Their chairs were orange boxes; they used ginger-beer bottles for candlesticks. Their underclothes were made from flour sacks, their washtub was a barrel sawn in half. The brightest thing in the place was a gaudy picture of the Sacred Heart. They slept six in a steaming bed, bitten by mice and lice.
Even in death they were overcrowded, being buried in earthy bunks, one on top of the other, symbol of an everlasting thrift.
O’Casey believed that these ‘thieves’ who never missed Mass on Sundays and Holy Days were acting within their rights.
Skeffy, on the contrary, was quivering with indignation. No believer in the sanctity of private property, he disapproved of this smash-and-grab approach to goods that belonged equally to everyone. He ran like a terrier into the crowd. ‘I beg of you, do not give Dublin a bad name.’ When this failed, he sat down in the street and started on some posters. ‘Do Not Touch’, and ‘Please Respect Property That Is Not Your Own’. These were instantly torn down, so he resolved to start a Peace Patrol, men with white armbands who would try and restore order now that the police were off the streets.
In the GPO, Skeffy’s friend, James Connolly, was no less horrified. Though in his paper he had once deplored the fact that a starving man was sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread and a rich man sent to the House of Lords for stealing a nation’s liberty, this was too much.
‘Surely,’ he moaned, quoting what a Spaniard said of the Irish after the battle of Kinsale, ‘surely Christ never died for this people!’
Someone suggested they had no choice but to shoot a few looters. Connolly was tempted. Yet over Murphy’s Hotel flew the flag of the Irish Citizen Army: a yellow plough encrusted with silver stars on a green background. It reminded him of flailing batons during the strike of ’13. Could he kill the very people whom the Citizen Army was formed to protect from police brutality?
‘Fire a few rounds over their heads,’ he said.
When the mob realized it was bluff they looted with renewed zeal. But some shots strayed, all the same.
A gentleman in a frock coat and top hat was taking cover between two pillars of Gilbey’s wine shop. Suddenly he sagged, stiffened and went down on his knees, a bullet through his heart. He was to remain kneeling there, hands joined, like a figure on a sarcophagus, turning sepia, then herring-coloured, for two whole days.
Pearse also quitted his seat to the left of the main door to look on the looters with his tragic face.
A Volunteer asked him, ‘Are they to be shot, sir?’
‘Most certainly,’ he replied, irresolutely.
An aide went out and brought one in. The man, shabby, hungry-looking, was mumbling, ‘But you lot started it.’
Pearse knew that he and his like came from homes whose staple food was dry bread and black tea, where two large families lived in a room and yet took in lodgers to be able to afford a fire in winter. Slaves for so long, they saw freedom only as the right to rob others.
He touched his holster nervously, never having fired a gun. ‘Ah, poor man, just keep him with the other prisoners.’
By now, Pearse was receiving intelligence from women of Cumann na mBan, who were cycling round the city. All four battalions had taken up their main positions and were covering the British Barracks. They had taken some railway stations, though the more strategically important ones, Amiens Street and Kingsbridge, remained in British hands. Still, not a bad start.
He asked some of the women to stay on in the GPO as nurses and assistants to Fitzgerald in the Commissary. One was young Louise Gavan Duffy. She thought the rising was a waste of lives but, like The O’Rahilly and Fitzgerald, now it had begun, she was prepared to give her all.
Apart from looting, Pearse received reports of women pelting his men with bricks and saying, ‘The Tommies’ll tan the arse from your bloody Sinn Fein britches, so they will.’
Dubliners resented having their holiday ruined by a bunch of crackpots playing soldiers. It was getting hard to buy even a loaf of bread. Jacob’s and Boland’s were not baking and who would make deliveries, anyway, in streets full of flying lead?
Church-going ladies were cursing the rebels for their sinful ways. Old people who, for the first time, were receiving pensions every Friday morning, regular as sunrise, kept calling out, ‘The English give us ten shillings a week, is that not so?’ while old soldiers said, ‘God save the British army that gave me a medal and me service pension.’
The severest critics were the ‘shawlies’, women who had sons and husbands fighting for England in the trenches and were paid a separation allowance.
‘If only me Johnny was back from the front,’ one yelled, ‘you’d be running with your tiny tails between your legs.’
Many came from houses where they had keened sons and husbands, killed in recent great offensives overseas. One of them screeched, ‘You dirty bowsies, wait till the Tommies bate yer bloody heads off.’
Train after packed train rolled into Kingsbridge Station. Tommies went on by the Loop Line to the North Wall and the docks, others marched to the Castle.
In the Castle Yard, machine-guns were in place and the troops on full alert when strange metallic noises were heard near the main gate. In the intense silence, every soldier fingered his trigger nervously.
In the upper gallery were forty or so veterans, visible proof of the tragedy of war. One, with his head swathed in bandages, looked like a ghost. Some had not yet recoverd from major surgery. Some lacked an arm or leg. Most were victims of chronic rheumatism after lying days and nights in mud and water in the trenches. They dragged themselves to the windows; a blind soldier gave a piggy-back to a comrade without a leg. Their faces went white with horror as recent experiences crowded in on them, comrades blown to smithereens or lying face-down in the dirt. All ears strained to listen to that awful, penetrating sound.
A milkman appeared, rolling a big milk churn. And everyone cheered with relief.
Soon after five, James Stephens, slight of build, admired for his books and lyrical poetry, closed his office at the National Gallery where he was Registrar and walked up Merrion Street towards Stephen’s Green.
He stopped near the Shelbourne Hotel where a crowd had gathered. In the Green nothing stirred. Stretched across the road was a barricade of cars and carts.
When a man stepped off the footpath and tried to extricate his cart, the Green erupted. Armed rebels jumped from behind trees to the railings, shouting and gesturing to him to clear off. He continued tugging on his cart.
Three shots rang out. It was only a warning.
He dropped the shafts and walked slowly over to the railings where ten rebels were cursing him. He lifted his right hand, attempting to explain.
Someone said, ‘Leave that be, or you’re a dead man.’
He did not budge.
‘Go, y’hear, before I count four: One, two, three, four.’
A single rifle shot rang out and, in two undulating, squirrel-like movements, he sank to the ground.
A woman gave out a long, loud wail as Stephens and others ran to help. There was an ugly hole in the top of the man’s head and blood clotted his hair. They picked him up and carried him to the hospital next to the Arts Club on the Green, yelling, ‘We’ll be coming back for you, damn you.’
The woman fell to her knees in the road, screeching, calling God to witness the crime that had just been committed.
In that moment, the rebels were hated.
By 5.20 p.m., the entire column from the Curragh had arrived at Kingsbridge. The organization was superb; munitions were neatly stacked and guarded. By a round-about route, a strong force reached the Castle in half an hour.
Since the military still had no idea of the strength of the enemy nor whether they were supported by German auxiliaries, Colonel Portal asked the Curragh for another thousand men.
Joe Plunkett was lying down studying maps in the lobby when he decided the outside world ought to know of the rising. He told Fergus O’Kelly to take a six-man squad across th
e street to a long abandoned wireless school of telegraphy. The receiver was kaput, but Kelly was hoping to get a 1 ½ kilowatt transmitter to work.
To provide cover from British snipers, Connolly put marksmen in the DBC (Dublin Bread Company), a tall, glass-domed building nearby. They would have to wait till nightfall before hoisting the antenna on to the roof.
At Archbishop’s House, His Grace William Walsh was in his study. He was small, with a massive head and thick shaggy eyebrows. Solitary by temperament, a four-year nervous disorder had made him even more reclusive.
Still formidable to look at, he was proud to have met Dan O’Connell seventy-four years ago and been enrolled as a repealer when he was nine months old.
He had played a major part in the downfall of Parnell a generation earlier. Of course the Catholic Church was the real Government of Ireland. It had irked him that an adulterous Protestant had more authority over the Irish people than he.
His Grace had spent this pleasant spring afternoon assessing news items borne on the superb clerical grapevine. Everything he heard angered him more. His permission had not been asked for a rebellion and, to his professorial mind, it was a mortal sin. In a theological nutshell: the British were not alien rulers; a rising had no hope of success; the innocent would be slaughtered and to no purpose.
He kept repeating to his secretary, ‘Hell is not hot enough for them, hell is not long enough for them.’
This solemn incantation was disturbed by a ring on the door. James O’Connor, the Solicitor-General, had arrived under military escort. He had been at the Races when he was informed of the rising and told to drop in on His Grace.
When he was shown in, the Archbishop was soothing himself at his Steinway grand piano, playing with shaky fingers a Chopin Prelude. He continued with a few more bars before rising slowly to face his visitor. He stuck his left thumb in his purple cummerbund, his right hand he stretched out, rock-like, for the Solicitor-General, a Catholic, to kiss his ring.
Their relative roles were thus clearly established. His Grace was the representative of an Empire older and greater by far than the British.
Before O’Connor was upright from his bow, Dr Walsh, in a rich baritone, with the hint of a lisp, asked, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Your Grace, we were wondering—’
‘We?’
‘The Castle has asked me to ask you if you will use your authority, Your Grace.’
‘For?’
‘To try and stop this rising getting out of hand.’
The Archbishop’s eyes froze behind his glasses. As he thought, the Government was wanting to use him as a cat’s paw. The rising could not succeed, that he knew, but no word of his would bring it to an end. If he had his way, the Government would resign for dereliction of duty.
‘The Castle,’ he growled, ‘did not use its authority to prevent a rising, and now they expect me to use my spiritual “weapons” to stop the shedding of blood, is that it?’
He went to the door and flung it open. ‘Good day to you, sir.’
Stephen MacKenna had been over five hours outside the GPO mumbling, ‘At last. Ah, yes, at last.’
With the aid of his stick, he walked into the foyer. Just inside the door was Pearse.
‘I was wondering, Padraig, might I do something for you?’
‘Indeed, sir. Go home to bed.’
‘Seriously, now.’
Pearse looked him over, saw the shaky hands, the lined face, the bent back. He pointed upstairs. ‘I’ll sit you in an armchair and when the British charge, you can light the fuses of the bombs and drop them on their heads.’
MacKenna shook him warmly by the hand and went home to bed.
Just north of O’Connell Street, barricaded in his tall, stately family house in Great North George’s Street, was John Dillon. Aged sixty-five, tall, slender, with dark eyes burning behind his pince-nez, he had a white pointed beard and white hair.
Warning his family to take cover, he peered through an upper window. Lines of women looters were passing below. He saw one of them pushing a pram filled with nothing but boots. What impressed him most was their silence, as if they were absorbed in a deep philosophical exercise.
He had no hope of contacting Redmond in London. Firing was far too fierce for him to venture out.
He had a presentiment that his life’s work was in ruins.
The sun went down in glory as though it had been dynamited, leaving a grape-purple glow in the sky. The air cooled. Smoke began to ascend from thousands of chimneys, mingling its sooty smell with the odours of leaking gas and open sewers in the overcrowded tenements. Behind Palladian facades, the poor were gloating over their booty in the bedlam of their own homes.
On the streets, lamplighters poked their long rods through the hinges of the lampheads, lighting gas burners that hissed and bit blue circles out of the dusk, causing moths and winged shelled creatures of the night to ping and plop against the glass.
Affluent citizens were returning from a day at the sea or the Races into the yellow glare of the city. They were surprised and annoyed to be regularly stopped at Army or rebel checkpoints and told, ‘Hands up. Who won the last race?’
Many, without trams, could not get home at all. Since, in Ireland, everyone is related to everyone else, they spent the night with family in the suburbs.
A car approached from the west. Its two occupants had hired it at Mullingar, fifty miles west of Dublin, when they learned the train line had been pulled up to prevent the movement of artillery from Athlone. One was Oliver St John Gogarty, who had once invited a budding author, James Joyce, to share the Martello Tower at Sandycove for the summer. The other was middle-aged with a tall top hat and grey beard. He was keen to be at the House of Commons next day for an emergency session behind closed doors. This was Laurence Ginnell, Westmeath MP, whose green bedspread was even then flying over the GPO, claiming Ireland for the Irish.
At Cabra, the car’s windscreen was shattered by a bullet. They pulled up as a sixteen-year-old with a rifle stepped out in front of them. He approached with menace, but, seeing they were civilians, he apologized.
‘Sorry, sirs. I was told to shoot at all military cars, and I thought yours was one ’cos of its blazing headlights.’
‘But you could have killed us,’ fumed Gogarty.
‘Like I said,’ the lad returned, ‘I thought you might be British, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt.’
On the other side of the city, approaching Beggar’s Bush Barracks, was a detachment of middle-aged, middle-class Irish reservists in the British defence force. They wore no uniforms, only armbands with GR on, standing for Georgius Rex. They were fondly known as the Gorgeous Wrecks, or God’s Rejects, or the Methuseliers. They were returning from manoeuvres in Kingstown, ignorant of the day’s events. They had rifles but no live rounds.
On Northumberland Road, near the Barracks, they were fired on by de Valera’s men, Malone and Grace, hidden in No 25 opposite. Five were killed and a number wounded.
Ninety survivors made a dash for the Barracks and locked themselves in. They were surprised to find it was empty.
When James O’Connor, still smarting from his episcopal rebuff, reached the Castle at about 7 p.m., he found all the lights dowsed.
Hamilton Norway whispered that troops with fixed bayonets were in the Lower Yard. They were about to go through the Upper Gate and flush out the rebels in the City Hall.
There was a terrific din as machine-guns and rifles opened up, accompanied by exploding grenades.
Inside the Hall, Helena Moloney was amusing her comrades by telling them she had taken a Tommy prisoner. They all went flat as toothpaste on a brush. Bullets streamed in like driven hail. Plaster fell from the ceiling and splinters from walls flew in all directions. Clouds of dust rose so thick they lost sight of one another.
As she lay on the floor, Helena felt a small damp hand placed in hers. She just made out a fifteen-year-old girl employee from Liberty Hall, whose name she
could not remember. She must have slipped in without anyone seeing her.
‘What do you think, Miss Moloney?’ she asked in a calm, thin, high-pitched voice. ‘We cannot give in, can we, Miss Moloney? Mr Connolly said we wasn’t to give in.’
Helena gave her hand a squeeze. ‘No, my dear, we won’t give in.’
On the Hall roof, the rebels returned fire so fast their rifles over-heated and they had to wrap their handkerchiefs around the barrels to prevent blisters.
As the sounds of battle waxed and waned, Norway and O’Connor in the Lower Yard saw women supporters of the rebellion being brought in and examined by torchlight. They had been caught carrying ammunition for the rebels. They were kicking and screeching like Kilkenny cats.
Norway, a Unionist, said, ‘This seems to be the death knell of Home Rule.’
O’Connor, a Nationalist said, ‘To be honest, I don’t know we are fit for it.’
In the Castle’s hospital wing, wounds were being stitched, haemorrhages being stopped. Soldiers were lying on mackintoshes waiting for surgery, with blood pouring out of gaping wounds.
In the gallery, the wounded veterans, after hours of watching at the window, were still mesmerized by the sights, sounds and smells of battle. Nurses moved among them.
‘Back to bed,’ they urged, ‘and I’ll tuck you in,’ a promise old soldiers found irresistible.
At 8.45 p.m., there was a ring on the door of the presbytery of the Pro-Cathedral, a stone’s throw from the GPO.
A lad said, ‘They want Father John O’Flanagan in the Post Office.’
‘Who does?’ asked an irate elder priest.
‘The Commander-in-Chief of the Republic.’
Pearse had learned that quite a few of his men had not made their Easter duties.
The priest was about to slam the door when a handsome young curate with twinkling eyes, wavy hair and a ready smile to which his wide Roman collar gave an added brightness, touched him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll go, Father.’
In the GPO, he was shown into an office behind the lobby. A long line of rebels was waiting to confess.
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