{"id":8855,"date":"2016-03-28T18:57:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T17:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etims.net\/?p=8855"},"modified":"2016-03-28T18:57:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T17:57:46","slug":"the-rising-revised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/etims.net\/?p=8855","title":{"rendered":"The Rising Revised ?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Third year history student MagFhionnghaile lays out some of the facts around the 1916 Easter rising that weren’t mentioned in the songs….<\/em><\/div>\n
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In Short: What was the Easter Rising ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Ireland, in the first years of the 20thcentury, was a country under direct British rule. The past half-century had seen constant pressure from<\/div>\n
Irish nationalists in Parliament to push through the Home Rule bill that would grant Dublin its own parliament, but opposition from the House of Lords and the outbreak of the First World War had, it seemed to many, indefinitely postponed the bill. In the eyes of Ireland\u2019s Republicans, the<\/div>\n
nationalists who were prepared to play by Britain\u2019s rules had failed, and action had to be taken.<\/div>\n
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Over Easter, 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood\u2019s Military Council launched an armed uprising in Dublin.<\/div>\n
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Members of the Irish Volunteers and James Connolly\u2019s Citizen Army occupied strategic locations around the city in a defensive circle around<\/div>\n
the General Post Office \u2013 the centre of communication for all of Ireland. The British response was sluggish, and at first the only resistance faced by the Volunteers was Dublin\u2019s police and British Army soldiers on leave from the war. Once the Empire adapted, however, the rebellion turned into a panicked rout. A full division of the British Army was deployed, accompanied by a converted warship, the Helga<\/span>. The ship sailed up the Liffey, bombarding rebel positions and laying waste to the streets surrounding the GPO, while the British infantry encircled the rebels\u2019<\/div>\n
defences.<\/div>\n
Sheer weight of numbers and the superior weaponry and training of the professional soldiers crushed the Rising, and forced its<\/div>\n
leaders to surrender. Sixteen men in all were identified as ringleaders, and were summarily executed for their treason.<\/div>\n
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Why the need for \u00a0Rising \u00a0in 1916 ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
\nThere is no simple answer, nor a short answer, to this question.<\/div>\n
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\u00a0 To ask why the Irish rebelled is to ask why the Irish rebel, and as major Irish rebellions average out to one every century and a half (give or take) \u00a0we\u2019d be here all day.<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s probably something to do with the Brits.<\/div>\n
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\nTo be brief, the Rising occurred two years after the proposed date of the Home Rule bill, legislation supported by the Irish Parliamentary Party through the 19th century and made into a personal crusade by Liberal Prime Minster, William Gladstone. Despite the best efforts of both parties, the House of Lords united to repeatedly postpone or even outright reject the bill, as most of the peers had land in Ireland they were making money from, and had no interest in altering the status quo. You have to feel for Charles Stewart Parnell, who let his extracurricular activities get between Ireland and Home Rule.<\/div>\n
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This, by the way, is the reason the House of Lords can no longer reject legislation and can only delay it a number of times. 1914 would have been the definitive date of Home Rule, though the government were still apprehensive.<\/div>\n
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Not over losing Ireland as direct territory, however.<\/div>\n
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Opposition to Home Rule was fiercest in what is now Northern Ireland, where the Protestant-majority Ulstermen had no intention of being governed by the southern, Catholic Dublin, and had no faith that a majority southern D\u00e1il would give them the same rights they\u2019d give to their own people.<\/div>\n
\nIt\u2019s entirely possible this fear stemmed from the knowledge that if a prominent Ulsterman gained power in the \u00a0Protestant north, he would immediately use that power to mistreat Catholics. It was, after all, to become \u201ca Protestant state for a Protestant people.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Regardless of dissident Lords or a hostile Ulster, what eventually prevented the Home Rule bill from ever being enacted was the outbreak of war in Europe. Now, the security of the United Kingdom took precedence over the autonomy of the Irish people, and the bill was delayed again until the cessation of hostilities, which, in fairness to the British government, was not expected to take a long time.<\/div>\n
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Some things, it seems , have been going on for a while…<\/div>\n
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But it was felt, among some of the hardliners, \u00a0that the government had betrayed Ireland for the last time, and the time for politics was over.<\/div>\n
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Why It Failed<\/strong><\/div>\n
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\u00a0This weekend has been full of celebration.<\/div>\n
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\u00a0Parades, roll calls and all manner of militaristic showmanship all celebrating the armed revolution and the forced freedom of a nation. Thousands upon thousands of people flood Dublin and the Air Corps stage a flyover of O\u2019Connell Street. I\u2019d have gone back over myself but I’ll leave it until it quietens down a bit.<\/div>\n
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. It wouldn\u2019t be too far a leap to say this is the most popular the Rising has ever been.<\/div>\n
\nBecause it was certainly \u00a0unpopular when it happened. \u00a0This picture shows Pearse pinning the declaration to the wall of the GPO building, in front of an enthralled and captivated crowd.<\/div>\n
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Outside of Irish Times op-eds, it goes mostly unmentioned that the Rising was a result of the machinations of a minority of extremists. Patrick Pearse declared his Proclamation to a bemused public, and Dubliners welcomed the British Army division, sent to crush the rebellion, \u00a0with applause. This appears strange, from a modern perspective \u2013 how can people who have lived for so long under the thumb of the British Empire treat people fighting for their freedom with such derision?<\/div>\n
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The answer to this is simple. On a personal level, living under the thumb of the British Empire was really no different to living under anybody else\u2019s thumb. The average Dubliner went to work, paid their bills, married and raised children, who would , in turn, go to work, pay bills and raise children, who would, well, you get the picture<\/div>\n
\u00a0Politics was for people with time to waste on that sort of thing.<\/div>\n
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This is partly why the Irish language was at such a high risk of disappearing.<\/div>\n
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It was all well and good taking pride in your heritage, culture and language but it wasn\u2019t going to get you a job, was it?<\/div>\n
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\u00a0 Pearse experienced this apathy first hand in the months before the Rising, as he and a detachment of Volunteers marched on Limerick to rally support for the rebellion. They were chased out by local women, who saw their anti-British behaviour as pro-German, as their husbands had followed the requests of John Redmond and signed up with the British Army. Many of whom would never return.<\/div>\n
\nThe Volunteers themselves were another reason for the failure of the revolt. Founded by Eoin MacNeill some years before, they were initially a purely defensive force designed to prevent the British enforcing martial law or any kind of substantial military occupation of the country. They gained more support with the continuation \u00a0of the First World War, when conscription became a real threat in Ireland.<\/div>\n
\u00a0 They swore to resist conscription by any means necessary, unsurprisingly as the birth deaths and marriages columns became heavily weighted on one particular side.<\/div>\n
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The IRB knew that if they were to have any chance of success, they needed access to the Volunteers\u2019 manpower, and that meant getting MacNeill on side. To this end, they fabricated a document, purportedly from Dublin Castle \u2013 the seat of British power in Dublin \u2013 in which plans for the arrest of all suspected IRB members, including MacNeill, were outlined. Faced with the threat of imprisonment, MacNeill conceded and gave orders to the Volunteers all over Ireland to march. The national revolution seemed inevitable, until Maundy Thursday \u2013 or \u2018the day everything went wrong.\u2019<\/div>\n
\nWith the help of Sir Roger Casement, a British official with connections in Germany, the IRB secured 20,000 to 25,000 Mosin-Nagant rifles, ten Maxim machine-guns and vast quantities of ammunition to be transported aboard the Aud,<\/em> a German ship disguised as a Norwegian ship\u00a0from L\u00fcbeck to Tralee Bay. The vessel \u00a0was due to arrive on Maundy Thursday, but circumstances changed and the IRB altered the plan. As the Aud<\/em> lacked a radio, the captain was not informed and the ship arrived in Tralee Bay on the original planned date. Once there, it was ambushed by HMS Bluebell<\/em>, which was already looking for it, and the cunning use of a Norwegian flag didn’t really fool them. En route to Cork Harbour, the captain gave the order to scuttle the boat and send the guns to the seabed, keeping them out of British hands, but leaving the Volunteers woefully under-equipped.<\/div>\n
\u00a0The misfortune of Maundy Thursday continued \u2013 as one of the cars sent to meet the\u00a0Aud\u00a0<\/em>crashed en route, killing all of its occupants.<\/div>\n
\nWithout the guns and ammunition, MacNeill realised the rebellion was doomed. To make matters worse for the IRB, he had also discovered the Castle document was a forgery, and he quickly ordered the Volunteers nationwide to stand down. A national revolt was to be constrained to a Dublin revolt \u2013 one whose opening shots would be aimed at Irishmen in British uniforms. Men who were either trying to earn a living for their families, or who were fighting for their country which, at the time, was Britain.<\/div>\n
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It remains extremely important to remember that nobody in Ireland in 1916 knew of an Ireland outside of British rule, and that for the majority of Dubliners there was no significant reason for considering the two landmasses as separate entities.<\/div>\n
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History cannot be fully understood unless we look at it through the eyes of those involved.<\/div>\n
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And How It Succeeded… \u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
\nDespite the glaring failures, needless deaths and lack of strategic foresight, the Easter Rising was a resounding success.<\/div>\n
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It may not have been the success the IRB expected, nor the success they were aiming for, but they succeeded in provoking the British Empire. As the leaders of the Rising were pushed into the spotlight and in front of a firing squad \u2013 made up of the same Sherwood Foresters who were ambushed at Mount Street Bridge, with the loss of around two hundred lives, as they had decided that the tactic of walking slowly toward the enemy had not worked in the trenches, it might work in the streets… \u00a0the British and Irish public saw them for who they were.<\/div>\n
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An idealistic poet, Patrick Pearse, was given the same treatment one would expect to be reserved for one of the Kaiser\u2019s men. James Connolly, who was too injured to stand, was shot in his wheelchair. The elderly Tom Clarke was stripped, humiliated and tortured before his execution.<\/div>\n
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Thanks to the British government, the IRB no longer appeared as an armed, extremist group of traitors, and instead took on much more sympathetic images. While the anger of the British can be explained by the ongoing Great War, and the solicitation of German aid by the IRB, it simply cannot be justified. The Volunteers who survived the Rising in Dublin, and those who stood down elsewhere in the country, still held their Republican ideals, and they now had a total of sixteen martyrs for their cause.<\/div>\n
\nThe British government knew this, and they responded accordingly. Dissidence was met with the iron fist, which, naturally, only provoked further resistance. A game of escalation was played, as insurgents struck at bolder targets, and British security forces reacted with more and more aggression, eventually culminating in what would be known as the Anglo-Irish War, or, to the Irish: The War of Independence.<\/div>\n
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Ralph adds<\/em><\/div>\n
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Elsewhere in the world, other peoples under colonial rule sought out and found inspiration in the Irish, and whilst the British have still to let fully go their closest colony, others were to have more success.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
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The leaders of the rebellion will be remembered for their part in encouraging the Irish to seek freedom, but it could also argued, and argued well, that they provided inspiration that was ultimately to lead to the eventual break up of the Empire.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
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And that’s no bad thing to be remembered for.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Third year history student MagFhionnghaile lays out some of the facts around the 1916 Easter rising that weren’t mentioned in the songs…. In Short: What…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":8856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/etims.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/easter-rising_960.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2J7If-2iP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8857,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855\/revisions\/8857"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etims.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}