The instrument for insurrection was to be the Irish Volunteers, that is, the minority wing who refused to join John Redmond's National Volunteers in support of the British war effort, remaining instead with Eoin MacNeill under the original label. However, the real movers of insurrection were a smaller group that held a dominant position in the general council of the Volunteers. These were also members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, that is, the Fenians, committed to the violent achievement of an independent Irish republic. Their agenda for the Volunteers was not the purely defense mood envisioned by Mac-Neill, namely that violence would be used only to resist British attacks on nationalist groups.
Leading IRB figures on the council included the poet and son of a papal knight, Joseph Mary Plunkett; the UCD lecturer and playwright, Thomas Mac-Donagh; and the Gaelic language enthusiast and educational reformer, Patrick (Padraic) Pearse. fiamonn Ceannt, who had worked for the Dublin Corporation, would later join them. They worked closely with Thomas Clarke, the IRB leader, and with the American support group, Clan na Gael, which was dominated by Fenian exile John Devoy and the American jurist Daniel F. Cohalan. The former diplomat turned revolutionary Roger Casement agreed to travel from New York in the still neutral United States to Berlin to facilitate the acquisition of arms from the German government and to recruit volunteers from among any Irishmen in the British forces who had become prisoners of war of the Germans. A military council of the IRB had been set up that included Pearse, McDonagh, Plunkett, Ceannt, Clarke, and Sean McDermott, a County Leitrim native who had become an activist in the IRB and Sinn Fein. In early 1916 James Connolly was drawn into the group and committed his Irish Citizens Army to the proposed uprising.
The ideological and strategic perspectives of some of these central figures in the uprising were various. Clarke obviously started from the traditional Fenian perspective of using violence to achieve an independent republic. Connolly had come to blend socialism with nationalism in his perspective. Plunkett, McDonagh, and Pearse weaved together romantic idealism, Gaelic cultural separatism, and devout Catholicism in constructing their vision for Ireland. Pearse in particular emphasized the notion of a blood sacrifice, parallel to
A general view of central Dublin after the abortive Easter Rising, 1916 (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Christ's death on the cross, in order to reawaken the Irish people to their national mission. In other words, many assumed their effort would be futile, but that in defeat they would sow the seeds that would flourish with Irish independence. Remarkably, and with significant help from an inflexible British military, their goal was realized.
The uprising was scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916, when German weapons and volunteers from among the Irish POW's were to arrive. Things went very much awry because of communication difficulties, discoveries by American and British intelligence agencies, and unawareness by the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, specifically MacNeill, Bulmer Hobson, and Michael O'Rahilly, of the full implications of what was under way. They had originally been told that a British operation was in progress against nationalist organizations and, accordingly, they gave their consent to a calling to arms of the more than 10,000 Irish Volunteers. When they discovered it was a deception, Mac-Neill called off the orders for the Volunteers to assemble on Sunday. In the meantime, Casement had arrived via U-boat on the Kerry shores ahead of time and was captured. There was no one to meet the disguised trawler, the Aud, with its cargo of 20,000 rifles. Its captain, Karl Spindler, had no choice but to leave the area, only to be later surrounded by British vessels near Cobh, where he scuttled the ship and its cargo.
Finally, the conspirators issued a counterorder to MacNeill's cancellation orders, this time setting the day for Easter Monday, April 24, when 1,500 assembled in Dublin and seized a number of public positions, including the celebrated General Post Office on Sackville (now O'Connell) Street, where Patrick Pearse, the designated president, proclaimed an Irish republic, which proclamation was signed by the other members of the IRB military council. However, the insurgents failed to make a serious effort to take the lightly defended center of government in Ireland, Dublin Castle, which would have greatly complicated their eventual suppression. The combined forces of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the reinforced British army brought the uprising under control before the week was over, but not without an extraordinary amount of destruction and casualties. Over 500 were killed, mostly innocent civilians, over a hundred soldiers, and a smaller number of rebels. The 2,500 wounded were also primarily civilians, as well as about 400 soldiers and 120 rebels.
Public sentiment in Dublin was originally overwhelmingly hostile to the rebels for the destruction and suffering their adventure had brought on the city, but also because so many Irishmen were fighting in the war and the action was looked on as a stab in the back. However, the British military commander, Sir John Maxwell, was able to transform the despised into martyrs by conducting a series of court martial trials in which a large number of the leaders were condemned to death. Within 10 days 15 had been executed, including all the signatories to the proclamation of the Irish Republic, before the government, in response to popular and international outrage, stopped the killings. Nearly 3,500 had been apprehended, including, inappropriately since they were not part of the rising, Sinn Fein members, and MacNeill and other nonparticipating Volunteers. But nearly 1,500 were soon released. Besides those executed, 170 others were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. The remaining 1,800 were interned in England and Wales, although two-thirds of the internees were released within a few months and the remainder before Christmas. Roger Casement was not treated as well. Tried and convicted for treason, he was hung on August 3, 1916.
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