He opened his Cabinet pouch and read an odd report, passed on by the Foreign Office. The British Ambassador in Washington said that the FBI had raided a German office in New York and found details of gun-running for a rising in Ireland on 23 April.
He was puzzled. The so-called gun-running had taken place on Good Friday, the 21st. As to a rising planned for some time on Easter Sunday, that, he thought, smiling, must have come and gone yesterday without anyone noticing.
At 12.10 p.m., Colonel Cowan received a call at Military HQ, Irish Command. The DMP told him the Castle had been attacked and warned him there might be outbreaks elsewhere in the country.
Cowan promptly took steps to reinforce the Castle and the Viceregal Lodge. It struck him that he ought also to put an extra guard on the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park.
The soccer players had been kicking the ball around for some time when Paddy Daly saw Tim Roche arrive in a jaunting car.
‘Christ Almighty,’ Daly exclaimed. ‘He was meant to bring a motor car.’
Roche had stolen a motor car for a quick get-away, only to drive it straight into a lamppost. He had then hailed the vehicle in which he was now sitting next to the jarvey.
Daly signalled his pal, Garry Holohan. With his good right boot, Holohan kicked the ball through the Fort Gate. The sentry’s grin as the players raced over to retrieve it vanished when they jumped him and relieved him of his rifle. They trussed him up and gagged him.
The raiders caught the young soldiers in the guard-room unprepared, only to be themselves surprised by the sentry on the four-foot high parapet above. He was too shaken to fire.
‘Surrender,’ yelled Holohan.
When the sentry raised his rifle, Holohan fired twice and badly wounded him. As he stood over him, the sentry whispered, with blood streaming from his thigh, ‘Don’t kill me. I’m Irish myself. Five kids.’
Holohan assured him they would let his pals know.
Paddy Daly, the explosives expert, had been told the keys to the storeroom with TNT would be on a board in the guard-room. They were not there.
Most of the Playfairs, the CO’s family, were in the Fort.
‘Where,’ Holohan demanded of Mrs Isabel Playfair, ‘are the fecking keys?’
‘At the Races,’ she said, shaking all over. ‘My husband put them in his pocket.’
They tried breaking down the door but it would not give. They piled up boxes of small arms ammunition in several rooms, smothered them with five bags of gelignite and set the fuses. They hoped the blast would trigger off the explosives inside.
The guards, with the Playfairs, were released and told to run like hell.
The rebels dispersed. Some, with captured rifles, jumped into the jaunting car and made for the south-eastern gate of the Park. Holohan on a bicycle covered their rear.
It was he who noticed the Playfair lad, aged about seventeen, running out of the Park, to raise the alarm at the Barracks. He pedalled madly, calling after him to stop, but he took no notice. He came level with the lad as he arrived at the soldiers’ billets and was banging on a door.
A woman opened up as the lad turned to face Holohan. They were both heaving for breath. Their eyes met, full of fear.
Not wanting this to hurt, Holohan took careful aim and shot him three times.
*
Not far away, outside the Viceregal Lodge, His Lordship’s party was about to step into the limousines.
Wimborne heard the small arms ammunition exploding in the Fort and thought it was a car backfiring until an aide rushed out of the house with the news.
‘A what? A rising?’ The Viceroy’s narrow moustache bristled yet he was not displeased. This proved beyond doubt that he was the one man in Ireland who saw things clearly, chiefly because, on principle, he despised all Irishmen.
His self-righteousness was somewhat dented when an officer said, ‘May I suggest, Excellency, that you take cover.’
‘Cover?’
Lord Blackwood pointed out that the lodge’s only defence was a sunken ditch curving around the long low fence. There was no military guard and, with the Races on, reinforcements might take time.
Just then a shell landed nearby. They were not to know that it came not from rebels but from excited soldiers, firing at random. With Wimborne in the lead, they all ran inside for cover. His Excellency poured himself the stiffest of brandies. He wanted to be proven right, but not posthumously. Having emptied his glass, he knew exactly what he had to do. He poured himself another.
The rebels in the GPO had grown to 200 as news of the rising spread.
Connolly was trying to organize them. Pearse was walking up and down, looking very impressive, with Willie, his long-haired, pale-faced brother, shadowing him. Joe Plunkett was lying down on a mattress in front of the counter trying to conserve his strength. Seeing him there in his immaculate uniform and with a white silk scarf draped round his neck, young Connolly nudged his father and grinned. Connolly took his son aside and muttered, ‘That man, Roddy, has more courage in his little finger than all the other leaders combined.’
The O’Rahilly, still hurt by Pearse’s distrust, pointed out that they ought to occupy the upstairs offices. Pearse told Michael Staines to see to it.
With half a dozen men armed with revolvers and automatics, Staines crept up the stairs just as telegraph girls were streaming down.
One of the girls called out, ‘Hello, Michael! That’s the stuff to give ’em!’
He halted his men on the landing opposite the Telegraph Office, the nerve centre of the GPO system. It was bound to be well guarded. There were stealthy movements inside. The guard must have heard noises below and locked themselves in.
Staines gestured to his men to fire through the door. Immediately, voices called out, ‘We surrender.’
The rebels rushed in to find themselves looking down the rifle barrels of seven servicemen. These promptly dropped their weapons on the floor where their sergeant was lying with a head wound.
Staines was appalled at their cowardice until a British NCO said, ‘We’ve no ammo for our rifles.’
The guard on the Central Telegraph Office had not one live round between them.
They got the Sergeant, a Scot, to his feet. A bullet had grazed his forehead.
Staines said, ‘Take him to Jervis Street Hospital.’
‘I’m no’ going,’ the Sergeant said, with a strong burr.
‘Indeed, you are,’ Staines insisted.
‘Listen, mon,’ the Sergeant said, blood pouring down his cheek, ‘I’ve been told to guard this place till 18.00 hours and, by God, tha’s what I intend to do.’
‘If I give you my word,’ Staines said, ‘that I’ll let you back, will you go and get treatment?’
They shook on it.
The manageress of the Telegraph Office was also a Scot.
‘Wha’ever happens, I’m no’ goin’,’ she growled.
Daunted by her tone, Staines warned her not to touch any instrument. He did not want her alerting the enemy.
She held up a batch of telegrams. ‘Might I at least send these off? Announcements of deaths.’
‘Our own people will do it.’
‘Very well,’ she said in a huff, ‘if tha’s your attitude, I’m off.’
On the roof, pigeons were disturbed as the Union Jack was hauled down. The Countess’s green bedspread with its gold and mustard lettering and its edges mauled by Poppet, was hoisted instead. The tricolour, green, white and yellow, was also flown.
This was Ireland now.
Around the stone balustrade, snipers were posted, youngsters for the most part. They waved to comrades across the street in the Imperial Hotel, owned by William Martin Murphy, the most hated capitalist in the land. On the Imperial’s roof, the Irish Citizen Army were raising their flag of the Plough and the Stars, slight revenge for all they had suffered at Murphy’s hands in the strike of 1913.
There were more waves to fellow snipers manning houses at street corners opposite,
before the rebels went on their knees to say the first of an unending line of rosaries.
In the lobby below, Connolly’s voice boomed out. ‘Shut and bar the doors. Smash those windows and barricade ’em with typewriters, furniture, mailbags, whatever’s handy.’
His orders were punctuated by shots from guns that went off by accident and cries from women in the street, ‘Glory be to God, they’re murdering our new Post Office.’
Through the Prince’s Street gate, The O’Rahilly finished unloading his second batch of supplies in the covered courtyard. As he entered the lobby, many wondered what he was doing there. Word was he had done his best to stop the rising. Sensing their disapproval, Pearse went and shook his hand. There was still a coolness between them; but at last they were on the same side.
With the rebels inside the guard-room to the right of the Gate, an eerie silence settled on the Castle. Kain, peering through the window, could not understand why the enemy were not trying to flush them out. He did not realize that for the first time since the thirteenth century the Castle was a plum for the taking.
In the end, convinced that the British were hatching a deadly plot against them, he withdrew.
Soon, firing from the City Hall and the newspaper offices was returned by the military. Volleys swept Cork Hill.
When Dr Kathleen Lynn’s car was unloaded, the Countess Markievicz drove it from the City Hall to Stephen’s Green. As a staff officer, her job was to liaise between Mallin and the GPO.
She left the Castle area as Skeffy arrived. He saw a British officer, Captain Pinfield, fall wounded just inside the Castle Gate. Without a thought for himself, Skeffy ran to help. He saw, at once that the Captain was badly hurt. He hurried to a nearby chemist and, in his high-pitched voice, urged, ‘Come. We can’t leave a man to bleed to death.’
With bullets striking the cobbles all round them, they reached the Gate just as soldiers were dragging the Captain inside. The two of them turned tail and fled for cover.
In the Green, Mallin, having emptied the Park of courting couples and mothers wheeling babies in prams, closed the eight gates.
Some of his men were forcing carters to uncouple the horses which had been busily munching in their nose bags and form the carts into barricades across the road. Others were digging trenches in the flower beds.
Mallin’s orders were to stop all traffic coming up the approach roads. Unfortunately, in the trenches, they made a perfect target from the tall buildings around them. Lacking the men to occupy the Shelbourne on the north side, the best they could do was to post snipers in houses at street corners leading to the Green.
The only policeman on duty was twenty-eight-year-old Michael Lahiff. He peered through the railings at what Dubliners called the Traitors’ Gate, an arch erected in honour of Irishmen who had fought for Britain during the Boer War. Rebels inside the Green told him to go away.
‘What do you think you’re up to?’ he wanted to know.
When he took no notice of a second warning, they shot him three times. He was taken to the nearby Meath Hospital where he died soon after admission.
When the Countess drove up with medical supplies, Mallin told her that owing to shortage of personnel he wanted her to take charge of digging trenches and barricading the Green.
‘I’ll need you as a sniper, too,’ he said. ‘I’m short of marksmen.’
‘Suits me, old bean,’ and the Countess joined in, hijacking any vehicle that came her way and taking over a couple of abandoned trams for barricades.
A commissariat and a Red Cross post were set up in the Green’s summer house. Nellie Gifford and the Countess’s friend, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, were in charge. They set out delicate cakes and fine-cut sandwiches on silver salvers and, when Madam had her first breather, offered her tea in a cup and saucer of bone-china.
‘How positively egregious,’ she said.
When Birrell was handed Nathan’s message of the day before, now decoded, he murmured, ‘Splendid idea. Couldn’t be a better time to round all the rebels up.’
He was keen to continue with his novel of the French Revolution life was so exciting in those days – but first things first.
Having wired Nathan permission to imprison the Sinn Feiners and take over their strongholds, he went to the Home Office to inform Sir Edward Troup, the Permanent Secretary. From there, he went across to Scotland Yard for an update on the interrogation of Sir Roger Casement.
‘It’s pouring out of him,’ Basil Thomson said.
Augustine Birrell could not remember a time when Irish affairs had given him so much pleasure.
When Colonel Cowan at HQ Ireland Command placed a call to the Curragh at 12.30 p.m., he was surprised to find the line still open.
The Curragh was only thirty miles away. On standby, in case of a German invasion, there was a 1,600-strong mobile column. He told the CO to prepare the 3rd Cavalry Brigade at once. Kingsbridge Station was sending trains to transport them to Dublin.
Cowan’s luck held. He got through to Athlone, eighty miles from Dublin, with a request for artillery. They said the 4th Battery Royal Fusiliers from Templemore would make ready at once. A final call summoned troops from Belfast.
MacNeill had not believed The O’Rahilly’s message about a rising. He cycled to Dr O’Kelly’s in Rathgar.
‘Seamus,’ he was saying, ‘I feel really grieved that a clique should try and use my movement for their own violent ends,’ when in burst Sean Fitzgibbon.
‘The rising. It’s started.’
‘But …,’ MacNeill began. ‘But that’s not possible. It must be a few trigger-happy Volunteers who failed to see my notice in the Sunday Independent.’
Another guest was a colleague of MacNeill’s, a lecturer in French. Liam O’Briain had spent the day before spreading the countermand. ‘I’ll go and see,’ he offered.
Meanwhile, MacNeill sat down as though he were in a trance, stroking his grey-tinged beard.
O’Briain cycled along the Grand Canal to Portobello Barracks. Troops were hiding behind the canal wall as they fired on Davy’s pub with rifles and a Maxim gun. The noise of battle was coming from every quarter of the city.
He cycled back to report.
For five minutes, MacNeill sat sucking his dead pipe. Then, in a choky voice: ‘I’ll just have to go home and get my uniform, won’t I? My friends, my comrades are fighting and dying. I have to join them.’
Having said that, he remained motionless in his chair. It was simply against his conscience to join in a rebellion he held to be sinful. He cycled back home.
‘What’s up, darling?’
MacNeill knelt beside his wife’s chair and put his head in her lap. For the first time, she saw him weeping.
‘Everything, Eileen,’ he sobbed, ‘everything is ruined.’
It was 12.45 p.m. when Pearse walked out of the GPO to read the Proclamation of the Republic.
Joe Plunkett stood by a window to watch. Across the street, in the Imperial Hotel, he picked out the slim figure of his fiancée, Grace Gifford, in her brightest clothes; and his heart went out to her. She was one of a party come to celebrate Geraldine Plunkett’s marriage to Thomas Dillon the day before. He waved and Grace waved back.
Flanked by Clarke and Connolly, Pearse went, loam-footed, to the middle of the boulevard, with his back to Admiral Lord Nelson. This was the high-point of his life, a moment to put even his oration over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa in the shade. But he read in an out-of-character mumble.
Magnificent words floated lifeless in the air.
In the name of God and of the dead generations … Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom … We hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a sovereign state … The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens … cherishing all the children of the nation equally.
The first citizens of the new Republic greeted it with cheers and hoots as if this were a Christmas panto
mime. But Tom Clarke was trembly and misty-eyed; and James Connolly was pumping Pearse’s hand, saying, ‘Thanks be to God that we’ve lived to see this day.’
As to Pearse himself, he knew it was hard to arouse patriotism for a country that had not existed for seven hundred years. The action-play they were staging was perfect. Though this generation might give it bad reviews, posterity would not.
One witness of the birth of the Republic was a journalist and classical scholar with a shock of blue-black hair and brooding eyes. Stephen MacKenna, in his mid-forties, had been a freedom fighter in foreign lands. He was mesmerized; could this great thing be happening at home, in dear old Dublin? Feeble and arthritic, he stood resting on his stick in that same place hour after hour. ‘At last,’ he kept muttering. ‘At last.’
Copies of the Proclamation were pasted on the base of Nelson’s Pillar, outside the GPO and inside the lobby where the rebels cheered. It was official: they were a Republic.
Soldiers of the Republican Army started ripping off recruitment posters and replacing them with the Proclamation.
‘In future,’ they cried, ‘Irishmen will only fight for Ireland.’
Birrell was scarcely back from Scotland Yard when into the Irish Office burst Sir John Denton Pinkstone-French, fingering his white moustache in annoyance. A junior officer in civvies had cycled from Dublin to Kingstown with a message that was relayed by wireless from a naval vessel in the harbour.
In his best I-told-you-so voice, French said: ‘There has been a rising in Dublin at 12.00 hours.’
Birrell listened dumb-founded. It was bad enough in itself but coming from the Commander-in-Chief who had repeatedly questioned his political judgement it was doubly galling. Only on 12 February, he had assured him categorically that there was no chance of a rising.
This was one of those rare moments when a man’s life makes a complete somersault, when, in an instant, he knows his world can never be the same again. Into his mind flashed an old saying: ‘In Ireland, the unexpected always happens, the inevitable never.’ He wondered what the PM, out of town for the Easter weekend, would make of his miscalculation. That cable from the British Ambassador in Washington did not seem so odd now.
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