1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  This final point swayed MacNeill. He knew that the long-threatened crackdown must come in the wake of the arms landing, and he replied ‘Well, if we have to fight or be suppressed, then I suppose I’m ready to fight’.40 While MacDermott brought the good news to the others, MacNeill dressed and then entered his drawing room to shake hands with Pearse and invite everyone to stay to breakfast. However, the breakfast bonhomie did not survive the day. The O’Rahilly (the ‘The’ stems from an old Gaelic designation, denoting the Chieftain of the Clan, and indicates that the wearer is the senior living member of the family) discovered that Bulmer Hobson had been kidnapped by the IRB. The Quaker Hobson still believed firmly in MacNeill’s original reason for founding the Volunteers: they were to be used only if an effort was made to prevent the introduction of Home Rule by force, not for staging an Uprising. The O’Rahilly burst in upon Pearse, waving a revolver and telling him that anyone who kidnapped him would have to be a ‘quicker shot’. The encounter did not come to shooting, but it reached no peaceful conclusion either. The O’Rahilly, a successful Kerry businessman, vehemently argued that Pearse’s arguments for a Rising were not those of a practical man, but a poet and an idealist. This, of course, is exactly what they were. Pearse was on record41 as saying:

  The European war has brought about a crisis which may contain, as yet hidden within it, the moment for which the generations have been waiting. It remains to be seen whether, if that moment reveals itself, we shall have the sight to see and the courage to do; or whether it shall be written of this generation, alone of all the generations of Ireland, that it had none among it who dared to make the ultimate sacrifice.

  Failing to move Pearse, O’Rahilly decided the following morning to attempt to talk MacNeill into averting the Rising. He found MacNeill an easier mark than Pearse. The morning papers had carried reports saying that a man had been captured in Kerry after landing from a German submarine. Casement was not named but clearly the portents for a successful German arms landing were bad. MacNeill began writing out a set of countermanding orders to be delivered to all Volunteer units throughout the country, cancelling any instructions they might have received for staging a rebellion. He was strengthened in his resolve in this course of action when, around teatime, O’Rahilly returned bringing with him two Volunteers who had just reached Dublin from Kerry. MacNeill learned for the first time of the sinking of the Aud and the capture of Casement.

  Furious, he had O’Rahilly drive him to St Enda’s for a final confrontation with Pearse, who told him: ‘We have used your name and influence for all their worth – now we don’t need you any more. It’s no use you trying to stop us. Our plans are laid and they will be carried out.’

  ‘So well laid’, MacNeill retorted, ‘that the police at Ardfert have already upset them’. He warned Pearse that he intended to forbid any mobilisation. Pearse retorted that the IRB faction at least would not obey him and MacNeill stalked angrily out of the house, telling Pearse where he could be contacted. MacNeill hoped until ten o’clock that evening that he would be so contacted and informed that the Rising was off. However, realising that he need expect no word from Pearse to the IRB, he gave The O’Rahilly the following countermanding order: ‘Volunteers completely deceived. All orders for special action are hereby cancelled and on no account will action be taken.’

  The O’Rahilly then set off in his car on an incredible drive through several counties, distributing the order which was also disseminated by other couriers using any means of transport available. Having dispatched his countermanding order, MacNeill then proceeded to drive the final nail into the coffin. He caused the following announcement to be published in the Dublin Sunday Independent:

  Owing to the very critical position, all orders given to Irish Volunteers for tomorrow, Easter Sunday, are hereby rescinded and no parades, marches, or other movement of Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer will obey this order strictly in every particular.

  Insofar as any hope of military success was concerned, the projected Rising was now a dead letter. Its only hope for success now lay in the possibility that it would ignite the flame of Fenianism in that generation – after, in Pearse’s words, its leaders had made the ‘ultimate sacrifice’. Even the supremely defiant Connolly was taken aback by MacNeill’s order. His daughter Nora had been in Dungannon on Easter Saturday and had seen at first hand the confusion which it had created amongst a large party of Volunteers, several hundred strong, who had gathered in the town expecting a mobilisation the next day. She had roused her father from his sleep to warn him of the damage and confusion which had been created. But the imperturbable Connolly had reassured her: ‘Pray God Nora, if there’s no Rising, may an earthquake swallow up Ireland’, and then went back to bed. But when he and the other members of the Provisional Government who had met in Liberty Hall on Sunday morning were handed a copy of MacNeill’s Sunday Independent and saw the wording in cold print, it was a different matter; even Connolly was shaken.

  Wearily the conspirators wrestled with the problem MacNeill had posed them. Clarke felt they should go ahead as planned, reckoning that once fighting broke out in Dublin, Volunteers from all around the country would join in. Pearse and MacDermott disagreed. The disagreement centred not on the issue of calling off the Rising, but on whether to postpone or not to postpone. No one voted to give up. Finally, Connolly gave his casting vote in favour of a noontide commencement of battle the next day, 24 April, Easter Monday. After the meeting, the depression level was such that Clarke, that flint-edged Fenian, told Piaras Beaslai: ‘MacNeill has ruined everything – all our plans. I feel like going away to cry.’

  Looking at the actual mobilisation the following morning outside Liberty Hall, Clarke would have been forgiven his tears. Rifles were in such short supply that they had been augmented by pikes, the fearsome hooked weapon set on a long pole which had been used by the insurgents of 1798. More fearsome, however, were the Howth rifles which Erskine Childers had sailed in. These antiquated weapons were enormously heavy and dated from an earlier war. They fired a single shot with horrific effect. In a letter to Joe McGarrity in which he described the inadequacies of the guns, ‘much inferior to the British service rifles’, Pearse said:42 ‘the ammunition landed is useless. It consists of explosive bullets, which are against the rules of civilised warfare, and which therefore we are not serving out to the men’.

  However, some of them certainly appear to have been served out, perhaps because no other ammunition was available, because one of the reasons for the rebels’ post-Rising unpopularity was the terrible wounds which the bullets inflicted – it was said that exit wounds were twice the size of a man’s hand. The insurgents also had some Lee Enfield rifles obtained from that never-failing source of Irish Republican armament, the British Tommy, a few Italian Martinis and several shotguns. Some carried pick-axes, crowbars and sledge-hammers. Not surprisingly, Connolly whispered to William O’Brien, who was to succeed him as leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union: ‘Bill, we’re going out to be slaughtered’. The only false prophecy that Connolly made that week was that the British, being capitalists, would not use artillery, because this would involve the destruction of property. In every other respect he was absolutely clear eyed; even to the extent of giving the last briefing to his men shortly before the Rising in which he said:

  The odds against us are a thousand to one. But if we should win, hold on to your rifles, because the Volunteers may have a different goal. Remember, we are not out only for political liberty, but for economic liberty as well. So hold on to your rifles!

  Amongst those who moved off from Liberty Hall was Connolly’s own son, Rory, who was fifteen years of age, and several others not yet twenty, including nineteen-year-old James Fox. Just before the mustering troops marched off to take their allotted vantage points, his father, leading the boy by the hand, had turned up saying:43 ‘Here’s my lad – will you take him with you? I’m too old for the job myself’. A fe
w days later, young Fox, hysterical and trying to flee the monstrous ordeal he found himself in, was cut to pieces by machine-gun fire as he attempted to climb the railings of the ill-chosen rebel strongpoint of St Stephen’s Green.

  Another doomed, last-minute arrival at Liberty Hall was The O’Rahilly. Having spent most of the night driving through the country in an attempt to call off the Rising, he now threw in his lot with the insurgents, saying: ‘Well, I’ve helped to wind up the clock – I might as well hear it strike!’ As it was well known that he was opposed to a Rising (although not that he’d been attempting to call it off), his gallant late arrival had a morale-boosting effect on men who were going into battle literally, in one case at least, led by a dying man, Joseph Plunkett.44 Plunkett had had an operation for glandular tuberculosis a few weeks earlier and had to be helped out of bed and dressed by his aide-decamp, Michael Collins, who stood behind him, one of the few present to wear a Volunteers uniform. Instead of concentrating on what lay ahead, many of the other Volunteers gave Collins ‘a slagging’ over his resplendent appearance. At twelve o’clock Plunkett, Pearse and Connolly led their rag, tag and bob-tail army up Abbey Street, across O’Connell Street, into the General Post Office and history.

  Behind them followed their handful of men, O’Rahilly’s motorcar, now filled with guns and bombs, a number of horse-drawn drays, a hansom cab and two motorbikes. Left behind also, disconsolate at Liberty Hall, was one of Pearse’s sisters, who at the last moment as the men formed up, had fruitlessly pleaded with Pearse: ‘Come home, Pat, and leave all this foolishness!’

  The rebels met no resistance. The Post Office was filled with bank holiday crowds buying stamps, posting letters and making phone calls. A few soldiers and policemen who were in the building on such errands themselves were immediately taken prisoner. The official armed guard of the nerve centre of communications in Ireland turned out to be a sergeant and six men – with no ammunition for their rifles. The sergeant, who was wounded before the absence of ammunition was discovered, was ordered to hospital in the custody of two Volunteers, arguing vehemently that he was on guard until six o’clock that evening and wouldn’t leave his post until he was relieved.

  Outside onlookers gathered in amazement as word spread that something out of order was happening. Their amazement would probably have been heightened had they been able to witness Michael Collins’ first action. He poured two tierces of porter down the canteen drain, exclaiming:45 ‘They said we were drunk in ’98. They won’t be able to say it now’. Later in his career Collins would become a legend because of his myriad escapes from capture and death. It is a reasonable speculation that in none of these was he closer to extermination than at that moment. But his behaviour foreshadowed that of the Volunteers throughout the fighting. Drink was eschewed, even when a public house was commandeered. The rebels took every precaution they could to protect the valuables of those whose homes they took over. When they did so one of their mantras was: ‘After the revolution you will be fully paid back by the Government of the Irish Republic’. In banking terms this had all the weight of Confederate money, but in propaganda terms its value was immense for the insurgents’ subsequent reputation.

  One of the few deliberate destructions of property that occurred during the week brought a measure of popularity in its wake. It was caused by a James Joyce who worked seven days a week in a cellar as a bottle-washer for a notoriously bad employer, the owner of Davy’s strategically located pub at Portobello Bridge. Given the joyful duty of seizing the pub Joyce burst in, rifle at the ready, to be greeted by Davy telling him that he was giving him a week’s notice. Joyce replied:46 ‘I’m giving you five minutes’ and opened fire on the bottles over Davy’s head. Davy and his customers left the pub, rapidly.

  More broken glass fell from the windows of the General Post Office as the rebels began using the furnishings to make barricades. Pearse appeared outside the GPO and proceeded to read to the onlookers the Proclamation of the Easter Rising,47 the root text of the situation (see the picture section for a facsimile of the Proclamation).

  After Pearse had finished reading, Connolly shook his hand saying: ‘Thanks be to God, Pearse, that we lived to see this day!’ Pearse’s sparse audience was less impressed. After the reading a copy of the Proclamation was placed at the foot of Nelson’s Pillar, weighted down by stones, so that passersby could read for themselves what was happening.

  On the roof of the GPO itself, Gearoid O’Sullivan, the youngest Volunteer officer in the GPO, provided further clues. Instead of the normal Union Jacks which bore the Cross of St Patrick symbolising the Act of Union which the revolutionaries wished to destroy, he hoisted two other flags containing potent symbols. One was the traditional Irish flag, green with a golden harp but emblazoned with an unusual legend – Irish Republic. The other was the tricolour, the flag of today’s Irish Republic. It was first given to the Young Irelanders instead of the hoped-for arms by Lamartine, the French politician and poet. Its hopeful but still unfulfilled message was green for the Gaelic tradition, orange for that of the Unionists and white for peace between them.

  By appending their signatures to the dangerous political camping site near the stars which the Proclamation represented, Pearse and his comrades forfeited their lives on behalf of their fellow citizens. It would be pleasant to record that the gesture was appreciated. But on 24 April, 1916, Lilliput ruled Dublin. Both Proclamation and Flag were greeted with a combination of apathy and cynicism. The streets were filled with gawkers and would-be looters according to L. G. Redmond-Howard, a nephew of John Redmond, who watched the proceedings from the balcony of the Metropole Hotel:48 ‘There was practically no response whatever from the people; it seemed the very antithesis of the emancipation of the race, as we see it, say, in the capture of the Bastille in the French Revolution’. Redmond-Howard described how the crowd reacted when a boy with copies of the Proclamation emerged from the GPO:

  Instead of eagerly scanning the sheets and picking out the watchwords of the new liberty, or glowing with enthusiastic admiration at the phrases or sentiments, most of the crowd ‘bought a couple as souvenirs’ – some with the cute business instinct ‘that they’d be worth a fiver each some day, when the beggars were hanged’.

  Later in the week, one Volunteer officer in the GPO who had fought with the Boers described the locating of the general headquarters in the General Post Office as a ‘mad business’. He, like many others, in particular Michael Collins who as a result transformed the rules governing Anglo-Irish warfare from ‘static warfare’ into guerrilla activities, saw the folly of the rebels cooping themselves up in one building with flags over their heads to indicate where artillery fire could most advantageously be directed. But the lack of military expertise was not confined to the Irish alone. Incredibly, the first response on that Easter Monday to the Dubliners’ oft-asked question ‘what is the military going to do about this?’, came in the late afternoon from a troop of Lancers under the command of one Colonel Hammond. The good Colonel ordered a cavalry charge down the middle of Sackville Street. Had the rebels been more experienced the troop would have been wiped out, but as it was many rebels disregarded Connolly’s instructions to let the horsemen get within killing range before opening fire. As a result, only a handful of soldiers were killed, but it gave first blood to the rebels who for some time were in more danger from their own continuously accidentally discharged weapons than they were from the British. But only initially, for more serious testing of the insurgents’ mettle was to come shortly.

  Brigadier-General W. H. M. Lowe, Commanding Officer of the Reserve Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, had a total of 4650 men under his command at the Rising’s commencement. Many of these were already deployed in barracks around the city, the rest were in the Curragh Camp in County Kildare from where they were dispatched to Dublin within hours of the Rising’s commencement. An additional thousand were sent from Belfast. Within two days still further thousands of reinforcements set sail from England. The
soldiers were supplemented by artillery and machine guns. With perhaps unconscious symbolism, the first British deployment of one of their 18-pound artillery pieces was at Grangegorman Lunatic Asylum. Lowe put in motion a battle plan to drive a wedge between the principal rebel positions, a line of fortified strongpoints running from Kingsbridge (now Heuston Station), the major railway station for the south, to Dublin Castle and on to Trinity College. Another looped cordon enclosed the GPO and the Four Courts in order to cut off the insurgents’ headquarters in the GPO from their outposts. By the end of the week these arrangements, equipment and overwhelmingly superior manpower would have crushed the rebellion.

  The city’s most immediate threats came not from the rebels or military but from the lack of food supplies, gas and – curiosity. The initial response of the Dublin crowds was to treat the Rising as a spectator sport, gathering at vantage points behind the cordons of military that slowly began to encircle the insurgents. As this book was being written, Mabel Fox, who lived in Rialto near the South Dublin Union (now St James’s Hospital), told me her memory of being taken as a six-year-old by her father to see the soldiers firing on rebel-held positions in the Union. ‘I remember peeping out from under his coat, holding his hand. The bullets were flying. It was very exciting.’ For many a Dubliner it was fatally exciting. Stray bullets snuffed out lives indiscriminately. A three-year-old child here, a nun there, a priest hurrying to a sick call, men and women standing at doorways or sheltering in their bedrooms were amongst the innocent civilians who formed what the Americans now refer to as collateral damage.