“We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland under the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years, they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again declaring it arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign, Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast. Now, some of you, I’m sure, will have recognized those words.
Yes. That was, of course, the proclamation of the Irish Republic. It was read out to the people of Dublin about 102 years ago now outside the general post office on O’Connell Street, in a moment that pretty much changed Irish history forever.
Yes, the legacy of that moment has reverberated through the course of Irish history, and it still impacts modern Ireland today.
So today, as you’ve probably guessed by now, we’ll be discussing the Easter Rising of 1916. What led to it? What happened? And what its impact has been?
We’ll also discuss how the concept of 1916 continues to shape current day political debates about what Ireland is and what it should be, especially since the marking of 100 years since the rebellion in 2016.
Before we go there, though, we have to say a special thank you to all of our new Patreon subscribers.
Yes, it’s amazing. You’ve been flooding in and we are so grateful for your support, so anyone who hasn’t signed up yet can head over to www.patreon.com/theirishpassport and you’ll get access to our exclusive extra series Halfpints.
Also, Naomi, on another note, this episode has been sponsored by Mike McQuaid from Scotland. And Mike would like to dedicate the episode to his wife Lindsay and his son Alastair, both of whom are recently the proud owners of shiny new Irish passports.
Great news. Welcome to the club, McQuaids. If you’d like to make a shout out yourself to someone you love or anyone, really, you can find details about how to do that and how to sponsor an episode on our website www.theirishpassport.com.
OK, so let’s get on with the episode. In a nutshell, Naomi, what was this 1916 rising?
In a nutshell, the Easter Rising of 1916 is pretty much modern Ireland’s founding myth. So, it was a rebellion against British rule that began on Easter Monday of 1916 in the middle of the First World War. A few thousand people, both men and women, seized important buildings, mostly in Dublin, and they declared an Irish Republic. They held out for six days until they were driven out by the bombardment of the British Army.
OK, so, and Naomi, now you yourself, you’ve been lucky enough to get a particularly close insight into this since some of our most listeners might already know, you actually made a short documentary about 1916, about two years ago for the national centenary. Listeners, it’s called Granite and Chalk, and I’d really recommend you check it out. We’ll put a link up on the website.
Yeah, I did a couple of 1916 projects, actually, as part of the commemorations. So, I made that documentary Granite and Chalk and I also led a team that essentially liberated a big cache of original documents from the time that were being kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford that kind of told the story of the rebellion in real time.
You know, I think probably one of the most captivating things about this particular event in Irish history is all these incredible historical figures it brings into the mix. Like, there’s some real characters in there, and a lot of them ended up shaping the future of the Irish state throughout the 20th century.
Yeah. And a lot of them live on in the national imagination as like martyr figures. So, the kind of visionary leader of 1916 who many people think of first was a man named Pádraig Pearse. He was a poet and a schoolteacher who was famous for inspiring people with fiery orations. He had some pretty lurid ideas about blood sacrifice being necessary to revive the nation. And we should remember that this was very much the mainstream of political rhetoric at the time. So this was in the middle of the First World War and all of Europe was throwing itself into an orgy of killing and dying. So this was very much the zeitgeist.
The 1916 rebellion was a very violent event. The rebel army was ultimately defeated, of course, but not before the city centre of Dublin was blown to pieces, really. In practical terms, the Rising itself never really had a chance of succeeding militarily. You now, the rebels were ridiculously outnumbered, and they were outgunned. But in another way, Pearce’s idea of blood sacrifice strangely came to fruition, because the symbol of this failed rebellion nonetheless changed the course of Irish politics in a really radical and irrevocable way. Like there was no going back really in Ireland after 1916.
Exactly. It was success through failure. So before we get to the battle, let’s put ourselves in Ireland in 1916. So, at the time Ireland was ruled by a British administration of civil servants at a Dublin castle and a governor who was appointed by the British king. It was is a poor place, largely agricultural, and it’s a place of sectarian divisions, so there’s a big disconnect between the mostly poor Catholic majority and the Protestant elites. All people at the time who were known to be of nationalist sentiment, are surveyed by a quasi-military police force called the Royal Irish Constabulary. And there’s a strong underlying resentment towards the representatives of British authority, which you can see in a kind of low-level prevalent anarchy, which was around the country. So, people would just not comply with authorities. Like, for example, it was really difficult to prosecute crime because Irish juries would often side with the accused and they’d refuse to convict.
Right. And in the countryside and in the cities, there was this very deep resentment and anger among many ordinary people about what was seen as Westminster’s consistent incompetence, really, in ruling Ireland. Now, remember as well that this is in within living memory of the Great Hunger, the great famine. The country’s population had now fallen more or less to about half of what it had been some 50 years previously. And with that, the language had been lost, a society. Traditional society had been decimated in all sorts of areas. And of course, there had been mass emigration. And that’s a really important element here. Emigrants abroad were often the ones who had borne the greatest brunt of Britain’s historical misgovernment of Ireland. And it’s not surprising that in emigrant communities there was a major kind of locus of revolutionary radicalism. Like many of these people had lost everything before they left. And of course, they were now on the receiving end of this whole new wave of anti-Irish sentiment — in Britain and America, they would have been faced with some pretty hateful attitudes to the Irish and to Irish culture in general. And that would have added plenty of fuel to this radical fire.
And yet they’d had to leave Ireland, so they’d lost their homes. They, you know, they’d lost everything. And in the 1860s, you see the rise of Republican revolutionary groups among Irish immigrants, like the Fenian Brotherhood. And in Ireland, they had a kind of counterpart called the IRB or Irish Republican Brotherhood. And they became a kind of established secret military organization. And they believed that the only way to guarantee Ireland’s freedom was through violent revolution. And groups like this were very often funded by emigrants abroad who were sending money back into Ireland.
These were people who wanted an Irish republic that was outright independence, right. So, a totally independent nation, not part of the British Empire, but, of course, at this stage before 1916, IRB supporters were very much in the minority, right?
Yeah, very much the minority. The mainstream political expression of nationalism had for decades been the home rule movement. So this was a peaceful, very popular campaign to reverse the Act of Union that had joined Ireland to the U.K. in 1800 and re-establish an Irish parliament in Dublin. And to do it all legally, you know, by electing MPs that would go to Westminster and achieve this through political action.
Okay. Yeah. So, if this home rule were to be enacted then Ireland would we would have become a self-governing state within the British Empire and the Irish politicians in Westminster would have moved back to Dublin and they would have gotten the chance to run the country themselves, which, of course, a lot of them really wanted.
Yeah. On the face of it, it solves a lot of problems. So, the Act of Union had pretty much been a terrible failure since the beginning. And the so-called Irish question from a British point of view was a very annoying and unending debate that just clogged up Parliament incessantly. So, home rule would have allowed Ireland to remain part of the empire, like the British wanted, but it also would have satisfied many Irish people who were incessantly agitating for greater autonomy.
Right. And home rule was very appealing to a broad majority of the Irish population. Like it a made a lot of sense, really. Ireland had already function like this before 1800. And this was how a lot of people in Westminster saw it, too. And so the Liberal Party in Westminster generally wanted to get home rule just done and over with. You know, they wanted to wash their hands of this whole time-consuming business. But, then the Conservative Party in Westminster — whose full name still is let’s remember, the Conservative and Unionist Party — they were against home rule on principle. So, the conservatives, they controlled the House of Lords and through this, they were able to block legislation again and again on this matter. So, by the 1910s, the whole issue of home rule had become a bit of a political football, which really frustrated the Irish nationalists. And then even worse, in about 1912, Ulster Unionists signed a covenant against home rule, saying that they would never accept it. And they even created an anti-home rule militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had the effect of suddenly militarizing this whole issue.
OK. So, that’s how things stood in politics in a snapshot. So, let’s zoom in on Dublin. Now, this was a major metropolis at the very heart of the British Empire. But it was also a place of appalling poverty. So, Dublin was home to some of the worst slums in Europe at this time. The city was full of these huge 18th century mansions that had been transformed into tenements all over the city. And it’s not surprising that in 1913 we see a mass labour movement among Dublin factory workers who were attempting to unionize.
And this culminated in 1913 into a huge and violent industrial dispute in Dublin known as the Dublin lock-out. And some of the leading protesters of that industrial dispute, who we’ll hear from later, like James Connolly and James Larken, they formed a worker’s militia in Dublin known as the Irish Citizen Army. Now, importantly, those striking workers in Dublin, they were being supported by some major, nationalist figures at the time. So, these two causes became kind of intertwined in many ways.
So, we already have three major political strands emerging here: so, there’s a secret, radical Republican movement; there’s a mainstream push for self-government; and there’s also a working-class socialist movement in the cities.
Right. And this is amid loads and loads of other movements that are emerging at the time. There were the suffragettes and Cumann na mBan, for instance, which was a women’s nationalist paramilitary organization. There were the Irish volunteers, another nationalist militia set up in response to the Ulster Covenant. And then there were a whole host of cultural organisations that were really shaping people’s political and cultural opinions of Ireland at this time.
Yeah, the kind of glue that holds all of this together is the emerging idea of Ireland at the time, which was promoted by cultural revivalists at all levels of society. So, the Irish cultural revival would become hugely important to 1916. So, Tim, let’s hear a little bit more about that movement with your report.
“Oh, down the hill I went one morn. A lovely maid I spied. Her hair was bright as the dew that wet. Sweet banners seldom tied…”
Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century was a political powder keg. The Great Famine, some 50 years earlier, continued to cast a dark and unmovable shadow over all aspects of life on the island. Emigration had emptied the country of generation after generation, and across the country the sheer scale of poverty and unrest had proved unsolvable for successive governments in Westminster.
The appearance of Fenian Brotherhood across the international diaspora had consolidated Ireland as a fundamental problem at the heart of the British Empire. The incarnation of this Irish problem was the home rule movement, a momentous campaign for self-government in Ireland which had come to dominate all aspects of Irish politics by the turn of the century. In the background of all this, however, another remarkable movement was already gathering pace, the Irish cultural revival. Rather than focusing on political independence, this growing circle of Gaelic revivalists sought to reclaim Irish culture from the colonial gaze, to claw back the linguistic and artistic heritage that had almost been lost forever during the famine, and to start valuing Irish-ness by the standards of the Irish themselves, not the patronising gaze of an imperial neighbour. The Irish cultural revival would not just become a landmark movement of post-colonial cultural nationalism but would provide the very foundations for a full-scale revolution.
The Gaelic revival of the 1890s, spearheaded by Hyde and the Gaelic League, was an incredibly important cultural movement. Obviously, it’s a delayed reaction to the famine and all the humiliation and migration it brought in its wake. But it’s more than that. It’s about saying that something that was a badge of dishonour, the Irish language, could become the proudest thing.
That’s the voice of Dr. Declan Kiberd whose recent book After Ireland Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present follows on from his series of seminal studies examining the invention of Ireland as an idea over the last century.
In many ways, the cultural revivalists preceded all political movements and helped indeed to create them. As Patrick Pearse said in 1916 during The Rising, “This wouldn’t have happened without the Gaelic League. We have all been to school in the Gaelic League.” I think in Ireland the cultural revolution preceded all others, and this is, of course, very different from most other countries.
The Gaelic League was established in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and presided over by Douglas Hyde — a man who eventually would go on to become the first president of Ireland’s independent state. But who were these people? And how exactly did they intend to revive Irish culture among its ordinary citizens? I asked Dr. Timothy McMahon, a lecturer at Marquette University and author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival in Irish Society 1893 to 1910.
The standard, older histories suggested that it was primarily a middle-class movement, suggesting in many ways almost, you know, posh people. But my research has shown that the Gaelic revival actually appealed to a much wider section of the Irish population, especially in cities like Dublin. While you certainly had middle class people, clerks, men and women who worked in what we would call middle class jobs — teachers, civil servants — you also have skilled workers, people who are members of unions. It was a really broad swath of the population that at least joined for short periods of time in the Gaelic League.
The primary aim of the League was to build up a new idea of Ireland in the minds of the Irish people not as a backward province at the periphery of the United Kingdom but as a centre of culture in its own right. This very act of moving the gravity of Irish culture from London to Dublin, they were effectively, as Declan Kiberd suggests, inventing an entirely new nation.
To find out what the invention called Ireland was you have to ask the English. And basically, they created a series of binary opposition that, you know, the English were rational, the Irish were irrational. The English were analytical, the Irish were impulse ridden. And for all of these negatives, the Gaelic revivalists substituted positive words. Like instead of saying “irrational”, they would say “instinctual.” They would take a negative stereotype and give it a positive spin. And the ultimate version of this is, of course, that the Irish language, rather than being a sign of backwardness, is the future. It’s very like what would happen in America in the 1960s and 70s when African Americans said black is beautiful, we will take a badge of shame, but we will wear it with pride. I think in some ways it’s anticipatory of liberation movements across the world in the 20th century.
Within just four years, the Gaelic League had already established 400 branches across the country. With festivals and competitions, it fought against anglicization in villages and towns, putting on plays and holding debates in Irish, while challenging locals to learn the language, ready to come back to the next festival and show off what they had achieved. These events were hugely popular and were soon attracting massive numbers.
The first of the great festivals was the Oireachtas in 1896-1897, and they were trying to create an Irish festival of language and music and begin to build up as an annual event where people from Gaelic League branches from around the country could come together and show off what they have learned over the year. And indeed, some people might go on to become, you know, a published author. They would put on different contests, some speaking or recitation. Some would be, you know, write an original poem or an essay on a particular subject. There might be dancing. There might be musical contests as well. And then at the end of the week after people had shown their skills, the winners would be declared in a grand event. What you start to see happening by the turn of the 20th century is all over the country local branches of the League will coordinate with each other to have their own local version of the Oireachtas. So they’ll have these feiseanna, literally all over the island and by the end of the first decade of the 1900s. You see a regular circuit of these things starting in the spring and then they would they would take place at different sites around the country. Some of these things drew as many as 10,000 spectators. And by bringing in people who were not associated with the revival as spectators, they’re exposing a wider group of the population to the work of the revival. It has that wonderful PR effect.
In parallel to the Gaelic League, an Irish literary revival sprung up amongst the country’s intellectuals, turning away from British conventions and looking instead to the grand traditions of Irish history. This decentring of cultural authority made Ireland and particularly Dublin, a capital of literary innovation at the time. The playwright John Millington Syne, for instance, journeyed West to become fluent in the English-spoken by native Irish speakers, capturing and celebrating the unique lyrical rhythm of the Aran islanders. To put this in perspective, at around this same time, British anthropologists were digging up skeletons from the graveyards of these same islands, trying to prove that the natives there were a biologically inferior people. The ascendancy landowner Lady Augusta Gregory co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, specifically for the production of revivalists plays. Her big house in County Galway was transformed into something of an international literary salon for Ireland’s new generation of revivalist writers. Looming large over them all was William Butler Yates, whose modernist poetry would, of course, later win him a Nobel Prize. In many ways, Yates idea of Ireland became imbued with the entire nationalist project. It is his words that would later become the literary emblem of the revolution, proclaiming in his poem Easter 1916, “a terrible beauty is born.”
Words are the ultimate weapons of a disarmed people. Writing is often, as Toni Morrison, among other African American writers, have said, it’s an alternative means of seizing power. And it is in some ways, as Alice Walker said, an alternative to the sin of violence. So I think what happened was that people thought, if you like, cultural self-sufficiency through the word, through painting, through sculpture and music that might have been enough, indeed. But because of the particular circumstances of the time, it was as if the notion of, say, a Gaelic Ireland began to strike some leaders as unattainable without, if you like, political freedom. Without the political freedom to administer a Gaelic education system, etc. etc. Pearse summed this up when he said he wanted an island not merely free, but Gaelic; not merely Gaelic, but free. I would say that Yates is the leading inventor, if you like, of modern Ireland. I remember when I was growing up in Ireland in the 60s and 70s, I used to feel almost resentment towards them as if I was walking around in a film set that he had invented. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that the island that emerged was one as he imagined. And then to a great extent, made incarnate or caused other people, including a political intelligentsia, to make incarnate. And Oliver Gogarty put this very well, actually, when he was speaking to the first Irish Seanad. He stood up and he said we would not be here if senators were it not for the writings of W.B. Yates. And I think in that sense, he was thinking the literal truth.
Go hide your clothes, ye roses red. And droop ye lilies rare. For you must pale for very shame before a maid so fair. Said I “Dear maid, will you be my bride?”
The Gaelic revival began to attract increasing criticism partly from police who worried about its subversive undertones, but also from the Catholic Church, who highly disapproved of its relatively liberal attitude to women.
The police are watching everything for fear that any group might actually be subversive and so you’ll see reports in the winter months they’ll say, well, you know, not much is really happening they don’t seem to be very active. By which they mean they’re not marching around and protesting something. What the Gaelic League referred to the winter months as was their quiet season. The quiet season was when people would go, and they would they would study the language.
The criticism in the early days came mainly from Anglo-Irish professors at Trinity College Dublin, especially Classicists, who believed that maybe Irish would become a substitute classicism studied in the schools and that it would be impregnated not just with the values of a narrow-gauge nationalism, but also with a very narrow-gauge Catholicism. Now, I think those criticisms at the time were pretty much preposterous. Hyde, who himself was Protestant and many other Gaelic leaguers, had a very ecumenical vision of the Gaelic tradition and how it would liberate Ireland.
What was most radical about was that they showed Irish men and women, and I mean that men and women, that they could participate in a society that was different from the one they were being presented every day. Within the Gaelic League, you were much more likely to hear anti-imperial rhetoric than you were in the general population. You were more likely to hear even people who were churchgoing Catholics challenge the power of the Catholic priest. There were a number of occasions when Gaelic League lay people clashed with the priest who was maybe president of their branch because he was trying to keep classes separate. Men in one class, women in another. And they said, no, that’s not who we are. The League presented a view of Ireland that was fundamentally different on gender. Women often performed what we might think of as stereotypically female roles. But at a time when women were denied the vote and when women weren’t allowed to sit on, you know, executive committees of various organisations, the League provided them that chance. In many ways, it was cutting edge. Women were integral to the movement. The Gaelic League was one of these sites where Ireland’s women had the chance to not just become politicized, but also to express themselves.
Subversive, as it might have seemed to the authorities, the Gaelic League had always maintained a strictly non-political status. This was partly in order to broadcast their cultural message to as many people as possible. Language revival was not just popular among Catholic nationalists, but also among Protestant unionists. The language was seen by the organisers as something that both communities could celebrate in common. As the home rule crisis deepened, however, and as Ulster men and women began to militarize against self-government, the revivalist political stance began to harden. In the years before 1916, it became a centre for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who sought to turn the Gaelic League into an overtly nationalist organization.
Without question, the vast majority of members, probably a higher percentage of members, in fact, almost certainly a higher percentage of members were home rulers. You do, however, have a small percentage of members of the Gaelic League who were unionists, especially in the north. The president of the Gaelic branch in Belfast, Dr John Sinclair Boyd, was a unionist. The politicization of the organisation becomes, you know, much more overt in the run up to 1916. You have people who were who were Republicans and who were IRB members who were very active in the Gaelic League, the most important probably being Patrick Pearce. I mean, Pearce was the editor of the Gaelic League’s weekly newspaper for six years. The politicisation that takes place is frankly part of the radicalising of Irish politics more generally that’s happening at the time of the third Home Rule Bill and the Home Rule crisis. In August of 1915, because the difficulty of travelling to a national Congress, which was always held in conjunction with the Oireachtas literary festival. The difficulty of travelling often meant that a branch, let’s say from West Kerry, might not be able to send somebody to Dublin for a week. You could designate a proxy to represent your branch. And what you see happening in 1915 is the IRB essentially collects a bunch of people they see as safe voters who will vote for their way of thinking and they offer them up as proxies. And so you have a bunch of people who really have no affiliation with the Gaelic League who come to the Ardfheis, which was held in Dundalk that year, they changed the Constitution to adopt a call for a free Ireland.
The politicization of the Gaelic league in 1915, in the words of W.B. Yates, changed things utterly for the Irish cultural revival. Within a year, it would be at the centre of Dublin’s greatest military uprising in 1916. A few years later, it would find itself laying the foundations of a new Irish free state, setting out the cultural course of a brand-new nation. The effects of this movement are embedded in the very fabric of modern Irish culture and there is something unique about it. It’s a nationalist movement that consistently looked outward. It was a traditionalist movement that didn’t shy away from smashing conservative taboos. And there is always that same desire to revive something ancient combined with a deep, inexorable thirst for something new.
I’ve always believed that the Gaelic League and indeed the raising itself, where instances of modernity of almost, as I say modernism avant la lettre. I mean, women fought as soldiers in the Easter Rising. Obviously, there were no women in the Imperial Army they fought. But equally, the proclamation promised to cherish all the children of the nation equally. In other words, it promised a welfare state decades before such a thing emerged in Scandinavian countries, in Britain and in France. To me, the forward-looking element of these movements is often forgotten by historians who accuse them of nostalgia. When the Irish appear to be looking back, they’re actually often looking forward.
“Yes, I will be your own dear bride. And I know that you’ll be true.” Then sighed in my arms, and all her charms were hidden in the foggy dew.
So, Naomi, as we’ve seen, Ireland was in political and social upheaval just before the 1916 Rising with all these various militia groups and all these cultural ideas of a new Ireland. But how do all these diverse movements lead into insurrection in Dublin?
OK, so here is how it went down. This is your potted history of the Easter rising.
OK. Right. Let’s do it.
Alright. So, I’m going to start with the Irish Volunteers. Now, you mentioned them briefly, Tim. They were civilian militia that was founded in 1913 to defend the idea of home rule.
Now, the Irish Volunteers was a pretty big group. I mean, by 1914 we’re talking about some 200,000 Irish Volunteer members.
Yes. And those Irish volunteers were training. So, they were marching, and they were drilling on the streets and they were getting whatever weapons that they could. But they actually weren’t initially founded to be a rebel army. So, their leaders were constitutional nationalists. They were the guys who wanted an Irish parliament with limited powers won through Westminster.
But the whole time, this Irish volunteer militia was being infiltrated with more radical individuals. I suppose that’s not really so different to what was happening in the Gaelic League.
Yes, exactly. They were infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. So these were revolutionary radicals who saw the potential of this militia. And behind the scenes, they started putting their people in key positions of command within it. But the really decisive thing that happened was the First World War.
OK, so famously, of course, the First World War required an unprecedented supply of soldiers. And Irish recruits were a really precious resource for the British army at this time. You see loads of posters from the time trying to convince Irishmen to fight for Britain in World War I was ultimately to fight for the security of Ireland. But of course, lots of people in Ireland were pretty sceptical about this, too.
Right. So, what the first outbreak of the First World War does is one, it delays the enactment of home rule, which was actually passed. The second thing it does is it causes the Irish Volunteers to split. So, the milder nationalists who wanted home rule, they were led by an Irish MP called John Redmond, and he called on the whole body of the Irish Volunteers to sign up to fight for Britain in the First World War. So, the argument was that this would actually show how loyal Ireland was and how much it deserved home rule.
So, essentially to fight for Britain would be, by proxy, to fight for home rule.
Yeah. Exactly. And John Redmond also thought that joining the British army would unify Ireland’s internal divisions because nationalists and unionists would be fighting together in the trenches. And my own great grandfather was one of these, by the way.
[skipto time=31:57] Naomi O’Leary
:
Wow. Alright. I didn’t know that, actually. I mean, lots of people’s great grandfathers would have been part of that group. The history of Irish soldiers in World War I has, until recently enough, has been kind of quashed in the Irish nationalist narrative. There were over 200,000 men who left to fight with the British over the course of World War I. Now, of course, Naomi, there was another by-product then of this sending of volunteers off to the trenches that I suppose Redmond hadn’t really foreseen.
Yeah, exactly. So it divided the Irish volunteers. The moderate nationalists were shipped off to war and it kind of left a distilled group of radicals, the ones who didn’t want to fight for Britain, behind. There was this idea that England’s difficulty could be Ireland’s opportunity – a famous phrase. So, the secret plotters led by the IRB, wanted to use the First World War as an opportunity to launch a rebellion in Ireland.
OK. So, at this point, listeners, you might be wondering where all this talk of rebellion is coming from. I mean, after all, home rule had already been passed in government, like you said, Naomi. And even though it had been suspended for the duration of the war, there was now this understanding that once the British won the war, Ireland would get self-governance within the empire. So, why would a rebellion be necessary? Well, firstly, not everyone was confident that the British would keep their promise on this. Remember, a home rule had already been thwarted three times by Westminster conservatives in the Lords over the previous 30 years. This had already taken a long time and it had come to nothing. And this time the Conservatives were backing these militant unionists in the north who were essentially threatening civil war if home rule were to be enacted after the war. So self-government was very much not in the bag just yet, by any means. Even more importantly, for the radical nationalists like the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the IRB, home rule just wasn’t good enough. You know, they were coming from the Republican tradition of 1798 and the Fenian uprisings and they weren’t going to settle for anything less than a fully independent republic with total political severance from the U.K. and from the empire. And the thing is, the political climate at this time, like we’ve seen, was actually quite receptive to ideas like this. Not only was there all this cultural and political unrest in Ireland, but all across Europe, there were borders changing and regimes falling all over the place. So the idea of the Irish seizing total power of Ireland and transforming it into this long dreamed of republic was particularly appealing at this very moment in time.
So, everywhere this atmosphere of revolutionary fervour was building. The Irish Volunteers were marching in increased numbers and looking increasingly professional and as well, the Irish Citizen Army, that workers militia in Dublin, they were still going strong. And so much so that their leader, James Connolly, was brought in on the secret plot because the IRB were afraid that he might pre-empt them with his own rebellion.
Right. OK. So, immediately there are multiple rebel groups getting involved here. Now, it’s important to note that for the British, an independent republic was a whole other kettle of fish to home rule. You know, for a lot of them, home rule was already bad enough, but Westminster could absolutely 100 percent not tolerate the proclamation of a republic in Ireland. This was a moment when the British Empire was at its height. And, you know, if like little impoverished, ostensibly backward Ireland were to successfully break out of the empire, this wouldn’t just have been a huge humiliation for Britain, but it would have given all sorts of really dangerous ideas to the other colonies. We shouldn’t forget either that the idea of a Republican revolution in particular, you know, also conjured up all these moments in history that were not good for Britain in their memory. You know, the American Revolution, for instance, or the French Revolution or 1798. So, like the idea of a republic would never be up for negotiation in Parliament, like home rule was, and the rebels knew that their republic could only come about through a violent insurrection. OK. So, Naomi, Britain has at this point more or less been emptied of its best and brightest soldiers. They’re all off, fighting in France. So, if there was a moment ever to strike for revolution, you know, this was the time.
Exactly. So, the rebellion was planned for Easter Sunday, 1916. But at the last minute, it almost completely fell apart. So, that Friday, two days before the big day, a shipment of guns from Germany that was destined for the rebels was seized by British authorities coming into County Kerry. So, I mean, the British administration was thrown into absolute alarm at this discovery and they knew something was afoot, so they began drawing up plans to arrest all of the known nationalist leaders. And as well, the founder of the Irish Volunteers and the militias’ chief of staff Eóin MacNeill, he’d actually been kept in the dark about what was planned. He was one of those peaceful constitutional nationalists, the home rulers.
OK. Right. So, that’s the same on Eóin MacNeil, of course, who co-founded the Gaelic League.
Yeah. That guy.
Who we heard about in the report. Yeah.
Yeah. He got wind of the rebellion now, and he was convinced that what would happen was they would just be a disastrous failed affair with no weapons, because they hadn’t arrived, and home rule could be jeopardized. So, he had an announcement published in the papers telling the volunteers that all marches for the weekend were off and they were not to go out on Easter Sunday. It caused mass confusion. So a core of rebels organized themselves to rebel anyway, to go at anyway, but a day late on Easter Monday. But the result was that much fewer people took part than they had planned because of all the contrary instructions that were flying around. And it meant that rather being a whole country-wide rebellion, as was planned, it was mostly confined to Dublin. Outside the capital, except for in Wexford, where there was a rebellion, people were mostly like rushing about in confusion and trying to find out what was going on.
OK, so here we are. It’s Easter Monday in Dublin then. Half of the rebels haven’t showed up at all because of that newspaper announcement. The other half have been earmarked already for arrest by the British. So this is, looks like it’s going to head straight for disaster. And of course, the centre of British intelligence in Ireland at the time was in Dublin Castle. For listeners who don’t know Dublin, Dublin Castle is this huge, big, bureaucratic complex. It had been the seat of British rule in Ireland since the first Norman conquest. It’s ancient, and it still was the seat of British rule in 1916. So, it’s right here then that some of the first rumblings of the uprising break out just as these authorities were uncovering the plans for rebellion.
Yes, exactly. So just as British authorities inside Dublin Castle were literally signing the papers for communications to be shut down for civilian use and for a mass roundup of nationalists, shots rang out below their window.
They were too late.
Too late. So, a faction of rebels attacked Dublin Castle. Another faction seized the general post office, the city’s communications hub. And other battalions seized very strategic buildings around the city.
Right. And for our listeners, the GPO, the general post office, was and is one of the biggest public buildings in the city. It’s this grand grey neoclassical edifice. It’s right in the middle of O’Connell Street. That’s the city’s main thoroughfare. And this was a building that would soon become synonymous with the 1916 Rising. Originally, there would have been a Union Jack flying from the mast there, you can see it in no photographs. But this was soon replaced by the rebels with the flag of the Irish Republic. And it was here, of course, that the poet and orator Pádraig Pierce, read aloud this proclamation of the Irish Republic to the people of Dublin.
The provisional government of the Irish Republic to the people of Ireland. Irish men and Irish women: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
And because of its key role in the Rising, the GPO really is still considered a kind of totemic monument to the Irish Republic today. So, Naomi, the official figure then for the number of people who took part in the rebellion is, I have this in front of me, 2558. And that’s in contrast, I understand, to about 20,000 British troops who were sent in to crush the Rising. So, there’s about 10 British soldiers for every rebel. Could you tell us maybe, like who are these rebels, and could we go through a few of them?
Yeah, I’ll introduce a selection of the characters and they represent some of the different strands who were involved. So right now on Easter Monday, just beside Dublin Castle, having failed to seize it and holed up in city hall instead is Helena Moloney. So, Helena is 33. She’s the daughter of a grocer and she became a nationalist after hearing Maud Gonne speak. So, that’s Maud Gonne the cultural revivalist and famously the muse of W.B. Yates. So, Moloney had been already arrested earlier in her life for smashing up a portrait of George V and she was a veteran of the Dublin lock-out in 1913. She was also a member of Cumann na mBan, the women’s counterpart to the Irish Volunteers, and James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, so she was very, very close to the rebellion organizers and she knew from the atmosphere in the citizen army’s headquarters, Liberty Hall, over the weekend that something was going to go off. So the night before the rebellion, she slept in Liberty Hall and she was given the stack of freshly printed Proclamation of Independence copies to keep under her pillow. And she was armed with a revolver.
Oh my god. Alright. What an image. I mean, every step of this is filled with so much drama. Helena Moloney actually survived the Rising and she gave an interview to the state broadcaster RTÉ in 1966 during what was then the 50th anniversary commemorations.
Now, in this clip Moloney describes the storming of the castle led by Sean Connolly. And she also describes, if we listen carefully, an encounter with the pacifist and feminist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. He doesn’t have long to live when she meets him because not long after this encounter, he was rounded up and summarily executed by an out-of-control British officer.
Let’s take a listen to that.
My little party under a young captain called Sean Connolly, no relation of James Connolly at all. He was a young captain, a young actor that I knew very well. We started all to attack Dublin Castle, that was our orders. The girls’ roles were all served out with revolvers. I had my own. Connolly led us around to the gate and the century, the British century, who was inside in his box, saw us. Surprised, and I suppose electrified, he you rushed forward and he banged the gates in our faces just in the nick of time, to shut us out. So, Sean Connolly, who had been trapped in the City Hall, which is practically part of Dublin Castle, knew all the ropes and got a look at a side gate, tiny side gate there, opened, had keys or something. Anyhow, there was no difficulty about it. Rushing in, girls and men together, into the city hall and all. And I and some of the girls went up to the very top, looking for the kitchen, which we wanted to arrive at in order to take care of the commissariat for the men, and a place for wounded, if any. And then the cross firing continued, very rapidly. Sean Connolly asked me to go over to the GPO to ask for reinforcements. And I went out, and down Gaines Street, and there I met Francis Sheehy-Skeffington in the middle, walking up Gaines Street, very, very perturbed looking, very agitated and perturbed looking. But quite calm, he was walking the middle of the road, taking no notice of the bullets no more as if they were rain drops. But looking terribly perturbed, looking up at the houses and the roofs where the fighting men were, both British and Irish. He was very brave. He was a pacifist. He always said, I’m ready to die for Ireland but I will not kill for Ireland — that was his slogan. And soon after that Sean Connolly was hi. He was hit somewhere in the body. So I dispatched one of our girls up to Stephen’s Green where Dr Kathleen Lynn was with Michael Mallin. She was a medical officer of the Citizen Army. And she came down and up and examined Sean Connolly and looked very serious. And she said, I’m afraid he’s going. And in a few minutes, he did go. I knelt beside him saying prayers into his ear. And his little brother, younger brother, about 15, was crying bitterly, oh so bitterly, by his side. So Sean passed. Very sad and very noble death.
So the head of the command in Dublin was James Connolly. So, James Connolly was a 47-year-old former cobbler and former British soldier who became a trade unionist and leading socialist thinker and organizer. He wasn’t actually born in Ireland. He was born in Edinburgh in an Irish immigrant slum, and he only moved to Ireland as an adult. But like we mentioned, he was one of the founders of the Irish Citizen Army in the wake of the Dublin lock-out. And through his activism, he’d become more and more Republican, so more in favour of outright Irish independence. His ideas were also radically egalitarian. It was on his insistence that the Proclamation be addressed to Irish men and Irish women, and that it also recognized votes for women because, of course, men and women worked on equals together in his Irish Citizen Army.
OK, right. And of course, address this proclamation to Irish men and Irish women on an equal keel at a time when women didn’t have the vote was a really radical thing to do, I suppose. So, James Connolly is the one who is manning the GPO then?
He’s more than that. So Connolly was the Commander in charge of the whole rebellion in Dublin, and pretty much by default then the whole rebellion. So by all accounts, he was a very formidable leader. So he set up rebel command within the GPO and he coordinated the rebellion by issuing commands to the other rebel strongholds. And these were messages that were, you know, tucked into the dresses of women who would go through the streets of Dublin, through the barricades.
Right. OK. So, there were other rebel leaders with him in the GPO?
Yes, of course. So, alongside Connolly in the GPO is, for example, Thomas Clarke. So Thomas Clarke is like the granddaddy of the whole rebellion. He’s 58. He was born in Tyrone and he’s an old Fenian. So, he was he was involved in a Republican bombing campaign in London in the 1880s.
Wow.
So, he spent a lot of time in prison. And he was then in America. And he moved to Dublin then. And he opened a tobacconist shop and this tobacconist became like the unofficial plotting HQ of the Easter Rising, so everybody dropped by, you know. And he was the senior leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and basically schemer number one behind the Easter Rising.
Okay. All right. And of course, Thomas Clarke is the first name right among the signatories of that famous proclamation.
Right. And meanwhile, over in Stephen’s Green, we have Countess Markievicz.
Of course.
So, Markievicz is Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Very different background to the others we’ve mentioned. So, she was born into the Gore-Booth family with a big estate out in Sligo. She’s called Markievicz, though, because she married a Polish Count and she was a key figure in Gaelic revival circles. She used to, you know, act and plays and kind of rub shoulders with all the leading cultural figures of the day. And as the years went on, she became increasingly politically radical. So she founded a nationalist boy scouting organization called Fianna Éireann, which she used to help ferry guns into Ireland.
Oh god.
And she was also as well, a veteran of the lock-out. So, she helped run the kitchens and distribute food to the striking workers. So, just for a taste of what Markievicz was like, she told a class of women students in 1909, quote, “Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank and buy a revolver.” And she followed her own advice and she marched out on Easter Monday to fight with the rebels in Stephen’s Green.
Oh my God. Right. OK. Just another like explosion of colourful character here. And Markievicz is such a fascinating figure. I’ve seen these really kind of flabbergasted newspaper reports from just after the Rising. And they all have her on the front page. You know, and one of them –I think it’s The Daily Mirror — it proclaims, “The involvement of a Larkinite Countess and a Rebel Chauffeur in the Same Rebellion.” But, Naomi, so, it’s pretty interesting that we already, among these figures, we already have two very prominent women. And we heard earlier that the cultural revival was a space in which women could access an unusually high degree of power and influence. So, it was this the case for the Rising as well? And why do you think that was?
So, one of the key strands of rebellion involved in 1916 were women radicals, and particularly suffragettes. So, the rebellion was seen by them as a way to get the change that they wanted, and they had a place within it quite comfortably, particularly due to the strong left-wing radical flank that was involved. The rebellions, more conservative strands were to become more pronounced as the years went on and the women did not get what they were fighting for and neither was their role well remembered, as we shall see.
OK. And right. Indeed. OK. So, let’s move on. Who’s next?
Right. So next we’ve got Michael Malone. So, this is a 28-year-old carpenter born in Dublin and he’s an officer in the Irish Volunteers. And he has a reputation as being a really good shot.
Right.
So, Malone was in charge of the positions around Mount Street Bridge, and that’s on a canal on the south side of Dublin. It’s going to become really important because at the time this route linked the city to its main port and it’s where the British army reinforcements are going to come from. So the rebellion had broken out on Monday and by Wednesday the British army battalions had arrived. So, they were going to come marching up from the port and Mike Malone sat his men up in buildings that were facing the road they would come down.
OK. So, these British soldiers, did they have any idea what they were walking into. It must have been pretty difficult to believe that Dublin wasn’t full on insurrection yet.
So, this was a city within the U.K., and these were soldiers who were expecting to end up in France. They were completely fresh recruits. They were Sherwood Foresters, which is a regiment from Nottingham and Derbyshire in England. And they were really inexperienced, so they had to be taught how to use their rifles, some of them.
God.
So, there were a bit bewildered to find themselves suddenly in the leafy suburbs of south Dublin. Some locals they passed even cheered them and all seemed safe so far until they reached Mount Street Bridge. So, Malone’s men waited until the soldiers had come into range, and then they opened fire. Now, remember that at this time the British army did not have experience in urban warfare because it wasn’t really a thing. So, armies generally they met each other in fields at this time. So, despite the fact that there was another bridge that they could have approached was just a street away, the General who was in charge just kept ordering men to go over the bridge at 20-minute intervals, every time a whistle was blown.
Oh god.
They went over just to be shot at again and again until there were piles of the dead and dying.
OK, so this is just a few sentinels, really, that are guarding it, guarding the entrance into Dublin. How many soldiers were there?
There were there were 17 Irish Volunteers in this battle versus an estimated 1,000 British soldiers.
Oh. My god. OK.
Initially, the British army thought that over 230 of their soldiers had been killed. Those two historians now question this. But either way, it was the biggest loss on the British side in the rebellion.
OK. Right. So, not far from here within Dublin. There were trenches being dug by Countess Markovich and other rebels in St. Stephen’s Green, which was quite a fashionable park at the time. It’s still in the middle of central Dublin. And British soldiers were machine gunning this park from the roof of the nearby Shelbourne Hotel.
Yeah. This is the heart of the rich commercial centre of south Dublin, so quite amazing to think of open battle raging here.
And listeners, you can still see traces of fighting them from the Rising all over the city. You might have noticed that most of the north side of Dublin actually dates, the buildings date from post 1916 since that whole area between the GPO and the river was shelled out. But if you look closely even still today at the statues on O’Connell Street or on some of the buildings on the south side, like the Shelbourne Hotel or the Royal College of Surgeons, you’ll see bullet holes and mortar marks all over the facades.
So this Wednesday, the 24th of April, is really a turning point in the rebellion because it’s the day that the British start bombarding the city. Now, it’s said the James Connolly had seized buildings in the belief that the British wouldn’t shell them as it would be too destructive, but this was an incorrect belief. So, British forces sailed gunships up the River Liffey, and with 18-pounder field artillery guns, they opened fire.
OK. Right. And Naomi actually showed me a picture of these guns earlier on and they are massive. I’s just unbelievable to think of this and of a warship essentially opening fire in such a dense urban area in the middle of Dublin. And remember, of course, this place is absolutely full of civilians. Some of the poorest people in the city were living in the centre. And these people were living hand-to-mouth. So they have no way anymore of getting food. The shops were shut. Supplies were running out all over the place.
Yes, as soon pretty much as the fighting had broken out, there had been looting. People seized what they could in the shops. And not long afterwards, huge fires broke out that couldn’t be treated by firefighters. Massive inferno started raging through the city.
Oh, God. OK. Right. I mean, if you look at a map of where the rebel buildings were, they’re strategically placed around the centre of Dublin city. So the people within that central zone were effectively trapped now in a blazing battle zone.
Yeah, and it’s very much a battle zone. So, civilians are in the crossfire. The roads were blocked with barricades and soldiers were stopping people from going about with checkpoints and how to tell who was the civilian and who was a rebel, no doubt it was genuinely difficult for British soldiers to know in many cases. And there were also some straight up reprisals and killing of civilians such as in North King Street. There’s also lots of unintended deaths of men, women and children. There was just shooting all over the city. There were open gun battles on the streets around the various rebel positions, and there was sniping back and forth constantly.
Of course, the biggest group of casualties in the Rising were civilians and that, I suppose, goes a long way to explain why Dubliners really took against the rebels initially.
So by Friday, much of the area around, but what is now O’Connell Street was destroyed. It was just smouldering ruins. The GPO, the general post office, which was the centre of rebel command, had been on fire for some time. And by the evening, its walls were beginning to collapse. So, the rebels had to flee. The leadership started to sneak out the side of the building in ones and twos dodging machine gun fire. James Connolly, who’d been wounded by this stage in his leg, he was carried out on a stretcher. They make their way out in little groups and move into the warren of streets between the GPO and nearby Moore Street. The leaders of the Rising all managed to get into a house together on Moore Street, and they tunnelled together through the walls of the terrorist houses, moving from one house to another overnight.
Yeah. And you can actually follow their route in those buildings on Moore Street are still there today, so you can see where they went to try to escape. So, on Sunday morning then the rebel leadership, it votes to surrender mostly because of these civilian casualties, right?
Yeah. So nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell was the one who was asked to leave for 15 Moore Street and carry the white flag and the message of surrender to British authorities. She was then asked to visit all the other positions where rebels were still holed up across the city to deliver that message of surrender.
Well, OK, so this really was a devastating moment in the history of the city and in the history of Ireland and the history of the U.K. But it doesn’t end here. Like we said earlier, one of the most significant aspects of the 1916 Rising was actually what happened after the rebels surrendered.
Exactly. The aftermath is almost as important as the rebellion itself. So as we kind of alluded to, when the Rising first broke out, it did not have unanimous support among civilians by any means. So the rebels were jeered by some ordinary Dublin citizens. But the reaction of the British in the aftermath of the rebellion changed everything. What happened afterwards is the British authorities declared martial law and they rounded up thousands of people, including hundreds of people who never had anything to do with the Rising, because in total far more were actually arrested than could have taken part in the rebellion.
OK. So, among those people arrested were, of course, James Connolly and Thomas Clarke and the other surviving leaders and signatories of the proclamation.
Yes, they were imprisoned and there were court martialled and 90 of them were sentenced to death by firing squad. The executions began on May 3rd with Pádraig Pearse, Thomas Clarke and Thomas McDonough, and two days later, John MacBride was shot. And two days after that, there was four more. So, they were they were dragged out slowly, the executions. And the citizens of Dublin could hear the shots coming out of Kilmainham jail without knowing who was killed.
Now, this whole event is often earmarked as Britain’s biggest mistake in the whole affair. Remember, they had Dublin people on their side at the beginning of this and it wasn’t unusual to execute traitors. In fact, that was totally standard. But it was the manner in which these executions were carried out, which was, it was particularly ham-fisted because by dragging it out like this, the British were allowing opinions to soften towards the rebels with each passing day that they spent in prison. The public were learning about them and they were getting to know them, and they were getting to like them. And then the next day, of course, another one would be taken out and be shot.
Another thing is that the bodies were not returned to their families. So, they were buried in quicklime, and that was to avoid their burial places becoming like a memorial or a shrine, so you’ve got panicked families, you know, waiting outside and trying to get through to their loved ones. Every morning, these shots ringing out. It goes on excruciatingly with public opinion turning on the last of the leaders to be executed with James Connolly. He was so ill that he had to be tied to a chair in front of the firing squad.
Right. And of course, James Connolly was one of the most popular rebels as well with the public. So this was, you know, a really terrible move to do this. All of it really just seemed to play into the drama of the uprising, which was already there. It was intensifying the drama of it all and it was profoundly changing the public’s attitude.
Right. So, originally there had been 90 death sentences, but they had to stop after 15 because the uproar was too intense. The rebels were quickly becoming heroes. They were becoming martyrs. So commemorative merchandise began to be produced about them. And there was ballads written and recruitment levels to the British army dwindled away. It politically transformed the country.
OK, so Pearce had said, “Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women, spring living nations.” And the weird thing is about all this, that in a way he was actually right when it came to the Rising.
The other thing that’s equally important as to who died was who survived. So a generation of leaders was taken out and a new crowd took over. So, the most senior rebel that survived alive was Éamon de Valera and he escaped execution mostly by luck. And even though he hadn’t, only had really a minor role before 1916 and he had seen almost no action in the rebellion, this was the man that was to become the defining Irish politician of the 20th century. He served both as Taoiseach and as president right up and until 1973.
Let’s hear a clip of him talking about the 1916 rebellion in 1966.
When Pádraig Pearse came here to read the proclamation, although he knew that it could not be military success, he had in view the real success. We know that every campaign, campaign is not the first battle. The campaign is what is needed after the first battle. And we should also not forget that were it not for the spirit of our people in the subsequent years the uprising of 1916 might not have been at all of importance.
Éamon de Valera, of course, also had a very different ideology than a lot of the rebels, right.
He had a very different vision of Ireland than, say, James Connolly. Éamon de Valera was a rebel, but he was also in his way extremely conservative. And he is representative of the forces that were to become dominant in the Irish state that emerged. Catholic, socially conservative and very firmly of the view that women’s place was in the home.
Speaking of which, then, Naomi, what happens to our women rebels in the end?
So Countess Markievicz was among those who were initially sentenced to death, but that was waived because of her gender, actually. So, she was interned in England and when she returned to Ireland in 1917, she was greeted by streets that were thronged with cheering crowds like a hero. And in the election of 1918 that followed, she was elected an MP for Sinn Féin. This was an election where the pro-independence Sinn Féin swept the vote. It was, of course, the first U.K. election that included women over 30 and working-class men. So Sinn Féin were led by Éamon de Valera and they took 70 percent of available seats on the island of Ireland. Markievicz, with this election became the first elected female MP, by the way, but she never took her seat in Westminster because instead of this, the elected Sinn Féin representatives formed a breakaway Irish Parliament. Shortly afterwards, Markievicz also booked another first because she became Irish Labour Minister from 1919 to 1921 –that’s one of the first female cabinet ministers in the world.
We actually have a pretty amazing clip of Countess Markievicz speaking to crowds in 1922. So let’s hear that.
Each men and women among us Republicans understands and knows what he or she wants. If De Valera was taken from us, the call would go on, go on for the republic. Our real leaders today are those who died for Ireland. These men our knights of valour travelled down the dark road before us. Their Martyrs crowns shine through the gloom and are our guides today. From them we derive the courage to go on, to go on, no matter how hard the road before us and Ireland is safe as long as there is one of us alive to stand in her defence.
It’s quite telling like you mentioned earlier, that Ireland didn’t have another female cabinet minister until 1979, after that.
Yes. And this is a legacy that our other character that we mentioned had an a M0lony commented on herself. So, what happened to Molony was she was captured there in city hall and she was imprisoned and taken to Kilmainham Jail, where she tried unsuccessfully to dig her way out with a spoon.
Oh. Oh, very Shawshank.
She was interned in England later, and she became the president later in life of the Irish Trades Union Congress in 1937, so she was the second woman to hold that post.
Oh. OK.
But she complained that in the new Ireland, although women had won the vote, they had not changed, quote, “their inferior status, their lower pay for equal work, their exclusion from juries and certain branches of the civil service, their slum dwellings and their crowded, cold and unsanitary schools for their children.” So Markievicz and Molony, by the way, are just two of a huge number of women who were absolutely instrumental in 1916. It’s not just that there were a few token women who were kind of tagging along with the men, like women were inextricable to the whole thing, but they were pretty much written out of history in the years following it.
OK. And I suppose let’s come back to how the history has been written then in the present day. Anyone who has grown up in Ireland will know that the way the Easter Rising has been remembered has long been fraught with controversy, and particularly joined the Troubles many people kind of thought twice about celebrating it since it was a violent uprising, you know, and it wasn’t really appropriate.
The different political strands in Ireland have basically all had different approaches to 1916 and they all use it in their own way for their own political ends because it’s a useful history. In my view, 2016, the centenary commemorations was completely transformative in how the rebellion has been remembered. So, to anyone who wasn’t in Ireland to experience it, essentially the whole country went 1916 mad two years ago, OK.
It’s true.
It’s kind of hard to explain the scale of it. So it’s like every school, every community group, almost every family were swept up into doing something to do with the commemoration, so there were there were exhibitions and there were lectures and there were re-enactments and reproductions of newspapers from the time for sale in the shops and film documentaries that parades. Like every town, every kind of commemoration you can think of, on every scale.
Yeah. You know, an interesting thing about it, something that really impressed me anyway was that these commemorative projects, they worked they worked really hard to avoid taking a simplistic, triumphalist, nationalist view of the rebellion, like they were all about re-introducing complexity to the history. Like, the country was kind of forced in it in another way into a lot of soul searching in the approach to the centenary of the Rising. And I think there was a very concerted effort to reclaim the Rising from those more simplistic narratives.
Very much so. And a few things stuck out to me. So, number one the government in charge was Fine Gael, which of course belongs to a political tradition that’s uncomfortable with the legacy of violent Republicanism. And the culture minister in charge of the commemorations was Heather Humphreys, who is an Ulster Protestant of Unionist descent. Her grandfather signed the Ulster Covenant that we mentioned earlier.
Wow. OK. I didn’t know that. Well, of course, this was 18 years after the Good Friday Agreement, so for the first time, really, like for generations, there was this whole new cultural climate in which you could finally just step back a bit from events like this and maybe feel a little bit more free to, either celebrate them or condemn the different elements of what it represented.
I thought that there was definitely a sense of inclusivity and of embracing the complex narratives of the rebellion. And this was very much helped by the sheer diversity of the different sorts of commemorative projects that were going on. So, obviously the government program and the funding they were offering had a major role, but there was also every kind of volunteer, an artist, an amateur and bizarre freelancer like myself, just kind of getting into the weeds of history and coming up with their own take on it, you know, and this was helped by the fact that loads of institutions opened huge archives up to the public. You know, this kind of these digital, digitization projects came to fruition all at the same time.
I remember one thing that caused controversy at the time was that the official commemorations put huge portraits of constitutional nationalists. Listeners remember those were the moderates who wanted to win home rule through the Westminster parliament. The government put up pictures of the leaders of that movement on landmark buildings in the centre of Dublin. And there was a suspicion in a lot of people, perhaps, that the government’s qualms about physical force and taking a qualified attitude to 1916 might end up in some kind of apologetic commemoration, which I think people really didn’t want.
Yeah, I think in the end, it really was a triumph, like was a great balance. It was huge in scale and really quite sophisticated on the various projects engaged in history. And one of the major emphases and successes of the commemoration was how it wrote women back into the central narrative of 1916, quite literally. So, for example, the Women of 1916 project at Richmond Barracks documented the lives of all 77 women who were imprisoned there after the Rising and held lectures on who they were and their lives.
Okay. Right. And it’s true. I mean, I have to say that before these commemorations, apart from Countess Markievicz, I knew very little about the sheer extent of women’s involvement in the event. And even Markievicz really has failed to be celebrated to the same degree at all as Pearse or Connolly say
Yeah. Like a lot of the leaders of 1916 have roads or say, a train station named after them and Markievicz got a swimming pool.
Yeah, indeed.
I spoke to historian Conor Mullah, who was swept up in the commemorations as an in-demand speaker because he works on 1916, and this is what he had to say.
The recession made us all armchair economists and 1916 made us all armchair historians. I think coming out of that event, I was hugely enthusiastic about the state of history in an Irish Republic. It was very democratic. It was hugely accessible. It was all free, which was an amazing testament to that. And that’s one of the big differences one begins to see in terms of access to archives between Britain and Ireland is the complete free point of use for archives in Ireland, whether that be the 1901/1911 censuses, the bureau military history, the military service pensions. We now have a culture where archives are free and open to all, and I think that’s hugely beneficial not only for the historical profession, but also for citizenship in general. It creates a very open, positive, engaged citizenship and one that I think can look at their history, warts and all. I think we are very pluralistic view of history in Ireland. We’ve managed to successfully embrace the First World War as part of our narrative of 1916 and rather than maybe looking at that in antagonistic fashion, we look at our history as I suppose a plurality of things that have happened. And I think that doesn’t remove the human agency from history, but it definitely allows us to look at history in a way that is embracing of the various aspects. I think it’s something that will equip as well to look at more troubled histories in the future, whether that be the history of confinement in Ireland with industrial school and Magdalene laundries, abuse, or to look at Ireland’s complex role in colonization, which is something that we need to look at, and particularly as we move forward now, not only to look at the centenary of much more contested history, both in the war of independence, which is a dirty, dirty war that’s fought at local level, but also in the civil war, which is obviously a point of huge division within families and even a basic level within the state. But also, we’re looking at events that happened 50 years ago in terms of the outbreak of The Troubles, Bloody Sunday. In October of 2018, we’ll be looking at 50 years since the civil rights protests really devolved into The Troubles. And by 2019, we’ll be looking at the arrival of British army in Derry and Belfast. So, these things coalesce, and I think the Irish public are in a very good place where they can look at their history with maturity. They’re not particularly worried about heroes or about carefully guarded histories that they think they need to preserve. Instead, they’re quite open to looking at history with its complexities, to look at the grey areas between very us and them histories or black and white histories. And I think that’s a very positive state for the nation.
I liked what Conor said about the public not really being concerned about looking for heroes in the history.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s something I particularly liked was how much discussion there was about the proclamation. I think a lot of people like that. A copy of it was delivered to every school and children were asked to write their own proclamations and what promises they would like to make the nation, which is a really lovely idea really, and it’s rather in keeping with the ideology of the rebels.
Yeah, I agree. There was this big kind of examination of the proclamation, in particular was part of this interrogation, a self-critical interrogation about whether the initial promises of the proclamation had been kept.
The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty. Equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.
Something that really hit home to me during my kind of immersion in 1916 history was just how radical these people were. You know, how radical were the founders of our Republic. In that document, what’s promised is a non-sectarian republic that explicitly includes all religions equally. There’s also a public of gender equality where women could vote, and it was one that looked after its citizens, particularly those lines, “equal rights and equal opportunity and cherishing all children of the nation equally.” Those lines get thrown at the government at every opportunity to point out its failings and where it’s going wrong, particularly in regards to things like the housing crisis, which is extremely severe in Ireland at the moment in terms of shortages and unaffordability, but also in the question about how the state treated women.
Right. And that’s a particularly poignant issue right now since, as we know, with a certain referendum coming up on women’s bodily autonomy, the state still has a long way to go in this regard. But that’s something that we’ll be coming back to very soon on the podcast.
And then remember, guys, as Declan Kiberd says, when Irish people are talking about the past, they’re often really talking about the future.
And Naomi maybe that’s a good place to come to an end for this episode. Everyone, thank you so much for tuning into this 1916 special edition of the Irish Passport podcast. The music you heard earlier on in today’s episode came from John McCormack’s 1913 recording of The Foggy Dew and Damiano Baldoni’s Celtic Warrior.
Remember, you can follow us on @PassportIrish on Twitter and Facebook/ passportirish or get in touch at theirishpassport@gmail.com.
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Thanks very much for listening.
The Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called. Signed on behalf of the provisional government. Thomas J. Clarke. Seán Mac Diarmada. Thomas MacDonagh. P.H. Pearse. Éamonn Ceannt. James Connolly. Joseph Plunkett.