Easter Rising 1916: the week that remade Ireland

For most of Easter week 1916 the center of Dublin was a battlefield. Insurgents held the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street, today O'Connell Street, and a ring of strongpoints around the city. British troops brought up field artillery and a patrol ship on the Liffey, and the people of Dublin were caught between them. When it was over, some 485 people were dead, more than half of them civilians.²

This is the story of the Rising from all three sides: the republicans, the British Army and government, and the Dubliners caught in the crossfire. It belongs to our military history of Ireland, and it opened the revolution that led to the War of Independence and, in 1922, to the Irish Free State.³

What was the Easter Rising?

The Rising was planned in secret by the military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), an oath-bound revolutionary society. Set up in May 1915, it had seven members by April 1916, among them Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, who joined in January. They were to form the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.⁴

The fighting force came from the Irish Volunteers, a nationalist militia, and from the Irish Citizen Army, a small workers' defense force of about two hundred that Connolly commanded from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Transport Union. Members of Cumann na mBan, the women's organization, and of Na Fianna Éireann, the republican youth movement, also turned out. The National Library of Ireland counts all of them among the roughly 1,400 who reported for duty in Dublin on Easter Monday.⁵

Why did the Easter Rising happen?

The planners worked from an old maxim of Irish separatism, that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity: a Britain absorbed in World War I, its armies on the Western Front and beyond, would be weaker at home.⁶

Home Rule, a parliament for Ireland within the United Kingdom, had been postponed when the war began, and men like Connolly feared partition and a Home Rule that would never come. Yet most nationalists still backed John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party, which supported the war effort. Around 200,000 men from Ireland served in the war, among them the 10th (Irish) Division, which suffered heavily at Suvla Bay in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.⁷

The Rising was meant to begin on Easter Sunday, 23 April, disguised as three days of Volunteer field maneuvers ordered by Pearse. Eoin MacNeill, the Volunteers' chief of staff, was kept in the dark and learned the truth only on Holy Thursday, 20 April. A German ship, the Aud, was bringing some 20,000 rifles to the Kerry coast. It failed to make contact with the local Volunteers, was intercepted by the Royal Navy and was scuttled by its captain, and on Good Friday Sir Roger Casement, who had arranged German help, was arrested in Kerry.⁸

MacNeill now cancelled the maneuvers, and on Easter Sunday morning his countermand appeared in the Sunday Independent. The military council met at Liberty Hall and decided to rise a day later, at noon on Easter Monday. The Proclamation was printed that day on the hall's press. J. J. Lee, Pearse's biographer, notes that the original scheme would have brought out about ten times as many Volunteers: what happened instead “was the rising no one planned.”⁹

Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule, had warning enough. The Royal Commission that investigated the Rising found that police reports had given the government “abundant material” to act on many months earlier, yet the chief secretary, Augustine Birrell, seemed by Britannica's account unable to sense any peril. According to the commission, on Easter Sunday the Castle decided to arrest the leaders once enough troops were ready, and early on Monday Birrell agreed. Before anything more was done, the rebellion broke out.¹⁰

What happened on Easter Monday?

By noon the insurgents held their positions across the city. The headquarters party under Pearse and Connolly took the GPO, and outside it Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Addressed to “Irishmen and Irishwomen” and signed by seven men, it guaranteed equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens and promised to cherish “all the children of the nation equally.”¹¹

Around the GPO the battalions of the Dublin Brigade seized a ring of strongpoints: Edward Daly's men in and around the Four Courts, Thomas MacDonagh's 2nd Battalion in Jacob's biscuit factory, Éamon de Valera's 3rd Battalion at Boland's Mill, covering the southeastern approaches over the Grand Canal, and Éamonn Ceannt's 4th Battalion at the South Dublin Union. Michael Mallin, with Constance Markievicz as his second in command, led a Citizen Army detachment at St Stephen's Green.¹²

By General Sir John Maxwell's account, the Dublin Metropolitan Police telephoned at 12.15 p.m. that the Castle was under attack. The Dublin garrison, he wrote, had about 2,400 officers and men fit for action that day, in a reserve cavalry regiment and three infantry battalions, and a picket of 400 set off at once.¹³

The insurgents came close to the Castle but did not take it. A small party shot the policeman at the gate of the Upper Castle Yard, the gates were shut, and they occupied City Hall next door instead. Their leader, Captain Seán Connolly, was shot dead there, and the rest surrendered that night. A column of 1,600 dismounted cavalrymen was ordered up from the Curragh.¹⁴

How did the British Army crush the Rising?

Brigadier General W. H. M. Lowe took command of operations in Dublin, and his first aim was to cut the insurgents apart. A cordon drawn eastward from Kingsbridge station separated the garrisons north of the Liffey from those to the south, and an outer line closed around the city. Martial law was proclaimed in Dublin by the lord lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, and the cabinet in London extended it to the whole of Ireland.¹⁵

Two infantry brigades were rushed over from England to Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire. Most were young Territorials or draft-filling battalions, Maxwell wrote, with no knowledge of Dublin.¹⁶

On Wednesday, 26 April, the army brought up artillery. At 8 a.m. field guns on the south bank of the Liffey and a gun on the patrol ship Helga opened fire on Liberty Hall, and shells and fires soon gutted the east side of Sackville Street.¹⁷

General Maxwell, recalled from Egypt, was appointed commander-in-chief in Ireland on 27 April and arrived early on Friday, 28 April. His biographer Keith Jeffery notes that by then the defeat of the rebels was inevitable.¹⁸

What happened at Mount Street Bridge?

The costliest fight of the week for the British came on Wednesday, 26 April, at Mount Street Bridge over the Grand Canal, on the road from Kingstown into the city. Seventeen Volunteers of de Valera's 3rd Battalion held four posts: Lieutenant Michael Malone and James Grace in No. 25 Northumberland Road, four men in the Parochial Hall, seven in Clanwilliam House on the far side of the bridge, and four riflemen in a builder's yard.¹⁹

Against them came two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters, about 1,750 men by one recent estimate. They attacked through the afternoon and, in Maxwell's words, charged “in successive waves,” taking the posts one by one only by evening. Maxwell reported 4 officers killed, 14 wounded and 216 other ranks killed and wounded. A 2017 study by Brian Hughes, Billy Campbell and Susan Schreibman judges that total exaggerated and puts the toll at 160, 26 dead and 134 wounded, still about half of all British casualties in the Rising.²⁰

Four Volunteers died: Malone at No. 25, and George Reynolds, Patrick Doyle and Richard Murphy at Clanwilliam House.²¹

How did the Rising affect Dublin's civilians?

For Dubliners the week brought hunger, looting and sudden death. Food ran short in the inner city, and going out to find it was dangerous. Looters stripped the shops of Sackville Street and Henry Street. Pearse, appalled, never carried out his own order to shoot looters.²²

Civilians died in the crossfire and under the shells, and some were killed deliberately. On Wednesday Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist writer, and two other men were shot without trial at Portobello Barracks on the orders of Captain J. C. Bowen-Colthurst, whom a court martial found guilty of murder but insane in June.²³

In the North King Street area, where the troops met fierce resistance from insurgents on roofs and behind barricades, soldiers killed civilians in the last days of the fighting. Maxwell wrote that allegations about the conduct of the troops were being most carefully inquired into. The National Library counts what happened there among the atrocities that, with the executions, enraged not only republicans but moderate nationalists.²⁴

How did the Easter Rising end?

By Friday, 28 April, the GPO was on fire. That evening the garrison abandoned it and crossed Henry Street under fire into the houses of Moore Street. The O'Rahilly, a Volunteer leader, was mortally wounded as an advance party tried to clear the way, and died in Moore Lane.²⁵

On Saturday morning five members of the Provisional Government, Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Mac Diarmada and Plunkett, met in Hanlon's fish shop at 16 Moore Street and decided to surrender to prevent further loss of life. Lee writes that Pearse made up his mind after seeing three civilians carrying a white flag shot down. At 12.45 p.m. Elizabeth O'Farrell, a nurse and member of Cumann na mBan, went out under a Red Cross flag to General Lowe, who would accept only an unconditional surrender.²⁶

Pearse surrendered that afternoon. His order, timed 3.45 p.m., said the leaders had agreed to an unconditional surrender “to prevent the further slaughter of unarmed people” and to save their followers' lives, and Connolly countersigned it for the men under his command. Word reached Jacob's, Boland's Mill, the South Dublin Union and the College of Surgeons only on Sunday, 30 April, and they gave up reluctantly. Maxwell recorded surrenders continuing until late on 1 May.²⁷

Who were the leaders of the Easter Rising?

The seven signatories of the Proclamation were Thomas J. Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett. Clarke, the senior figure, signed first, but Pearse, a teacher and writer, was chosen as president, perhaps, Lee suggests, because he was the best communicator among them. Connolly, a socialist and trade union leader, commanded the forces in Dublin as commandant general until he was badly wounded.²⁸

Other commanders mattered as much on the ground: Constance Markievicz at St Stephen's Green and Éamon de Valera at Boland's Mill, with a force of about a hundred. Eoin MacNeill, who had tried to stop the Rising, was nonetheless court-martialed afterward and sentenced to life imprisonment.²⁹

On the British side, Birrell and the under-secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan, ran the Irish administration, Lowe directed the fighting, and from 28 April Maxwell decided the fate of the prisoners.³⁰

How many people died in the Easter Rising?

The official figures, issued in May 1916, counted 300 killed and 997 wounded, but lumped civilians and insurgents together because the authorities could not tell them apart, and more of the wounded died later. Maxwell's despatch put the army's dead at 17 officers and 89 other ranks.³¹

The most careful count is the 1916 Necrology compiled by the Glasnevin Trust, which runs Glasnevin Cemetery: 485 men, women and children killed during the Rising or as a direct result of it. By the Trust's count, 54 percent of the dead were civilians, 26 percent British soldiers and 16 percent insurgents, and the rest police. The Department of the Taoiseach gives a similar picture: over 250 civilians, 130 members of the crown forces and over 60 insurgents. Civilian deaths rose day by day, the Trust found, and peaked on 29 April, the day of the surrender, when 45 civilians died.³²

Who was executed after the Easter Rising, and why?

Maxwell's reasoning was a general's in wartime. According to the National Library of Ireland, in a memorandum to the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, he cited the German connection, the heavy loss of life and the need to deter any repetition, and Jeffery adds that it was widely assumed the Germans had stirred up the Rising. In courts martial held under martial law, 171 people were tried and 90 sentenced to death. Maxwell confirmed fifteen of the sentences.³³

The executions were carried out by firing squad in the Stonebreakers' Yard of Kilmainham Gaol over ten days: Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh on 3 May, then Plunkett, Edward Daly, Michael O'Hanrahan and Willie Pearse on 4 May, John MacBride on 5 May, Ceannt, Mallin, Con Colbert and Seán Heuston on 8 May, and finally Mac Diarmada and Connolly on 12 May. Connolly, badly wounded, was brought from the Red Cross hospital in Dublin Castle. Thomas Kent was shot in Cork on 9 May, and Roger Casement was hanged for treason at Pentonville Prison in London in August, the sixteenth man executed.³⁴

Asquith came to Dublin on 12 May after telegraphing Maxwell that there should be no further executions except in exceptional circumstances, yet Mac Diarmada and Connolly were shot that day. The other death sentences were commuted to prison terms. Their number differs from source to source: about 75 on Jeffery's figures, about 80 in the UK National Archives guide, 97 in the National Library's exhibition. De Valera's sentence, passed on 8 May, was among them.³⁵

Some 3,500 people were arrested across Ireland, by Jeffery's count, most of whom had taken no active part, and some 1,800 to 2,000 were deported to prisons and internment camps in Britain. The National Library calls the camps “virtual academies of sedition,” and Jeffery writes that the mass arrests clearly radicalized many of those involved.³⁶

Why did the Easter Rising matter?

Most Irish people did not support the Rising at first, and many saw in it only carnage and bloodshed. The British response changed that. In the House of Commons John Dillon of the Irish Parliamentary Party protested that there had been “no rebellion or insurrection put down with so much blood and so much savagery.”³⁷

In London the Royal Commission under Lord Hardinge reported on 26 June 1916 that the main cause of the rebellion was that lawlessness had been allowed to grow up unchecked, and it held the chief secretary primarily responsible. Birrell had already resigned amid general condemnation.³⁸

The internees and prisoners, the last of them freed in June 1917, rebuilt Sinn Féin, and in the general election of 1918 the party swept aside the Home Rulers. Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the British parliament and, like all Sinn Féin members, refused to take her seat. In 1919 they met in Dublin as Dáil Éireann, and the War of Independence followed.³⁹

The Rising was not the only cause of that change. The Department of the Taoiseach also points to the plan to impose conscription in 1918, which, it says, “cemented the transformation of Nationalist Ireland,” and the Kilmainham Gaol Museum names the harsh treatment of the leaders, martial law and the conscription attempt together. Lee puts the point about Pearse this way: there would have been a rising without him, but, in terms of public image, not the Rising.⁴⁰

Six years later, men who had fought side by side in Easter week faced each other across the Liffey in the Battle of Dublin, which opened the Irish Civil War.