, the IRB leaders presented MacNeill with a forged letter claiming that the British were to arrest him and other Volunteer leaders.
He agreed to a rebellion on Easter Sunday, but on hearing of the failure to land German arms and the capture of Sir Roger Casement, who had been liaising with the Germans on behalf of the IRB, issued an order on Saturday evening to countermand the following day’s manoeuvres.
Fresh orders
The IRB council rescheduled the Rising for the next day, April 24, and issued fresh orders. Roughly 1,200 Volunteers and ICA members assembled on Monday and took over a series of strategic points in Dublin, with Pearse declaring a Republic from the rebel headquarters at the General Post Office.
Martial law was proclaimed on Tuesday, as British reinforcements began to arrive, and on Wednesday the HMS Helga and 18-pound guns at Tara Street began shelling Liberty Hall. Direct shelling of the GPO began on Friday and by evening the rebels withdrew to a new headquarters on Moore Street.
On Saturday, after saying a final Rosary, they surrendered in order to prevent further “slaughter” of Dublin’s citizens, 184 of whom had already been killed in the fighting. Other rebel positions surrendered on Sunday April 30, and the rebels were imprisoned, mostly in Richmond Barracks.
Over the next two weeks, 14 prominent rebels were executed at Kilmainham Jail, with Tom Kent being shot in Cork on May 9. Roger Casement was hanged for treason on August 3.