1916:
The Easter Rising
TIM PAT COOGAN
To Charles and Wilma Mooney,
friends to me and to Ireland.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR TODAY
THE 1916 EASTER RISING
AFTERMATH
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ENDNOTES
About the Author
Illustrations
Copyright
List of Illustrations
The Citizen Army at Liberty Hall: The headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union bearing the banner ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland!’ Collection Sean O’Mahoney;
Constance Markievicz was a founder member of the Citizen Army and fought with the rebels at St Stephen’s Green and the Royal College of Surgeons. She continued to take a prominent part in Irish politics until her death in 1927. National Museum of Ireland;
Mary Spring-Rice and Mrs Childers photographed by Erskine Childers on his yacht, the Asgard, holding imported arms which were successfully landed at Howth Harbour. National Museum of Ireland
Volunteers march to Howth to meet the Asgard and offload the rifles. National Museum of Ireland;
Lord Wimbourne inspecting troops at Dublin Castle. He became Lord Lieutenant in 1915 and urged that stronger action be taken against the Volunteers in the period before the Rising. Cashman Collection
A key figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and one of the seven signatories to the declaration of the Irish Republic, Padraig Pearse’s ideal was a free and Gaelic Ireland, shown here in his barrister’s robes. He was executed on 3 May 1916 after the Rising.
This historic document, issued by Thomas MacDonagh, countersigned by Pearse, called all Volunteers to a parade on Easter Sunday. National Museum of Ireland;
The rebels met no resistance at the GPO. Crowds viewed their activities with some amusement until weapons were produced. Collection Tom Graves
Michael Collins was one of the few Volunteers dressed in full uniform during the Rising. Collins introduced the art of guerrilla warfare to Ireland and the world. Collection Tom Graves
The Proclamation which Pearse read outside the GPO after the rebels had seized control. Collection Tom Graves
A British barricade on Talbot Street comes under fire from rebel positions. National Museum of Ireland
A surrender note signed by Pearse, James Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh. National Museum of Ireland
De Valera’s surrender: he was the only key figure of the Rising not to be executed. Collection Sean O’Mahoney
The leaders of the Rising were executed, mostly by firing squad in Dublin. Pictured are all those who were executed (from left to right): P.H. Pearse, Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, Edward Daly, William Pearse, Michael O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Eamonn Kent, Michael Mallin, Con Colbert, Sean Heuston, Sean MacDermott, James Connolly, Thomas Kent and Roger Casement. Collection Sean O’Mahoney
The heavy damage sustained by the GPO which was the first building seized by the rebels; they replaced the Union Jack with a green and gold Irish Republican flag which flew over the building throughout the conflict. National Museum of Ireland
The Aftermath: in Dublin more than 32 buildings and over 62 businesses were destroyed. Collection Sean O’Mahoney
Booklets were published after the Rising, detailing the key events and characters, and also recording the damage inflicted on the city. Collection Sean O’Mahoney
A Cautionary Tale for Today
… either character or circumstance may be the basis of a sunkrisis (comparison); similar events affecting dissimilar persons and similar persons reacting to contrasting events alike provide a suitable field for the exercise. It is basically a rhetorical procedure: but it is rescued from purely rhetorical ingenuity by its value as a way of concentrating and directing the moral reflections which are the primary purpose of biography.
D. A. Russell, PLUTARCH (London, 1973)
The 1916 Rising was both profoundly important and profoundly unnecessary. Widely and rightly hailed as a high water mark of the Green or Catholic and Nationalist tradition, it was in fact triggered off by the Orange and Protestant tradition and its British allies. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: ‘There never was, I believe, an Irish crime – if crime it can be called – which had not its roots in an English folly.’ His words are still relevant. The genesis of 1916 has an uncanny resemblance to contemporary Irish events in certain significant regards. For although one ushered in a period of violent change, the other (hopefully) of peaceful alteration, nevertheless if one changes the word ‘biography’ to ‘history’ in the foregoing quote, one finds that Russell’s thesis of sunkrisis becomes disturbingly apposite when applied to the 1916 Rising and to what may validly be termed Easter Two, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In both cases, a majority of political opinion in Ireland, England and amongst the Irish diaspora was and is in favour of a certain process being given legislative effect. In what might be termed Easter One, that of 1916, an overwhelming majority in favour of Home Rule was registered some four years before the Rising broke out, at the time when the third Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912.
In the case of the contemporary Peace Process, there was equally overwhelming support for the ceasefire declared by the Provisional IRA on 31 August, 1994, four years before Easter Two, when the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed. Both processes were destined to be seriously impeded by the Ulster Unionists and their English Conservative allies in politics and the army. These are nothing like as potent now as they were in 1916. But they are not without a malign efficacy nonetheless. Ominously too, just as in 1916 a small segment of the physical force school of Irish Nationalism, like their counterparts in the Volunteers of 1916, have declared no confidence in the constitutional process and have placed their faith in violent means to achieve their ends. This decision has resulted in a series of bombing attacks ranging from the Omagh atrocity in Ireland to an explosion at BBC Centre in London. Whether the group responsible, the so-called Real IRA, has the remotest possibility of achieving anything of the effect of the 1916 men is debatable to say the least.
What the four years of contemporary delay and their stagnant aftermath of two further years of squandered opportunity will ultimately lead to, nobody knows. But in grappling with the challenges posed by the Real IRA and the recalcitrant Orangemen, it is at least instructive and at worst alarming to examine what four years of delay and extra parliamentary defiance led to in 1916, a date that still holds all the sacrificial significance of High Mass for Irish Republicans. Ultimately, modern Ireland and its two states were created. But these were achieved at the cost of the vicious Black and Tan war which broke out after the Rising, the even more vicious Irish Civil War which followed the ending of Anglo-Irish hostilities and the partition of Ireland. This last was responsible for a murderous pogrom and population displacement of Catholics. There followed the creation of an apartheid system of government – the institutionalisation of discrimination and gerrymandering as methods of preventing a rise in the Catholic vote in the 1920s. The results were a divided community, various intermittent outbreaks of violence and the thirty continuous years of ‘the Troubles’, which the Good Friday Agreement was intended to put an end to for ever.
When looked at against the contemporary background of the faltering Peace Process, the 1916 Rising is transformed from being an historical event into a cautionary tale for today. To tell the tale of Easter Week by merely reciting the events which occurred that fateful April wo
uld be analogous to attempting to describe the development of the American West solely by reference to events such as the shoot-out at the OK Corral. Granted that the Rising was a seminal event in Irish history, and that out of it modern Ireland emerged, and as the poet said, all was changed, changed utterly. But it is what has not changed that matters, namely the resistance of a sizeable section of Protestant opinion in north-eastern Ireland to the Peace Process, and the continuing involvement of the Conservative Party and sections of the British security forces in that resistance. Set in that context, 1916 becomes no faraway historical event but a cautionary tale. While I hope to give the average intelligent reader a good general grasp of what happened in 1916, I have also attempted to bring home the lesson that the message of 1916 is as vitally important today as it was then. The message is that those who do not learn from history really can be doomed to relive it…
The 1916 Easter Rising
THE ROSE TREE
But where can we draw water,
Said Pearse to Connolly,
When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There’s nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.
The play scheduled for the Abbey Theatre that night was Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan.1 In it, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (Ireland) is an old woman who appears in a house where a wedding has been prepared on the eve of the 1798 Rebellion. She says that she is buoyed up by ‘the hope of getting my beautiful fields back again; the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’. By the end of the play, she has been transformed into a young girl with ‘the walk of a queen’, and the prospective bridegroom has left to join the Rebels, of whom the old woman says:
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever.
It was an uncannily appropriate production, in more ways than one. The stage drama had to be postponed because the street theatre outside took over. Cathleen Ni Houlihan no longer graces the Abbey boards, but in a real sense the old lady’s wishes are still echoed in some quarters in Ireland and at the time of writing, the play goes on.
The reason it does so is contained in the same pithy sentence which led to the 1916 Rising: ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. It is also the reason why six of Ireland’s north-eastern counties are still ruled from London and why in 1998 three sovereign governments, those of the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom and America, involved themselves with Irish political parties in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement which it was vainly hoped would settle the argument over the ‘beautiful fields’.
The significance of that sentence lies not merely in its wording, but in its context and its source. The context was the debate in late nineteenth-century England and Ireland on the issue of introducing Home Rule to Ireland. The source was a senior British Conservative, Lord Randolph Churchill, who addressed his audience in an artfully duplicitous manner which became the leit motif of the Conservatives’ utilisation of the Irish question for domestic political gain. Churchill told his audience of Belfast Unionists that he was with them, as was his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, who had been a general of William of Orange, the Orangemen’s icon; he neglected to remind them that the Duke had also been a general of William’s enemy, the Catholic James II whom William defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. More importantly, along with telling his hearers that they would be right to fight, he gave Ulster Unionists a pledge that if Home Rule was attempted,2 ‘there will not be wanting to you those of position and influence in England who are willing to cast in their lot with you, whatever it may be, and who will share your fortune and your fate’.
The meeting held on 22 February, 1886 in the Ulster Hall had been advertised in the Belfast News Letter as a ‘conservative demonstration – a monster meeting of Conservatives and Orangemen’. Churchill’s presence and the commitments he made thus gave a benison to a remarkable feature of the Orange philosophy – its ability to preach ‘loyalty’, constitutionalism and religious liberty while at the same time either threatening or practising treason, violence, the arousal of sectarian hatred and the denial of human rights. Churchill returned to London, leaving in his wake violent Orange demonstrations and burning Catholic homes. In the long history of Protestant-Catholic animosities 1886 still stands out as a particularly bad year for sectarian violence. Not all the violence may fairly be laid at Churchill’s door; rioting between Protestants and Catholics had been a feature of Belfast life since as far back as 1813, but his contribution and the use made of the Home Rule issue, both by the Conservatives in London and the Unionist leadership in Northern Ireland, certainly helped to inflame the situation.
A second reading of the Home Rule Bill triggered off rioting in Belfast. Protestant shipwrights drove Catholics from their dockland employment, forcing some into the waters of the Lagan, drowning one young man. Attack begat counterattack, and in a summer of discontent, some 32 people were killed, 371 injured and some £90,000 worth of property destroyed.
In helping Belfast to arrive at that level of dementia Churchill acted quite deliberately. Six days before making his Belfast speech, he wrote to a friend saying that he had ‘decided some time ago that if the GOM went for Home Rule, the Orange Card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the Ace of Trumps, and not the two’. Churchill’s prayers were answered. Gladstone, the GOM (Grand Old Man), did introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland and the Orange Card turned up trumps. A number of Liberal Unionists sided with the Conservatives and the Bill, which incidentally only provided for a very limited form of self-government within the British Empire, went down. Nevertheless, in the subsequent general election, Ireland returned eighty-six Home Rule members against seventeen Unionists. This Irish percentage continued to be recorded in general elections for more than thirty years, but to no avail. In fact, the percentage would remain much the same a century later for the vote on the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which also contained a measure of Home Rule for part of Northern Ireland. The votes that counted were not those cast in Ireland but in the parliamentary balance at Westminster.
Tory and Unionist opinion here was correctly summed up by a candidate in the general election of 1887 brought on by the Home Rule controversy. George Joachim Goschen (later First Viscount), a Liberal Unionist standing in Liverpool, declared:3 ‘We cannot allow the discontent of some three million inhabitants of the United Kingdom to reduce more than thirty million to impotence’. Lord Salisbury joined in the fray. He was a descendant of Lord Burleigh, one of the original lords of the Irish Plantation, and a prime minister of England. In an address to the Primrose League at Covent Garden he stated that Parliament had the right to govern Ulster but it had no right to sell its people into slavery. He said he did not believe in the unrestricted power of Parliament any more than he did in the unrestricted power of kings. He reminded his audience that James II had stepped outside the limits of the constitution and had been summarily dealt with by ‘the people of Ulster’. He pointedly told his audience that should a similar abuse of power again occur on the part of a parliamentary king, he did not believe ‘that the people of Ulster have lost their sturdy love of freedom nor their detestation of arbitrary power’.
But what of the native Irish themselves? At this stage the questions that logically arise are: what were the three million Irish doing in the United Kingdom in the first place; what was the source of their discontent; and what or who were the forces that made up the ‘Orange Card’?
The short answer to the last question is: those who supported the Act of Union of 1800 which suppressed the Irish Parliament established in Dublin seventeen years earlier. The Parliament owed its existence to the formation of the Protestant Volunteers at Dungannon in 1782, ostensibly created merely to defend Ireland from the plagues coming from revolutionary France and America. In reality it was also used to defend the commercial interests of the ruling Protestant Ascendancy class as it was known, against the effects
of English discrimination against Irish economic life as a whole, that of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. The Catholics suffered under the Penal Law Code, which although lately somewhat relaxed, had over the century enervated the Catholic Irish population through forbidding it property, education or advancement in government. The last category, the Presbyterians, were discriminated against for refusing to join the Established Church and were being forced to emigrate to America.
Thus when the Dungannon Volunteers were formed, a frisson of anxiety went through the British establishment at the spectre of an Ireland growing powerful through a unity of its different factions and thus creating a commercial and strategic threat rather as though Ireland stood in the same relation to England as Cuba does to America. Mindful of such fears, although they demanded and got a parliament, the Volunteers were careful to stress their loyalty to the Crown, proclaiming at their formation that:4
a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland to make laws for this Kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal and a grievance.
However, the Volunteers also passed a resolution drawn up by one of their founders, an enlightened Protestant landowner and orator, Henry Grattan, which declared:
We hold the right of private judgement in matters of religion to be equally sacred in others as in ourselves…as men and as Irishmen, as Christians and as Protestants, we rejoice in the relaxation of the Penal Laws against our Roman Catholic subjects, and we conceive the measure to be fraught with the happiest of consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland …
Throughout the coming century, it was from what might be termed the Grattan school of thought, that Catholic Ireland would derive much of its political leadership. In the immediate wake of the Volunteers’ formation and the creation of the Irish Parliament, in the handsome Dublin building which now houses the Bank of Ireland, there also flowed ‘the happiest of consequences’. For a brief period the independence of action and release of dynamism provided by the new Parliament created a degree of prosperity, cultural activity and social elegance that was scarcely rivalled until the coming of the contemporary ‘Celtic Tiger’ era. The fortunes of the Protestant Ascendancy flourished and a Catholic middle class emerged.
1916- the Easter Rising Page 1