Curious Journey - The 1916 Easter Rising [YouTube] [Documentary] In 1973, Kenneth Griffith, the renowned documentary maker, gathered together a group of veterans of the Irish Rising. Almost half a century after the terrible events they lived through, this highly diverse group - branded terrorists by the British in their youth and now highly respected citizens - gave their own vivid account of what it was like to live through those turbulent times.
Related:
- Easter Rising centenary: How the 1916 Insurrection Shaped Modern Irish History. by Rozina Sabur [The Telegraph]
What was the Easter Rising?
On Easter Monday 1916, a group of Irish nationalists staged a rebellion against the occupying British government in Ireland, in an attempt to establish an Irish Republic. The group of rebels hoped to spur the public into rebellion to overthrow the British, but didn't attract much public support.
Who were the key figures?
One of the rebels, Eamon de Valera, evaded a death sentence and dominated Ireland's political landscape, first as Taoiseach, then as president.
Another, Roger Casement, had planned a shipment of German arms and ammunition for the rebels but it was detected by the British shortly before the Rising. Casement was charged with treason and executed in the summer of 1916. Patrick Pearse, was part of the Irish Volunteer Force and played an active role in preparing for the Rising, though it is unlikely he fired any shots. Before his execution he was proclaimed President of the Provisional Government the rebels attempted to establish. Trade union leader James Connolly was a key figure in the pro-independence movement. The image of a wounded Connolly facing a firing squad changed public opinion and was a key contribution to the bitterness against the British in Ireland. Thomas Clarke, a republican revolutionary, had been in favour of armed revolution for most of his life. He spent 15 years in English prisons before his role in the Easter Rising, and was executed after it was thwarted. Seán MacDiarmada, another signatory of the proclamation, was a member of the Military Committee of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Thomas MacDonagh, a political activist poet had also signed the proclamation. A member of the Gaelic League, he was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers with Pearse and Eoin MacNeill. Éamonn Ceannt, another signatory of the proclamation, was on the military committee of the Irish Republican Board. Joseph Plunkett, one of the original members of the military committee also signed the proclamation; largely responsible for the plan the rebels followed during the Easter Rising, his ill health prevented him from having too much active involvement.
What was the backdrop to the unrest?
A crucial moment in Ireland's history, the Easter Rising of April 24, 1916 was predicated on growing tensions between Irish nationalists and the British government. Since the 1800 Act of Union which merged Ireland with the UK and the later potato famine in 1845-47, pressure had been mounting for Home Rule. The Act of Union meant Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and was governed from Westminster. Since its inception Irish nationalists had been staging their opposition to this shift of power. Nationalists lobbied for an arrangement whereby the country remained part of the UK but had some form of self-government. It was not until 1914 that a bill to this effect was passed through Westminster, but its implementation was suspended at the outbreak of the First World War.
- The Bloody Legacy of the Easter Rising, Still Dividing Ireland a Century On. by Tom Rowley [The Telegraph]
On a chilly morning in Dublin, a man wearing nothing but a kilt and a rugby shirt came to honour the founding fathers of one nation, traitors to another. As the seconds passed, he stood still by a memorial to the men, beneath the Irish tricolour, the flag of the state they fought so bloodily to create. When at last he turned away, his eyes were red and his voice strained. "I've got so much respect for those men lying in there," he said, giving his name as Terry. Those men were the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, an armed rebellion against British rule that was quashed in less than a week but that began a series of events culminating in Irish independence six years later. After defeating the rebels, the British executed 14 of them and buried them here, behind the capital's Arbour Hill prison.
- Martyrs With Guns and the Easter Rising by Lawrence Downes [The New York Times]
To me it was a thrilling tale of doomed courage. A handful of rebels rose up in arms to demand independence while Britain was distracted by the Great War. Though the rebellion was swiftly crushed and its leaders executed, it catalyzed Ireland's transformation from oppressed colony to independent republic. How this happened, exactly, was unclear to me. But like anyone raised Roman Catholic, I understood triumph in humiliation, the worship of sacrificial death. The part that seems odd now, but did not then: martyrs with guns. Ireland is marking the centenary of the Rising this year with programs and parades the island over. It does so gingerly, knowing that its path from 1916 to the present day is strewn with agonies: years of civil war and terrorist bloodshed. And though there has been courageous peacemaking, sectarian hatreds still smolder, buried, like a coal-seam fire.
- Easter Rising, Enniscorthy 1916: Writing About a Revolution. [Irish Times]
The 1916 Rebellion began in Enniscorthy in the early morning on the Thursday of Easter week, with the Athenaeum, a building close to the castle in the centre of the town, as headquarters. An emergency hospital and a kitchen were set up by member of Cumann mBan. One member claimed that there were about 70 or 80 women working in the Athenaeum while she was there during Easter week. Some 33 women who participated in the Rising in Enniscorthy were awarded military service pensions in 1934. In the aftermath of the surrender in early May 1916, the majority of Cumann na mBan members avoided imprisonment. Two prominent members, however, were arrested and detained – Kathleen Browne from Rathronan Castle and Nell Ryan from Tomcoole, Taghmon, were imprisoned in Waterford Jail and subsequently detained in Richmond Barracks, Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. Kathleen Browne was released in early June 1916 while Nell Ryan was deported to Lewes Prison, England, in June and was not released until October 1916. The Republican flag was hoisted over the Athenaeum when the rebellion began and saluted with bugler and firing party. The three women who hoisted the flag, members of Cumann nBan, were Greta Comerford, Una Brennan and Marion Stokes. Three writers remember these three women: George O'Brien remembers his grandaunt Greta Comerford, Roddy Doyle his grandaunt Una Brennan and Colm Tóibín his neighbour Marion Stokes.
- 1916: Nursing the Wounds of the Easter Rising by Sinead McCoole [Irish Times]
Nursing staff were on duty in the workhouses in the city during Easter week. The South Dublin Union was a location for the soldiers of the Irish Republic who had taken over the city and declared a Republic. Workhouse hospital nurse Margaret Kehoe (45) was still tending the inmates during Easter week. When she was recorded in the 1911 census she was living in house 10 in the union complex which then housed 3,817 inmates. She was tending a wounded volunteer, Dan McCarthy, outside Acute Hospital 3 on Easter Monday when she was shot. Dan survived but Margaret, who was born in Carlow, was fatally wounded when she went to his assistance.
Margaret Rachel Huxley, the former matron of Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital and founder of the Dublin Metropolitan School for Nurses and also of the international council for nurses was also tending the wounded during the Rising. The year before she had taken over the position as matron of the Dublin University Women's Voluntary Aid Detachment's Hospital at 19 Mountjoy Square. She ran it with the assistance of a matron, two trained nurses with Belgian refugees working in the kitchen. During Easter week she also opened her own private nursing home, on Lower Mount Street, for casualties. Women opened their homes as hospitals at the time. It was recorded that numbers 32 and 35 Fitzwilliam Square were opened as temporary hospitals for those injured during the fighting. The occupier of 32 was Miss Meade, while a Miss Fletcher is listed at 35.
- Why, 100 Years After the Easter Rising, Are Irish Women Still Fighting? by Olivia O'Leary [The Guardian]
It was never just England. It was always Pagan England. When I was a small child at school in Ireland, that was the difference between us. England was pagan, and Ireland was holy. And Holy Ireland had no place for liberated women. So what happened to the promise of equality in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic read out on Easter Monday 1916 by the poet and rebel leader Patrick Pearse, and addressed to "Irishmen and Irishwomen"? The proclamation declared an end to British rule but it also guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens. It made a commitment to universal suffrage, extraordinary for the time, and two years before women in Britain won the vote. Constance Markievicz, the feminist and socialist who played a prominent role in the 1916 rising. So how did the document's message become stifled by a conservative culture obsessed with female chastity and purity, and so terrified of glimpsing the outlines of a woman's body that in the 1950s we were still condemned to conceal ourselves in voluminous cardigans? How did that dream of a radical, free Ireland give way in the succeeding years to Holy Ireland, where generations of women felt they had to hide themselves away?
- The Easter Rising, and a Tale of Two Friends Torn Apart by War. by Daniel Mulhall [The Guardian]
The complexities of that era are well illustrated by the parallel lives of two Irishmen named Thomas who both met violent deaths during that fateful year. Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Kettle were born within two years of each other, in 1878 and 1880. Both men edited nationalist periodicals and supported the cause of votes for women. They sympathised with Dublin's trade unionists during the bitter industrial dispute of 1913. By 1916, MacDonagh and Kettle were published authors, colleagues and friends at University College Dublin, where they both held academic posts. MacDonagh, one of the seven signatories of the proclamation of the Irish republic issued during the Easter Rising, was executed in Kilmainham jail on 3 May 1916, alongside his friend and fellow poet, Patrick Pearse. Four months later, on 9 September, Thomas Kettle died fighting for Britain in the Battle of the Somme. How was it that two such similar individuals could end up on different sides of history? The answer is that they didn't. In fact, they were part of what the late historian Keith Jeffery has termed the "seamless robe of Irish experience" during this period.
- What Should Britain Feel About the Easter Rising? How About Shame? by Kevin Meagher [The Independent]
The centenary of the Easter Rising, the insurrection by Irish republicans in Dublin 100 years ago is a secret history to most people on this side of the Irish Sea. The Easter Rising was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The total loss of control in Dublin, even for just a week, was a wounding humiliation for Britain. If uppity Fenians could bring the second city of the Empire to its knees, nothing would ever be the same again. Revisionist British history has it that, by the standards of the time, and taking into account we were midway through the First World War, their treatment was no worse than what should have been expected. But tying the badly-wounded trade union leader, James Connolly, to a chair in the yard outside Kilmainham Gaol, merely for the pleasure of killing him by firing squad, was as disastrous a piece of public relations then as it sounds now.
- Irish government launches free 1916 Easter Rising e-book. [Irish Central]
Irish Foreign Minister Charlie Flanagan announced last week that the Irish government has provided a gift to the world to mark the Easter Rising's centenary: a free downloadable e-copy of the Royal Irish Academy's book "1916 Portraits and Lives". The book, a winner of the Best Use of Illustration in Design at the 2015 Irish Design Awards, is a collection of 42 short biographies, accompanied by original illustrations by artist David Rooney, of the men and women whose lives helped to shape or were touched by the events of the Easter Rising. It is available to download until March 31 at www.dfa.ie and www.ireland.ie/portraits.
- The 1916 Rising - rarely seen images. [Irish Times]
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