1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  Back in Ireland, as the last act of the parliamentary Home Rule drama played out at Westminster, Redmond had forced a measure of control on the newly formed Irish Volunteers, which he correctly foresaw would pose a major threat to his position. After abortive private negotiations between his nominees and the Volunteers’ leaders, Redmond went public in the press on 9 June, 1914, attacking the Volunteers’ Committee as being ‘non-Representative’ and demanding that the Committee should be ‘strengthened’ by the addition of twenty-five nominees of his own ‘in sympathy’ with the ‘policy and aims’ of the Irish Party. Rather than have a split, the Volunteers agreed to Redmond’s terms.

  However, a split was unavoidable. The dichotomy in philosophy between the Redmondites and the physical force men was moving to its inevitable conclusion. On Sunday, 26 July, 1914, two days after the Buckingham Palace negotiation broke down, the yacht Asgard26 and Erskine Childers sailed into history. The yacht, a wedding present for Childers, had been designed and built in Norway in 1905, ironically the year in which Norwegian independence was achieved – peacefully. Asgard is the Norwegian word for Home of the Gods.

  Robert Erskine Childers was the orphan son of noted English oriental scholar, Robert Caesar Childers. He was raised by his mother’s family, the Bartons, in Annamoe, County Wicklow. After graduating from Cambridge, he became a clerk in the House of Commons. His sailing experience provided the background for his famous novel, The Riddle of the Sands. This was such an authentic picture of a fictional plot by the Kaiser to invade England across the North Sea that the book is credited with causing the Royal Navy North Sea fleet to be expanded prior to World War I. Childers, who ultimately died before an Irish firing squad in the Irish Civil War, apparently started to become disenchanted with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilising mission during the Boer War. He and his wife Mary ‘Molly’ Osgood of Boston were devout Home Rulers and in the wake of the Larne gun-running, it was to Childers and another Irish yachtsman, Conor O’Brien, that Mary Spring-Rice, a daughter of Lord Mounteagle, turned with a suggestion that arms purchased in Germany might be sailed into Dublin. Other prominent figures of the period who helped to raise and to donate money for the project were the historian Alice Stopford Green, the humanitarian Roger Casement and the novelist Darrel Figgis.

  Childers and his wife sailed 900 rifles aboard the Asgard from a rendezvous point off the Ruytigen Lightship on the Belgian coast to Howth Harbour in County Dublin. Appropriately enough, they set off on the Orangemen’s feast day, 12 July, 1914 and landed in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. Childers’ 900 rifles were followed a few days later (Saturday, 1 August) by a consignment of 600 guns which were sailed to the Welsh coast aboard Conor O’Brien’s Kelpie. Here they were trans-shipped to the yacht Chotah, owned by a Dublin surgeon, Sir Thomas Myles, and landed at Kilcoole on the Wicklow coast.

  In the wake of the Howth landing, an event occurred which had a marked effect on Irish public opinion. Some 800 Volunteers had marched to Howth from Dublin seven miles away to meet the Asgard. On the way back to Dublin with the rifles, the Volunteers were halted by Assistant Commissioner Harrell of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, backed up by a company of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Harrell demanded the rifles, was refused and ordered his police to disarm the Volunteers. A fist fight broke out in which a handful of participants on either side were injured and approximately a dozen rifles captured.

  A number of the Volunteers who had only joined since Redmond had enforced his will on the organisation, had little or no training. Some of these broke ranks and fled, throwing away their weapons. Harrell then ended the confusion by calling off his men and staging fresh negotiations. During this parley, the Volunteers at the rear of the procession broke away and made off safely with their rifles, leaving Harrell virtually empty-handed. But then tragedy struck from another quarter. As the Borderers returned to their barracks, a hostile crowd gathered at Bachelors Walk and stoned the soldiers. The officer in charge, Major Haig, ordered his men to prepare to fire, but this was translated as an order to fire and a volley poured into the crowd, killing four people and wounding thirty-seven.

  The behaviour of the Borderers towards the Dublin mob contrasted so sharply with the attitude of the British Army towards the Ulster Volunteers’ arms landing that even the mildest of Nationalists saw the Bachelors Walk deaths as being the most stark indication yet of there being one law for the Green and another for the Orange. The IRB was secretly delighted at the hornets’ nest of outrage which the shootings provoked. But the storm of indignation had only a week to rage before the outbreak of the Great War would overshadow everything.

  Redmond rose in the House of Commons as soon as war was formally announced on 3 August by the Foreign Secretary, to state that the British Government might with confidence withdraw all their troops from Ireland, because the Irish Volunteers would cooperate with the Ulster Volunteers in protecting its shores. Carson had already pledged the UVF to the British for service either at home or abroad, and in light of the two pledges Lord Grey declared: ‘The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland. The position in Ireland – and this I should like to be clearly understood abroad – is not a consideration among the things we have to take into account now’. But Birrell, who liked and respected Redmond, judged afterwards, appropriately enough in the Irish leader’s obituary in The Times that:27 ‘…his famous speech in the House of Commons was a mistake, though a noble one. He took the curve too sharply and did not carry the train with him’.

  In the wake of the Buckingham Palace conference the Home Rule Bill had indeed been placed on the statute book and given the royal assent, but at the same time (18 September) a Suspensory Act was passed postponing the operation of the Home Rule Act. Three days earlier, Asquith had told the House that the Home Rule Bill would:

  Not come into operation until Parliament should have the fullest opportunity, by an Amending Bill, of altering, modifying, or qualifying its provisions in such a way as to secure at any rate the general consent both of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

  Where this ‘consent’ might be obtained, the Prime Minister did not say. Certainly it would not be forthcoming from the IRB who saw the war as an opportunity of following Wolfe Tone’s dictum that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. There was also in the IRB a sense of moral obligation to fight that is difficult to understand today. Many of these men felt a sense of shame at being the first generation of Irishmen for 120 years not to have risen with arms in their hands. It was pointed out that they had missed the opportunity of a Rising during the Boer War, and that the chance provided by the Great War should not be passed up. But above all, their initiative in creating the Irish Volunteers had given them an army to rise with.

  Accordingly, on or around 9 September, 1914, at a meeting in the office of Sean T. O’Kelly (who later became President of Ireland) in the Gaelic League building at 25 Parnell Square, Dublin, the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood called a small meeting at which it was decided that the war provided the opportunity for a Rising. Arthur Griffith was one of those present. So was Padraig Pearse who had been co-opted on to the Supreme Council the previous July. Writing about the meeting afterwards (in An Phoblacht, 30/4/16) O’Kelly said of Pearse, who was Director of Organisation in the Volunteers:28

  Padraig Pearse, probably the ablest and most inspiring figure of that time, interpreted worthily the traditional aspirations and ideals of Irish Nationalism, and symbolised in himself the unity of ideal of the different races that go to make the Irish Nation. He was well fitted to be chosen by his colleagues as the most outstanding figure of his time.

  Padraig Henry Pearse, the son of an Irish mother and an English father, was born in Dublin in 1879 and educated at the Christian Brothers’ School, Westland Row. He graduated at the Royal (later the National) University and became a barrister. He edited the official organ of the Gaelic League, Claidheamh, and was a prolific writer in both Irish and
English and an advanced educational thinker. To further his ideal of a free and Gaelic Ireland, he founded and ran St Enda’s, a school for boys at Cullenswood House, Dublin, and later transferred this to a larger setting at Rathfarnham at the foot of the Dublin mountains. By all accounts St Enda’s was an excellent school, but was continually in debt, presumably contributed to by his preoccupation with matters revolutionary, which were so much a part of his daily life that a group of his pupils formed a Volunteer cadre and fought in 1916. Pearse was enrolled in the IRB during a visit to America. Subsequently his gifts as an orator and a writer led to his being appointed first President of the Irish Republic.

  In the eyes of friend and foe alike he became the epitome of the ideal of the blood sacrifice, for two statements in particular which he made in 1915 as the storm clouds of 1916 gathered. The first was made in August at one of the great centrepiece rites of the Irish political and revolutionary traditions, the funeral, in this case the burial of O’Donovan Rossa, one of the heroes of Fenianism. Rossa had died in America but the IRB decided that he should be brought home to be buried. Because of his privations in English jails, the IRB ordered that during the trans-shipment of his coffin to a boat bound for Ireland after the Atlantic crossing the Volunteers should not allow his coffin to touch English soil. Standing at Rossa’s graveside, ‘in communion with that brave and splendid Gael’, Pearse told a huge crowd at Glasnevin cemetery:

  Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriotic men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools, the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never beat peace.

  In December he wrote of the war:

  The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth… the people themselves have gone into battle because to each the old voice that speaks out of the soil of a nation has spoken anew… Belgium defending her soil is heroic, and so is Turkey fighting with her back to Constantinople…The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country…war is a terrible thing and this is the most terrible of wars, but this war is not more terrible than the evils which it will end or help to end.

  In the Ireland, indeed the Europe of the time, before the reality of the carnage on the battlefields sank in, such Rupert Brooke-like ideas were quite acceptable and touched a chord which would not be sounded today. But they do not represent the thinking of a man stirred to blood lust by war, rather the continuation of a train of thought Pearse had been developing for some years. As far back as 1897 he had said:

  The Gael is not like other men, the spade and the loom and the sword are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of a Britain, awaits him to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual life, the regeneration and rejuvenation of the literature of the world, the instruction of the nations, the preaching of the gospel of nature and worship, hero-worship, God Worship – such is the destiny of the Gael.

  To such a man, the notion of a Rising was an idea whose hour had struck. To his peers, and indeed given the Irish literary and missionary traditions, to successive generations, Pearse seemed both the embodiment and the exponent of Celtic idealism. He himself was the gentlest of men. Joseph McGrath, the founder of the Irish Sweepstakes told me the following story involving Pearse and Connolly a few days before the Rising:29

  We had just come out of a meeting somewhere in Dolphin’s Barn. It was a lovely evening and Pearse looked up at the mountains and said: ‘If necessary we can fight on in the mountains…’ but Connolly interrupted him. He was a tough, rough man, a trade unionist, and he said in that northern accent of his: ‘You’ll fight in Dublin, Pearse’. Pearse stopped talking. He got red in the face, embarrassed. He was a nice fellow, very soft.

  The IRB set up a military council to get control of the Volunteers and to plan the proposed insurrection. The IRB had officers throughout the Volunteers and it was arranged that when the decision to rise was put into operation, these men would take their orders from MacDermott and Pearse, not MacNeill. The Military Council consisted of Pearse, Clarke, MacDermott and Plunkett. Later they would form themselves into a Provisional Revolutionary Government with the addition of three other names – James Connolly, who took charge of the military operations during the Rising, Eamonn Kent and Thomas MacDonagh.

  Eamonn Kent (Irish form, Ceannt) was born in County Galway in 1881. He played the Uilean Pipes, the Irish version of the bagpipes and was a member of the governing council of the Gaelic League. Thomas MacDonagh was born at Cloughjordan in County Tipperary in 1878 and educated at Rockwell College, Cashel. A poet and critic, he was a lecturer in English at University College, Dublin, and taught under Pearse at St Enda’s School. His cottage at the foot of the Dublin mountains was a centre of both literary and revolutionary thought. Curiously, for someone who spent his life in defence of both literary and political freedom of expression, and who, had he lived, would probably have become known as the best poet amongst the 1916 men, one of his heroes was the poet-hating, book-burning Florentine monk Savonarola. Some of MacDonagh’s verse was prophetic to the point of being obituaristic:

  His songs were a little phrase

  Of eternal song

  Drowned in the harping of lays

  More loud and long

  His deed was a single word

  Called out alone

  In a night where no echo stirred

  To laughter or moan

  But his song’s new soul shall shrill

  The loud harps dumb

  And his deed the echoes fill

  When the dawn is come.

  Joseph Mary Plunkett, who drew up the military plans for the Rising, was one of the three sons of Count Plunkett who fought in the GPO; the other sons were George and Jack. Plunkett was born in Dublin in 1887 and in spite of continuous ill health, led an active life. He studied science and philosophy, wrote poetry, worked with Thomas MacDonagh and others in founding the Irish Theatre and edited the Irish Review. He was one of the founders of the Volunteers and was a member of their first Executive in 1913. Becoming a member of the IRB, he was sent on secret missions to the Continent and to America in 1915 in order to raise support for a Rising. An exotic, highly visible figure, given to wearing bangles, jewellery and flowing cloaks, paradoxically, he also had a taste for conspiracy and undercover work. He gave Michael Collins a copy of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: a Nightmare and advised him to act on the chief anarchist’s advice: ‘If you don’t appear to be hiding, nobody seeks you out’. Collins subsequently acted on that advice with spectacular results. Plunkett was appointed Director of Military Operations in 1916.

  Plunkett’s plans for the Rising were like all Irish Republican plotting, mindful of precedent from the past. They were heavily influenced by those drawn up by Robert Emmet for his doomed insurrection in 1803. In Dublin main buildings were to be seized and the roads and railways interdicted so that no military reinforcements could get into the city. As a last resort, the Volunteers were to fall back upon the GPO which was designated as the Rising’s headquarters, and then to retreat northwards to Tyrone, to link up with Volunteer units from the north. The whole thing was based on German arms arriving. The rebels even looked forward to receiving assistance from a German submarine in Dublin Bay. Artillery was also expected from Germany and there appeared to be a possibility of officers and soldiers arriving. The Volunteers themselves did not have even one machine gun and Plunkett’s plan depended on the certainty of the Provisional Government’s ten thousand or so Irish Volunteers coming out. There was al
so the hoped-for possibility that once hostilities commenced, Redmond’s much larger National Volunteers would join in, bringing the strength of the insurgents up to one hundred thousand men. In the event none of these hopes was to be realised.

  The Rising was scheduled to take place if the English tried to enforce conscription, or if the Germans invaded Ireland, or if the war appeared to be ending. At the insurrection’s commencement, there was to be a declaration of war on England, accompanied by a demand that the Provisional Government should be represented at the inevitable Peace Conference following the cessation of hostilities. Many members of the Volunteer Executive, including Eoin MacNeill, were kept in ignorance of the IRB’s decision. It was particularly shielded from Redmond’s nominees, but the outbreak of war precipitated a split between these forces and those nominally led by Eoin MacNeill.