On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Irish republicans seized the General Post Office and other buildings in central Dublin, and proclaimed an Irish Republic outside the Post Office. The British Army brought in reinforcements and artillery, and after six days of street fighting the rebels surrendered on 29 April. Most of the dead were civilians. The rising had little public support at first, but the executions of its leaders that May turned opinion in Ireland toward the republican cause.
A rising planned for all Ireland
The rising was planned by Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and other leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society working inside the nationalist Irish Volunteers, together with the Irish Citizen Army, a workers' militia from Dublin. The National Army Museum notes the background: the British government had passed Home Rule for Ireland in 1914 but put off carrying it out, and talk of linking it to conscription angered Irish nationalists.1
It was meant to be a national rising, but it went wrong before it began. The Royal Navy intercepted a shipment of German arms, and Sir Roger Casement, landed from a German submarine in County Kerry, was arrested. According to Britannica, Eoin MacNeill, the head of the Volunteers, then canceled the mobilization orders, so the rising was confined almost entirely to Dublin, and Pearse and Clarke went ahead with about 1,560 Volunteers and some 200 men of the Citizen Army.2
Easter Monday
On 24 April the rebels occupied the General Post Office on Sackville Street, now O'Connell Street, and other strong points in the city center, and proclaimed the Irish Republic outside the Post Office. The National Army Museum says British intelligence had believed the plot was postponed after the arms were seized, so the army was caught by surprise with only a few troops in Dublin. It took most of a day to organize a response; soldiers were rushed in from the Curragh and from Britain, and martial law was declared across Ireland.3
Six days in the streets
The fighting was hard and confused. The National Army Museum quotes a regimental account of heavy losses as fresh British troops pushed along Northumberland Road toward Mount Street Bridge, and the Glasnevin Trust's count shows that 26 April, the day of that fight, was the British Army's worst of the week, with 30 dead. The rebels were driven back street by street, until only the Post Office remained in their hands. The arrival of British reinforcements and artillery ended the fight there, and on 29 April Pearse surrendered. Glasnevin found that 29 April was also the deadliest day of the rising, with 78 deaths, 45 of them civilians.4
The dead
The figures depend on the source. The Glasnevin Trust's necrology, published in 2015, lists 485 people who died during or as a direct result of the rising. It found that 54 per cent of them were civilians, 26 per cent British soldiers and 16 per cent rebels, with the rest police. The National Army Museum gives 120 British soldiers killed and nearly 400 wounded, around 60 Volunteers and Citizen Army men killed, and more than 180 civilians dead. Both agree that civilians were the largest group of the dead.5
Executions and a change of mood
Many Dubliners were hostile to the rising at first. That changed after the courts martial of May 1916. Britannica counts Pearse and 14 other leaders executed, and the National Army Museum gives 16; Casement was tried separately in London and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916. The executions created wide sympathy for the republicans, and the National Army Museum adds that the internment of more than 1,400 nationalists angered many more. Sinn Féin, which had not organized the rising, came to be identified with it and grew into the leading republican party, and the rising led on to the Irish War of Independence of 1919 to 1921.6 › Battle of Dublin, 1922
Also on this day
- 1945: Battle of Halbe. Near Halbe, south-east of Berlin, the encircled German Ninth Army under Theodor Busse tried to break out west to Walther Wenck's Twelfth Army during the Battle of Berlin.
